Part 2

That large tracts of the earth’s surface are eminently suitable for viticulture, though still virginal of the vine, such as—excluding the British Empire for the moment—parts of central China and Morocco, and possibly Abyssinia and Arabia as well, to say nothing of those considerable regions of Asia Minor and the United States where it was formerly cultivated, there can be little doubt. Moreover, such countries as Southern Russia, the Balkan States, Greece, Persia, Japan and many of the South American republics are undoubtedly capable of a much larger production of wine than they actually grow. The trouble is that the vine, once planted in a strange land, takes many decades, if not centuries, before it begins to yield wine that has any real quality. A successful wine-growing industry cannot be created in much less than half a century. True, we are told by a certain Brother Benedictus in his “_Chronicques Vivaroises_,” as Mrs G. B. Stern reminds us, that the “_belle ordonnance de seps, pères de gros savoureux raisins_” on the famed Hill of Hermitage, the juice of which is “_une rosée paradisiaque_” rather than mere man-made wine, was planted, pruned and tended ready for the vintage in a single night by a host of ex-vigneron angels (for all vignerons, the worthy monk assures us, go straight to heaven, just as no single miscreant of the ungodly company of water-drinkers has ever passed St Peter’s scrutiny at the Golden Gate), so that the grapes were hanging ripe to bursting from these “_vignes séraphiques_” on the morrow, waiting only on the poor, Saracen-hunted hermit, perishing of thirst, to pluck and press them. What an impious irony of fate that Hermitage should be one of the slowest wines to mature! But this is, perhaps, rather an exceptional case even among legends concerning the origins of famous vineyards, most of which claim, with wearisome monotony, to have been planted by the pious legionaries of the benign Emperor Probus, by Charlemagne himself, or various unfamiliar though duly authenticated saints; and raised to fame in the inexhaustible goblets of the _Vert Galant_ or the immortal Rabelais. The vine thrives best and most luxuriantly and yields the largest, coarsest and most regular harvests in very hot, sub-tropical climates to which it is not indigenous and where it is often necessary to irrigate the vineyards. Only in comparatively cold regions, within measurable distance of the northern limit of the vine (an imaginary line passing approximately from Nantes, through Paris, Compiègne, Coblentz, Dresden, a little east of Prague, along the southern slopes of the Carpathians and to the north of the Crimea and Caucasia in Europe; bisecting Turkestan, Cashmere, the Chinese Province of Shantung and Central Japan in Asia; and running from south of Puget Sound, north of the Great Lakes and across part of Canada, to the Atlantic seaboard in the State of New York, on the American continent), and from soil long familiar with its roots, will the Vitis Vinifera yield a vintage of fine and delicate wine; and then only in very small quantities, with an infinity of painful labour, at great expense and seldom more than two or three times in a decade, if, indeed, so often. The world’s most classic vineyards are planted on poor, stoney soil, often on rugged slopes, little suitable for other forms of cultivation.

The world, then, is threatened with the extinction of the few hallowed acres of its very finest and most renowned vineyards within a measurable space of time by the ever-growing threat of over-production—the inclusion not only of just those additional adjacent rods, poles and perches which past generations in their probity and wisdom resolutely refused to annex to them; but also of whole square miles of outlying meadowlands, arable plain or bleak and insufficiently sheltered hill-tops beyond their immediate limits—no less than by a menacing invasion of baser and insufficiently acclimatised sub-species of the parent vine.

Other perils besetting the continuity of the finer wines are the spread of the so-called Type-Wines, in the form of standardised qualities for certain districts (a development that originated in California where wine used to be grown, as long as it could be grown at all, from vineyards vast as cattle-ranches, equipped with all the typically American resources of plant and capital for dealing with vintages on a Ford scale of output), which is being steadily fostered by wine-growers’ co-operatives in many parts of France, Italy and other wine-lands; and the wholesale manufacture by the large French wine-shippers of those vinous mixtures known as “_Monopoles_” and “_Marques Personnelles_.”

