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.

The appellation d'origine contrôlée was created by a decree-law of 30 July 1935, and within eighteen months Bordeaux, Saint-Émilion, Sauternes and the Médoc had entered the system that still governs them. It ended a thirty-year legal fight over what counts as wine and who may sell it under the name of a place. In the summer of 1907 more than half a million people marched in Montpellier, the largest of a wave of Midi demonstrations, against "wine" made from sugar-water, imported raisins and falsely named blends. Getting from there to 1935 took three flawed laws, troops in Champagne, and a long disagreement between two men who worked in the same small Gironde town.

Wine without grapes

The crisis came out of phylloxera's destruction of the French vineyard. In the economic historian James Simpson's reconstruction, French production averaged 57.4 million hectolitres a year in 1863–75 and fell to 31.7 million in 1879–92, while consumption, pushed up by railways, cities and higher wages, had gone from 76 litres per head in the early 1850s to 140 litres by 1875. Three substitutes filled the gap.

Imports came first. In 1866–75 France exported the equivalent of 5 per cent of its supply; in 1886–95 it imported 19 per cent. Then raisin wine. Dried grapes and currants entered duty-free until 1899, cost far less to ship than wine, and could be soaked, sugared and fermented industrially. One contemporary estimate cited by Simpson: 100 kilos of raisins gave some 300 litres of 8-degree "wine" at about 0.15 francs a litre, a fraction of the real thing's price. Paris alone reportedly had twenty such factories. Last came sugar. Chaptalisation, legitimate in moderation, shaded into sugared piquettes: second and third "pressings" of the same marc, stretched with water and beet sugar.

Around 1900 the replanted vineyard returned to full production and the substitutes stayed. Overproduction became structural, prices collapsed, and buyers could no longer tell what was in the bottle: the background to the deepest price depression in Bordeaux's modern economic history.

Algeria's colonial vineyard, planted at speed after phylloxera, shipped 4 million hectolitres to mainland France in 1905 and 6 million by 1915. Giulia Meloni and Johan Swinnen have shown that its 13- to 16-degree wines were what merchants needed to "improve" the thin 9- or 10-degree wine of the new hybrids. In Bordeaux as elsewhere, outside wine blended into local barrels made, in Simpson's phrase, a more marketable product, still sold under the local name.

1905: fraud defined, wine left undefined

The first legal 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 fraud-control service was set up. But prosecuting a false "Bordeaux" required knowing where Bordeaux began and ended, and the law did not say. An amendment pushed through by deputies from the Marne allowed wine regions to be delimited by administrative decree. That short clause caused most of the trouble of the next six years.

The south moved first. The Midi produced two-fifths of France's wine, could not sell its vintages, and blamed sugar and fraud. After the demonstrations of spring and summer 1907, which peaked at Montpellier, Clemenceau's government passed the law of 29 June 1907 "to prevent the watering of wines and the abuse of sugaring": a compulsory annual harvest declaration from every grower, and surveillance and taxation of vinification sugar. French vignerons still file that declaration. It began as an anti-fraud measure.

1908–1911: delimitation by decree

The decrees followed. Champagne was delimited on 17 December 1908, Cognac and Armagnac in 1909, Bordeaux on 18 February 1911. The Bordeaux decree came after four years of regional dispute and gave the name to wines of the Gironde department only, excluding the neighbouring Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne. The legal historian Gérard Aubin describes it as extending a city's name to a whole department.

Simpson identifies who wanted it. The Gironde's growers of ordinary wine, undercut by cheap Midi and imported blends, had lobbied for a regional appellation. The merchants, who blended, objected. The great estates sold under their own names and treated the matter as irrelevant to them. The 1911 line has lasted: it is still, in essence, the boundary of AOC Bordeaux.

In Champagne the decree led to violence. The 1908 delimitation had left out the Aube, whose growers mobilized in spring 1911; when the government hesitated, the Marne rose in turn. In April 1911 rioting vignerons sacked and burned the cellars of négociants accused of making "champagne" from outside wine, a Saint-Barthélemy des vins to contemporaries, and troops were sent in. That June the Aube got a face-saving "Champagne deuxième zone". Parliament concluded that state-drawn wine borders set region against region, and dropped the method.

