The Vile and the Noble: On the Relation between Natural and Social Classifications in the French Wine World

Abstract

This article examines the concept of terroir—a French word that captures the correspondence between the physical and human features of a place and the character of its agricultural products. Tied to the protection of economic rents threatened by competition and fraud, the practice of classifying certain lands, grapes, and properties both substantively and qualitatively has become the organizing principle of the entire French wine industry. Often derided as snobbish monopolistic practices by New World producers, the notion terroir in France and its rejection in America both exemplify how the “principles of vision and division” of the natural world are always intertwined with the “principles of vision and division” of the social world. The present article discusses these affinities through an analysis of wine classifications in the French regions of Bordeaux and Burgundy, and some of the critiques they have given rise to, in the United States especially.

NOTES

Notes

¹ I am deeply indebted to Rebecca Elliott Gilles Laferté, and Colin Jerolmack for excellent comments on an earlier version of this article. This paper was presented at the “Competition: An Interdisciplinary perspective” conference at the University of Chicago in Paris, June 2012. All remaining errors are mine, of course.

² As Ritvo (1997) has shown in the case of 18th-century animal classifications, zoological taxonomies were deeply permeated by the taxonomical habits of laymen (artists, hunters, farmers, butchers, breeders, showmen, and others) and with all kinds of nationalistic considerations.

³ This is true even though blind-tasting experiments have shown repeatedly that both laymen and experts fare poorly in their abilities to identify different types of wine and distinguish expensive wines from cheap ones.

⁴ 1979 edition: 118, cited in Schirmer (2000:348).

⁵ The term of cru paysan, peasant growth, was sometimes used for the latter (Dion 1952:421). One also finds crus artisans.

⁶ As the works of Enjalbert (1953, 1978) and Markham (1998) show, there were many categorizations and classifications of wines in the Bordeaux region before the classification of 1855, starting around 1647. By the early decades of the 19th century, stable hierarchies existed that grouped wines into first, second, and third growths. By the 1850s, lists for the fourth and fifth growths had been clarified, and the action moved to ranking the subfifth categories of bourgeois supérieur and bourgeois wines.

⁷ The main exception to this is the 1955 classification for Saint-Émilion, a more recently developed vineyard in Bordeaux. A “modern” classification that relies almost exclusively on tastings of consecutive vintages, it is by design more shifting and therefore more contested. The Saint-Émilion appellation classification undergoes a revision every 10 years; the last (2006) reclassification, which contained a significant number of changes in the ranking of properties, generated considerable turmoil and numerous legal challenges.

⁸ Prior to the laws about appellations of origin and owing to the complexity of Burgundy's territorial organization, wine brokers in Burgundy bought grapes from across the region and made and sold wine under their house names in an effort to develop brand recognition; under this system, it was also difficult to ascertain the actual origin of the final product, and there was a lot of suspicion that low-prestige wine was passed for wine coming from high-prestige villages. The laws severely constrained this practice of regional equivalence by allowing grapes to be traded only within micro regions, or appellation areas. This effectively protected the interests of the most privileged producers, although the broking business has remained important in the region (Laneyrie 1926; Laferté 2006).

⁹ Author's translation. According to Lavalle (1855), there were in 1855 23,000 ha of land planted with gamay vines in Burgundy, yielding about 50–60 HL/ha, against 2,500 ha planted with Pinot, producing no more than 18HL/ha (p. 73).

¹⁰ Lewin (2010) and Bazin (2002). The map came from Jean Lavalle's (1855) Histoire et Statistique de la Vigne des Grands Vins de la Côte d'Or, which was reworked and formalized by the Beaune Committee of Agriculture. Lavalle (1855) explains that wine prices were officially fixed by “gourmets” (p. 52)—often themselves brokers or growers—who were recruited by local mayors to taste the various wines produced in their commune's territory.

⁴⁴ For instance, Lavalle refers to conversations he had with “the mayor of Nuits.”

¹² Up to 1974, the AOC system “set a limit for the amount of wine that could be bought and sold under each famous appellation, but there was no limit on the amount of wine that a vineyard could produce. This created a “cascade” system of naming, which allowed a grower in Pommard, for instance, to produce 80 hectoliters per hectare from a vineyard; of this one identical wine 35 hectoliters were called Pommard; 15 hectoliters Bourgogne, and the rest was vin rouge. And there were several markets (Holland, Germany, and especially the UK) that were eager to purchase the over-productions, baptizing them Pommard as soon as they had crossed the frontier.” (Hansen 1995:180).

¹³ Eighty-five percent of the structures of production in Burgundy are less than 10 ha (about 25 acres) (Chiffoleau and Laporte 2004:661). There are also about 100 appellations in Burgundy (as opposed to 57 in Bordeaux, even though Bordeaux is more than four times larger).

¹⁴ Some land parcels in Burgundy have been reclassified however, for instance from a village appellation to a premier cru one.

¹⁵ In Burgundy, grands crus represent 0.8 percent of the region's production and 1.5 percent of its appellations.

¹⁶ As a result of the definition of new appellations, the number of vineyards ranked as grands crus has increased, too (but it has remained extremely small as a proportion of all French wine production).

¹⁷ The world wine production peaked in the early 1980s, then decreased through the late 1990s, and has stabilized around 27,000 ML since (Anderson and Nelgen 2011). Appendix A has breakdowns by country and shows the rather dramatic decline of wine production in the Old World (especially France and Italy) and the comparative rise of the New World (especially the United States and Australia).

¹⁸ In an unmistakable display of self-inflicted symbolic violence, American wines prior to the 1960s were identified through semigeneric labels that emphasized their resemblance with styles of wine produced elsewhere, such as “Burgundy” (to designate a generic red wine), “Claret” (a British term used to designate a generic red Bordeaux-style wine), “Chablis,” “Chianti,” “Champagne,” and so on.

¹⁹ For instance, the recent redefinition of the meaning of terroir by French “biodynamic” winemakers (from a set “taste of place” to an obscure quality to be revealed through craft; see Teil et al. 2012) represents an interesting revision of the classificatory dynamic of economic struggles.