Readings

Reading Roger Dion's Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France: The Book That Made Terroir a Social Fact

A critical reading of Roger Dion's Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France (1959), the self-published masterwork that argued French vineyards were made by markets and power, not by soil.

Roger Dion's Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France des origines au XIXe siècle came out in 1959 without a publisher. Dion, a professor at the Collège de France, had finished a manuscript of nearly eight hundred pages, found no house willing to take it, and paid for the printing himself. The notices of the time tell readers where to order a copy: from a Monsieur Poisson at Charcé, a village in Maine-et-Loire. The book has since become the most-cited work in French wine historiography. Flammarion reprinted it in 1977 and again in 1990, CNRS Éditions reissued it in 2010, and it is still in print. It is also where this site gets the phrase it uses more than any other: terroir is a social fact, not a geological one.

The book and its first readers

Dion (1896–1981) held the chair of historical geography of France at the Collège de France from 1948 to 1968. His publisher's note puts the research behind the book at twenty-two years. The reviewers' descriptions are consistent with that. The first edition has 768 pages, 22 figures, 15 plates and three maps, and the notice in the Bibliothèque de l'École des chartes (1960) counts more than eight hundred printed works in the bibliography.

The reviews came quickly and, for an academic book, they were unusually warm. In the Revue de géographie de Lyon in 1960, Raoul Blanchard, the senior figure of French regional geography, wrote that in a long career he had rarely met a book that made him think so much or taught him so much, "in geography as in history". Max Derruau titled his 1961 review in the Annales du Midi "A great book on the vine and wine". The medievalist Philippe Wolff, writing in the Cahiers de civilisation médiévale in 1962, praised its "fullness of thought" and "ease of exposition".

The later verdict came from outside history. Reviewing the 1990 reissue for the Cahiers d'économie et sociologie rurales, an agricultural-economics journal, P. Bartoli placed it among the books that "endure and establish themselves as references, beyond the effects of fashion". He also called it an unavoidable starting point for any economist working on the wine sector.

The argument

The opening chapters set out the physical frame: the Mediterranean zone, the northern margins, and the intermediate country between the two. The rest of the book shows how little that frame explains.

Blanchard singled out Dion's treatment of the northern limit of commercial viticulture, a line running roughly from the Morbihan through Paris to Luxembourg. Along that line, climate sets the outer boundary of what is possible. Inside it, the decisions are made by people.

Derruau's summary of the thesis is the best short one. Wine history, he wrote, is more deeply marked by "human arbitrariness" than the history of any grain crop, and the map of French vineyards records "a long sequence of ambitions, enterprises and successes". The sentence the CNRS edition prints on its cover copy puts the same idea as a comparison: the part the land plays in making a great wine scarcely exceeds the part the raw material plays in making a work of art.

Region by region

Dion works through the wine regions one at a time and explains each by the market it served. The hierarchy of Burgundy's wines answers to the expectations of the ducal court. The Rhône took the character of its wines from the demands of Lyon's merchants. Champagne owes its sparkling identity to British demand and aristocratic fashion. Languedoc had sun and soil in abundance and stayed poor for centuries, because its route to the Atlantic ran through a city that would not let its wines pass.

Bordeaux gets the longest treatment. Dion credits its classified growths to a commercial strategy pursued since the Middle Ages, rather than to its gravels: the deliberate production of quality wine for elite export markets, the English one above all.

Wolff's review sets out the medieval sequence Dion proposes. Bishops and monasteries kept the vineyard going through the early Middle Ages. From the eleventh century, northern buyers drove a commercial revival, first around Laon and on the Rhine and Moselle, then along the Yonne and the Loire. Only after that came the Atlantic vineyards of La Rochelle and Bordeaux, whose growth Dion places "principally in the thirteenth century", in step with improvements in Atlantic navigation.

Dion in this site's articles

Several articles on this site rest on Dion's argument. Is Terroir Real? sets out his position. The school that answered it, with Henri Enjalbert's "Comment naissent les grands crus" of 1953 and René Pijassou's soil-centred history of the Médoc, organised itself in reaction to him.

The privilège des vins is his thesis in institutional form. For five centuries a city ranked wines by origin under a written rulebook and kept Languedoc's wines out, long before anyone spoke of appellations.

Dion dates Bordeaux's take-off to the thirteenth century rather than to the marriage of 1152. Our account of the English centuries makes the same correction to the Eleanor legend.

What Dion did not claim

The book is caricatured about as often as it is cited. Dion never wrote that soil does not matter. In his account soil and climate are necessary and not sufficient. Favourable land is the precondition of a great vineyard, and favourable land is far more common than great vineyards. The question the book teaches its reader to ask is why this favourable land and not that one. Dion's answer is always a buyer, a road, a port, a privilege or a court: somebody wanted wine made in that place and paid for it.

That is historical geography in the full sense of the term. Bartoli's review makes the economists' version of the point: those who study the modern wine trade end up rebuilding Dion's geography, whether or not they have read him.

Age and limits

The subtitle is exact. The book stops at the nineteenth century, and does so by design. Derruau's one regret was that Dion set phylloxera and the railway-age remaking of French viticulture aside for a separate volume. That volume was never written. Everything this site covers in Three Plagues and after lies outside the book.

Its evidence is also that of 1959. Dion built the book from texts (charters, customs, travellers' accounts, treatises) and presented it in prose and maps. The quantitative series that now anchor wine economics did not exist yet. Where Dion argues from a chronicler's remark, he can be too trusting. Wolff's review makes the point with one example, a passage in the Franciscan Salimbene about the vines of Auxerre that echoes scripture more than it describes an economy. The book remains the place to find the question; the numbers have to come from the newer literature.

The debate Dion started has also moved on. The soil scientists of Bordeaux went on to map in detail what he had dealt with in a sentence or two. The defensible position today is that both sides were right, in proportions that are still being argued.