1919: the courts decide

The law of 6 May 1919 moved the question to the civil courts. Any producer could claim an appellation of origin; anyone who felt wronged, growers' unions included, now had standing to challenge it; judges ruled on origin and on "local, loyal and constant usages". Presenting the law, the commerce minister Étienne Clémentel said the trade had come to believe that great names such as Bordeaux, Champagne and Cognac belonged to it, when they were the property of the producing regions.

Through the 1920s about ninety-four appellations were defined by court decision, thirty-eight of them in the Gironde. The law protected origin, not quality. A grower inside the area could plant high-yielding hybrids on the worst land in the commune and still use the appellation; Claudine Wolikow has shown that the courts would not read quality conditions into a text that contained none. In the Gironde, communes petitioned to add a famous neighbour's name to their own, which is how Montagne-Saint-Émilion and similar compound names arose. Appellation wine became plentiful and often mediocre, the guarantee extended to almost anyone inside the line. Joseph Capus called the results scandals.

Two doctrines from Cadillac

Both positions in the interwar argument took shape in Cadillac, a small wine town on the right bank of the Garonne. Georges Cazeaux-Cazalet, vigneron and deputy for the Gironde, had organized the department's growers from 1895 and chaired the 1907 parliamentary commission on the wine crisis. The growers' movement he led held that the appellation belonged by right to every producer on the delimited soil. Origin was the only test.

Joseph Capus taught viticulture in the same town before becoming a deputy, briefly minister of agriculture in 1924, and then senator for the Gironde. From his first report on the subject in 1906 he argued the opposite: fine wine is the joint product of soil, grape variety and human practice, and a name detached from those conditions guarantees nothing. His formula became the doctrine of the controlled appellation. An appellation of origin stands for the origin and for certain usages of production.

Capus won in stages. The law of 22 July 1927 amended the 1919 regime. An appellation wine now had to come from grape varieties and areas consecrated by local, loyal and constant usage, and hybrid vines were barred. In Champagne the law ended the Marne–Aube conflict with a parcel-by-parcel delimitation. Elsewhere it changed little. The courts still ruled, and indifferent appellation wine kept coming.

1935: the appellation contrôlée

The Depression ended the argument. With the wine market in ruins, the decree-law of 30 July 1935, with Capus as its parliamentary architect, created the appellation d'origine contrôlée and a body to run it, the Comité national des appellations d'origine (CNAO), governed jointly by the wine trades and the state: producers proposed, a decree ratified. For each AOC the committee set a boundary and conditions of production (grape varieties, yields, minimum alcohol, practices). Wine names passed from judges and prefects to each region's professionals, under national control.

The model came from the Rhône. At Châteauneuf-du-Pape the lawyer-vigneron Baron Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié, head of the local syndicate since 1923, persuaded its members to accept an authorized list of grape varieties, a 12.5-degree minimum and compulsory sorting of the harvest, then defended those rules up to the Cour de cassation. On 21 November 1933 it upheld delimitation and production conditions together: the AOC in small, two years early.

Capus chaired 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. Champagne followed on 29 June.

Bordeaux enters the system, 1936

Sauternes was recognized on 30 September 1936. On 14 November 1936 a set of decrees created AOC Bordeaux, confirming the departmental delimitation of 1911, together with Saint-Émilion and Médoc. Graves followed on 4 March 1937. Names fought over in court for two decades now carried conditions.

The AOC defined Bordeaux; it did not rescue it. Philippe Roudié, whose Vignobles et vignerons du Bordelais remains the reference work on the period, established that on the eve of the Second World War the Gironde vineyard was still among the most economically depressed rural areas in France. Prosperity came only after the war.

Control of the name was far older. Under the Ancien Régime, Bordeaux spent five hundred years controlling at the port which wines could carry its name. That was a merchants' privilege, aimed at wines from the Haut-Pays upriver. The AOC moved the control from the quays to the vineyard and turned it into a guarantee held by growers, aimed at fraud in the vat.