TYPE-WINES

The impulse that has called the Type-Wines into being was the necessity of finding some expedient that would enable the proprietors of the less famous growths of well-known regions to sell their wines remuneratively, which was becoming more and more difficult. There was also a strong desire on their part to profit by the recently established _appellations d’origine_ for even the most lowly and inferior wines grown within these areas, and the ambition to compete in foreign markets with the cheap wines of countries such as Algeria and Australia, that are all of them inevitably Type-Wines, sold as often as not under the titles of one or other of the most famous viticultural regions of France (_e.g._, Algerian “Chablis” and South Australian “Hermitage”). True, these descriptions would be illegal in France and those countries which, under recent commercial treaties, now admit yearly quotas of French wines and thereby assure the authenticity of their appellations; but in England the International Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, which nominally secures respect for these same appellations in all signatory states, seems to be a dead letter, if indeed it was not stillborn.

These Type-Wines, already familiar in France, are not easily explained without giving a concrete and somewhat detailed example. For many decades wines have been available in commerce which bore the names of one or other of the great sub-divisions of the Bordelais, such as St Estèphe, Pauillac or Margaux in the Médoc, and Graves, St Emilion and Pomerol as representatives of the other districts entitled to be sold as “Bordeaux.” It was notorious that these wines, which were not always genuine, differed enormously in quality according to the standing of the firms which selected them and the vintages to which they belonged: vintages that were often passed over in silence because the wines in question were a blend of two or more. Nevertheless, wines sold under these labels, that made no claim to have been grown on any territorially defined plot of ground within the borders of their several districts—a particular Château or Cru—represented the cheapest authentic, or putatively authentic, kinds of Bordeaux with which the general public was familiar. The Co-operative Movement among French wine-growers, which had started in the Midi, a region devoted to the production of cheap wines on a vast scale, without much pretension to quality, where it was decidedly beneficial to the interests of the growers and the public alike, eventually spread to certain of the less-known districts of the Bordelais. One of the latest recruits is the Commune of Margaux.

The Commune of Margaux, one of the two most famous in the Médoc, has for centuries been reputed for producing some of the very finest Bordeaux wines there are; its supreme glory being the First Growth of Château Margaux itself. In addition, the Commune boasts four Second Growths, four Third Growths, one Fourth Growth, about a dozen recognised superior Bourgeois and ordinary Bourgeois Growths and something like thirty _Crus Artisans_ and _Crus Paysans_, which represent the tail of the Bordelais hierarchy in point of reputation. There are besides some half-a-dozen large growths planted in _Palu_ soil (rich, alluvial clay) on the foreshore of the Gironde and on certain low-lying islands in the stream. Palus vineyards give a very much larger yield of appreciably coarser wines than those planted on the gravel soil further inland, which is geologically typical of the Médoc proper. In point of production the ten _Crus Classés_ of Margaux yield about 650 _tonneaux_[5] of wine a year, which is easily sold at high prices; the Superior Bourgeois, Bourgeois, Artisan and Peasant Growths account for another 550 between them, the best of which finds a fairly ready market in good years, but much of which has nearly always to be sold at unsatisfactory prices; while the Palus growths produce some 1,100, the sale of which, though prices are relatively low, is on the whole more remunerative because the vintage is much heavier and the cost of cultivation much less. Yet each of these growths, high as humble, every litre of the total average yield of 20,700 hectolitres, has an identical right to the common appellation of “Margaux.” Anyone who lives in the Commune of Margaux and has a strip of garden in which there is room to grow a row of a dozen vines of sorts, tended, perhaps, little and carelessly, can sell his wine as “Margaux” with the same legality as his neighbour who may cultivate a considerable and reputed vineyard in the most approved scientific manner.

