The 20th Century

Wine Without Grapes: How a Fraud Crisis Invented the Appellation, 1905–1936

Raisin wines and fake "Bordeaux" forced France to define wine itself — from the 1905 fraud law to the 1935 AOC decree and Bordeaux's appellations of 1936.

In the summer of 1907, more than half a million people converged on Montpellier — the largest of a wave of demonstrations that swept the Midi — to protest not a tax or a war, but the contents of a bottle. Their enemy was "wine" that had never seen a vineyard: fermented sugar-water, vats built on imported raisins, blends passed off under respectable names. It would take France three decades, three flawed laws, troops deployed in Champagne and a running battle of doctrines between two men from the same small Gironde town to answer, in law, two deceptively simple questions: what is wine, and who has the right to sell it under the name of a place? The answer, reached on 30 July 1935, was the appellation d'origine contrôlée — the AOC — and within eighteen months Bordeaux, Saint-Émilion, Sauternes and the Médoc had entered the system that still governs them today.

The flood of wine without grapes

The crisis grew directly out of phylloxera's destruction of the French vineyard. The economic historian James Simpson has reconstructed the sequence. French production, which averaged 57.4 million hectolitres a year in 1863–75, collapsed to 31.7 million in 1879–92 — just as consumption, fed by railways, cities and rising wages, had climbed from 76 litres per head in the early 1850s to 140 litres by 1875. Something had to fill the gap, and three things did.

The first was imported wine: France swung from exporting the equivalent of 5 per cent of its supply in 1866–75 to importing 19 per cent in 1886–95. The second was raisin wine. Dried grapes and currants, imported duty-free until 1899 and far cheaper to ship than wine, could be soaked, sugared and fermented on an industrial scale: by one contemporary estimate cited by Simpson, 100 kilos of raisins yielded some 300 litres of 8-per-cent "wine" at a cost of about 0.15 francs a litre — a fraction of the real thing — and Paris alone reportedly counted twenty such factories. The third was sugar itself: chaptalisation, legitimate in moderation, shaded into the manufacture of sugared piquettes — second and third "pressings" of the same marc, stretched with water and beet sugar.

When the replanted vineyard came back into full production around 1900, the substitutes did not leave the market. The result was structural overproduction, collapsing prices, and a consumer who could no longer tell what was in the bottle — the backdrop to the deepest price depression in Bordeaux's modern economic history. Algeria added a final twist. Its colonial vineyard, built at breakneck speed after phylloxera, shipped 4 million hectolitres to mainland France in 1905 and 6 million by 1915; as Giulia Meloni and Johan Swinnen have shown, its strong wines of 13 to 16 degrees were precisely what merchants needed to "improve" the thin 9- or 10-degree produce of the new hybrid vines — and, in Bordeaux as elsewhere, outside wine blended into local barrels made, in Simpson's phrase, a more marketable product that still travelled under the local name.

1905: the state defines fraud — but not wine

The state's first answer was the law of 1 August 1905 on the repression of fraud — the founding text of French consumer-protection law, covering all goods, wine included. Selling a falsified or mislabelled product became a criminal offence, and a dedicated fraud-control service was created. But prosecuting a lie requires knowing the truth, and for wine the law left the essential undefined: where did a name like "Bordeaux" begin and end? An amendment pushed through by deputies from the Marne opened the door to delimiting wine regions by administrative decree — a short clause with explosive consequences.

Before the decrees came the explosion in the south. The Midi, producer of two-fifths of France's wine, was drowning in unsellable vintages, and its growers blamed sugar and fraud. After the great demonstrations of spring and summer 1907 — Montpellier's half-million being the climax — Clemenceau's government rushed through the law of 29 June 1907 "to prevent the watering of wines and the abuse of sugaring": compulsory annual harvest declarations from every grower, surveillance and taxation of vinification sugar. The harvest declaration, still filed by every French vigneron today, was born as an anti-fraud weapon.

1908–1911: drawing lines on the map — and regretting it

The administrative delimitations authorized in 1905 followed: Champagne by decree of 17 December 1908, Cognac and Armagnac in 1909, and Bordeaux on 18 February 1911. The Bordeaux decree, obtained after four years of regional infighting, gave the name to the wines of the Gironde department alone, shutting out the neighbouring Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne — in effect, as the legal historian Gérard Aubin puts it, extending a city's name to an entire department. Simpson's work shows who had wanted it: the Gironde's growers of ordinary wine, undercut by cheap Midi and imported blends, had lobbied hard for a regional appellation, over the objections of merchants who blended and of the great estates, which considered the whole affair irrelevant to wines sold on their own names. The line drawn in 1911 proved durable: it is still, in essence, the boundary of AOC Bordeaux.

In Champagne, drawing the line meant civil war. The 1908 delimitation had excluded the Aube, whose growers mobilized en masse in the spring of 1911; when the government wavered, it was the Marne's turn to rise. In April 1911, rioting vignerons sacked and burned the cellars of négociants accused of making "champagne" from outside wine — contemporaries spoke of a Saint-Barthélemy des vins — and troops were deployed to stop the destruction. A face-saving "Champagne deuxième zone" was invented for the Aube that June. Parliament drew the obvious conclusion: having the state draw wine borders by decree set region against region, and the approach was abandoned.

