How France thinks about wine

Pick up a bottle of Chablis and you won’t find the word Chardonnay anywhere on it. Pick up a Sancerre and Sauvignon Blanc is absent. This confuses people raised on New World labelling, where the grape is the headline. The French position is straightforward: if you know the place, you already know the grape, because the place decides which grape is allowed.

The AOC - Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée - was formalised in 1935, largely in response to widespread fraud after phylloxera - a root feeding aphid accidentally imported from America - destroyed most of the vineyards in Europe. It defines a boundary on a map and then attaches rules to everything inside it: which varieties may be planted, maximum yields, minimum ripeness, sometimes even pruning method and ageing time.

The trade off is real and worth naming. You get a guarantee of style and a defence of local tradition. You also get a system that can make genuine innovation illegal, and that can leave a name protected long after the wine behind it has stopped being good.

The general principle across France: the smaller the named area, the higher the claim. A wine labelled with a whole region is the base; a village is better; a single vineyard is the top.

That last row is where Bordeaux stops behaving like the rest of France. The appellations run out at the commune, and the ranking above that’s of châteaux rather than of land - which is a different thing, and the source of the most common trap on a Bordeaux label. Saint-Émilion is the one to watch. Saint-Émilion Grand Cru is an appellation: any grower in the commune can use it by accepting slightly lower yields and a little more ageing. Grand Cru Classé is a classification, a separate ranking of estates revised roughly every decade. The words are nearly identical and the wines need not be. Two bottles can both say Grand Cru on the label, and only one of them has been ranked at all.

Nothing consistent, which is the honest answer. In Bordeaux the 1855 classification ranked châteaux - businesses - and those businesses have bought and sold vineyards ever since, so the rank travels with the name rather than with the ground. In Burgundy a cru is a ranked patch of ground, and it stays ranked whoever farms it. In Alsace a grand cru is a site. In Beaujolais a cru is a whole village. The word travels; its meaning doesn’t.