Those of you who have bumped into my writing down the years will know that I love French wine. I am, though, frustrated by France’s inability to sell its wine effectively, and communicate what it has to offer to all those who haven’t spent years studying Hegel, Kant and Ding an sich.

This doesn’t mean that I am in favour of scrapping AOC. I’m not. Appellations are wonderful things: brands for the brandless, and as such vitally important is giving small-scale producers sales openings which they might not otherwise have. Lots more on this in The New France, of course.

What it does mean is always providing producers with a viable option to AOC. An option, in other words, to make non-traditional wines in any way they want, and in any location they want, and to sell those wines in an easy and readily comprehensible way.

It may, finally, be going to happen.

Trying to extract news from the costive intestines of French wine bureaucracy is almost as tricky as playing a hand of nuclear poker with Kim Jong-Il, but a little recent digging has revealed the following:

1. Vin de Pays is finally loosening up, and almost all French wine growers except those in Champagne, Alsace and most of Burgundy (boo! hiss!) will soon have a Vin de Pays option open to them. Those in Bordeaux now have the large scale Vin de Pays de l’Atlantique; a few of those in Burgundy have the smaller Vin de Pays des Coteaux de l’Auxois (for the area around Auxerre) and Vin de Pays de Sainte-Marie-la-Blanche (for a bunch of villages on the wrong side of the A6 at the southern end of the Côte d’Or). Beaujolais has the memorably named Vin de Pays des Gaules. In addition to the 52 standard departmental Vin de Pays (which not every wine-growing département has) and the 93 tiny Dénominations de Petite Zone, there are also now six Dénominations de Grande Zone: Vin du Pays de Val de Loire (the greater Loire), Vin de Pays des Comtés Rhodaniens (the greater Rhône) , Vin de Pays de Méditerranée (Provence and Corsica), Vins de Pays d’Oc (Languedoc-Roussillon), Vins de Pays du Comté Tolosan (the Southwest) and Vin de Pays de l’Atlantique (greater Bordeaux).
2. Moreover it will in future be possible to blend wine from different Vins de Pays zones together as ‘Vins de Pays-Vignobles de France’. (Yes, I know this is almost as difficult for non-francophones to pronounce as the difference between ‘Rully’ and ‘Reuilly’, or saying ‘Reims’ or ‘Troyes’ correctly. I have asked if the English version ‘French vineyards’ is an acceptable alternative. On its own, the answer is – no. However the English can accompany the original French. Provided it doesn’t misbehave.) The rubric for this overall umbrella Vin de Pays says that it can be blended from any of the “64 French winegrowing départements“. Wow! 64, not 52! It seems to me that this must therefore include those who are presently holding themselves aloof from the Vins de Pays scrum, like Côte d’Or, Bas-Rhin and Marne. The map given at http://www.vins-de-pays.info/site/indexfr.htm seems to confirm this. It really will, in other words, mean the WHOLE of winegrowing France. The idea behind this Vignobles de France thing is to enable the French (or Gallo, come to that) to make big, consistent pan-French blends and sell them under varietal names.

But wait: Vins de Pays still have rules and regulations, and in particular rules and regulations surrounding which grape varieties you can grow. If you’re in Sainte-Marie-la-Blanche, you can’t make a Vins de Pays Viognier or Syrah. If you’re Gallo and wanting to blend a French Pinot Noir to sell under the Vignobles de France banner, you’ll have to rely on those Vins de Pays where Pinot Noir is permitted.

There is, though, a new proposal which (as I understand it) would allow growers to break through even this final libertarian frontier and, at long last, take all their clothes off and dance around the varietal maypole. That proposal is to scrap the Vin de Table category altogether, and replace it with something called Vin de France. Mention of grape varieties would be permitted, as would vintage dates (both are at present denied to Vins de Table). Any grape variety permitted anywhere in France would be allowed. So, yes, Viognier in Vouvray – or Cabernet in Corton, or Petit Manseng in Pauillac. The draft is up for EU approval at present.

I don’t suppose, of course, that anyone in Corton will want to plant Cabernet, or anyone in Pauillac Petit Manseng, but – vive la liberté. It’s an important stage in French wine achieving maturity: trusting growers to make sane economic and commercial choices for their land, and ensuring that anyone who doesn’t want to work within the always-stringent demands of creating a vin de terroir can do so. Bring it on.

PS  For completeness’s sake, I should also mention another aspect of France’s new, communicative future: the Sud de France initiative. Any wine (AOC or Vin de Pays) produced anywhere in Languedoc-Roussillon can now badge itself ‘Sud de France’ and use the logo and assorted brand paraphernalia developed to go with the project. It’s another brand for the brandless, in other words, and as such greatly welcome. I did ask Louise Hurren who is working on PR for this project if ‘South of France’, or other local language equivalents, are acceptable alternatives. Apparently not. Or not yet, any way. Many thanks, by the way, to Sud de France for use of the pretty photos posted with this blog entry.