1919: let the judges decide

The law of 6 May 1919 handed the problem to the courts. Any producer could claim an appellation of origin; anyone who felt wronged — including growers' unions, newly armed with standing to sue — could challenge it; the civil courts would rule, guided by origin and by "local, loyal and constant usages". Introducing the framework, commerce minister Étienne Clémentel made the philosophy explicit: the trade had come to believe that the great names — Bordeaux, Champagne, Cognac — belonged to it, when they were in truth the property of the producing regions.

Litigation duly exploded. Through the 1920s roughly ninety-four appellations were defined by judicial decision, thirty-eight of them in the Gironde alone. But the law protected origin, not quality. A grower inside the delimited area could plant high-yielding hybrids on the worst land of the commune and still sell under the appellation; the courts, as Claudine Wolikow has shown, proved unable to read quality conditions into a text that mentioned none. In the Gironde the race for names even reached the map itself, as communes petitioned to hyphenate famous neighbours into their own names — the era that gave the wine atlas Montagne-Saint-Émilion and its siblings. Appellation wine became overabundant and often mediocre: the system designed to guarantee authenticity was manufacturing it wholesale. Joseph Capus called the results, bluntly, scandals.

Two doctrines from one small town

The doctrinal battle of the interwar years had, improbably, a single epicentre: Cadillac, a modest wine town on the right bank of the Garonne. Georges Cazeaux-Cazalet, vigneron and deputy of the Gironde, had organized the department's growers from 1895 and presided over the 1907 parliamentary commission on the wine crisis; the syndical movement he embodied held that the appellation belonged by right to every producer of the delimited soil — origin, and origin alone. Joseph Capus taught viticulture in the same town before becoming deputy, briefly agriculture minister in 1924, then senator of the Gironde. From his first report on the question in 1906 he argued the opposite: that fine wine was the joint product of soils, grape varieties and human practice, and that a name divorced from those conditions guaranteed nothing. His formula became the doctrine of the appellation contrôlée: the appellation of origin represents at once the origin and certain usages of production.

Capus won by instalments. The law of 22 July 1927 amended the 1919 regime to require that appellation wine come from grape varieties and areas consecrated by local, loyal and constant usage, and barred hybrid vines from appellations. But outside Champagne, where it settled the Marne–Aube war with a parcel-by-parcel delimitation, the 1927 law changed little on the ground: the courts still ruled, and the flood of indifferent appellation wine continued.

1935: the appellation contrôlée

The Depression finished the argument. With the wine market in ruins, the decree-law of 30 July 1935 — drafted with Capus as its parliamentary architect — created a new category, the appellation d'origine contrôlée, and a new body to govern it: the Comité national des appellations d'origine (CNAO), run jointly by the wine professions and the state, its decisions proposed by producers and ratified by decree. For each AOC the committee fixed not just a boundary but conditions of production — grape varieties, yields, minimum alcohol, practices. Definition of wine names passed, at last, from judges and prefects to the professionals of each region under national control.

The template came from the Rhône. At Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the lawyer-vigneron Baron Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié had led the local syndicate since 1923 and persuaded it to bind itself voluntarily to strict rules — an authorized list of grape varieties, a minimum of 12.5 degrees, compulsory sorting of the harvest — then defended that package all the way to the Cour de cassation, which upheld delimitation and production conditions together on 21 November 1933. It was the AOC in miniature, two years early. Capus presided over the CNAO from 1935 until his death in 1947; Le Roy succeeded him and led the institute — renamed INAO on 16 July 1947 — until 1967. The first six AOCs were recognized on 15 May 1936: Arbois, Cassis, Cognac, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Monbazillac and Tavel, with Champagne following on 29 June.

Bordeaux enters the system, 1936

Bordeaux's turn came in the autumn. Sauternes was recognized on 30 September 1936; on 14 November 1936 a wave of decrees created AOC Bordeaux itself — confirming the departmental delimitation of 1911 — along with Saint-Émilion and Médoc, and Graves followed on 4 March 1937. The names that had been fought over in courtrooms for two decades became controlled appellations with conditions attached.

The AOC defined Bordeaux; it did not, by itself, save it. As Philippe Roudié — the geographer whose Vignobles et vignerons du Bordelais remains the reference on the period — established, the Gironde vineyard on the eve of the Second World War was still among the most economically devastated rural areas of France. Prosperity would wait for the post-war decades. What 1935 built was something else: a durable answer to the question of 1907. And there is a longer historical echo. Bordeaux had spent five hundred years under the Ancien Régime policing which wines could bear its name at the port; the AOC moved the checkpoint from the river to the land itself — from a merchant's privilege to a grower's guarantee, enforced not against the Haut-Pays but against the fraud in the vat.