Formerly the _Crus Bourgeois Supérieurs_ and the _Crus Bourgeois_ commanded a ready sale at prices not utterly disproportionate to those attained by the _Crus Classés_, while the ratio between the two orders of growths was nearly always the same, whatever the prices realised for the First Growths, which always set the tone of the market. Nowadays the public knows far less about wines, and a predominantly _parvenu_ generation wants to buy the best, and nothing but the best, and is guided almost entirely by names and labels and very little by vintages or careful tasting. Moreover there is no longer the same prejudice against consuming comparatively new wines in this hasty age, and, as a consequence, the laying down of wines that are slow to mature is the exception rather than the rule. The result is that it has become so difficult to sell some of the best and most ancient in fame of the _Crus Bourgeois_ at a reasonable profit—to say nothing of the _Crus Artisans et Paysans_—that vines are being grubbed up wholesale. It was to meet this state of affairs that a Co-operative Communal Cellar was founded in Margaux. The avowed object is to utilise all wines made in the territory of the commune, excepting only those that sell readily on their own names and merits, so as to produce year in and year out, irrespective of good or bad vintages because blended from both, a uniform wine with a flavour as typical of the best Margaux growths as the nature of a single composite mixture may allow. It is needless to say that such a Type-Wine “Margaux,” bearing full guarantees of territorial authenticity though it would, must be a hollow parody of a real wine, because it is a synthesis, a standardisation, of many, blended to the taste of the uncritical majority of the public. Should this experiment prove commercially successful, and the example of Margaux prevail, there would soon be an end to all individuality, to all those finer shades of years and growths that are the delight of the true wine-lover; and the ambition of Margaux and its emulators would be to produce an ever-greater quantity, trading on an ancient and no longer justifiable local renown for quality that was only attained in the past by a deliberate and consistent sacrifice of any idea of securing bumper vintages.

It is the rapid rise of the “_Monopoles_,” the very existence of which is an impious challenge to the fair name of wine, that has stimulated the wholesale vatting of these standardised regional growths.

MONOPOLES

The French word “_monopole_,” as applied to wines, really means a firm’s trade-mark, a proprietary brand: in fact very much the same sort of thing as the popular blends of Scotch Whisky advertised by the leading distillers. At present these Monopoles are chiefly confined to the Côte d’Or and the Bordelais, though specimens have already made their appearance in the lists of certain Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône, Touraine and Anjou wine-merchants who specialise in these particular growths. To explain what these Monopoles really are—an authority of the eminence of M. Raymond Baudouin has not hesitated to stigmatise them as “pharmacy, but not wine”—the French law concerning appellations of origin, which the Monopoles have been devised to circumvent, must first be briefly examined. A wine may now no longer be sold under a territorial designation unless it is territorially entitled to its use: that is to say only when it has been grown exclusively within territory having an identical geographical (but not necessarily administrative) appellation, or within the area of such adjacent communes as may enjoy a recognised and long-established right to the better-known name of their neighbour. For instance, a red wine sold as “Pommard” in France must have been grown within the Commune of Pommard, Département de la Côte d’Or, and none other; a white wine sold as Pouilly (not to be confused with the white wine of Pouilly-sur-Loir from the common border of the Départements of the Cher and the Nièvre), which is the name of a tiny hamlet in the Mâconnais and not of any one commune, must have been grown either in the Commune of Solutré (in which this hamlet actually lies), the Commune of Fuissé, the Commune of Vergisson and a cadastrally delimited part of the Commune of Chaintré, in the Département of Saône-et-Loire, and nowhere else.

In the Côte d’Or there are two kinds of red vines: one the proud “_plant noble_,” called the Pinot of Pineau, which alone has made the wine of Burgundy the nectar that it is, that will grow in few places and then only on the lower slope—a niggardly beggar so delicate as to be prone to practically every malady that the vine is heir to; and the Gamay,[6] a “_plant commun_,” which will thrive anywhere, especially where the Pinot will not—a hardy vine that is a heavy bearer and causes little anxiety or expense to the vigneron.

As there is very little slope with the right exposure in each commune, it follows that there is a considerable extent of Gamay plantations, since the wine of the Gamay vineyards has just as much right to be sold as “Pommard,” if it is grown in that commune, as wine grown in the most famous of the historic “_climats_” which have been planted exclusively with Pinot vines since time immemorial. (In England, in so far as our “Pommard” ever comes from that Commune, or the Burgundy region at all, it is nearly always Gamay wine, French growers and shippers having long ago discovered that most English wine-drinkers, and many English wine-merchants, cannot distinguish it from a Pinot growth, though these respective flavours, once they become familiar, are as dissimilar as chalk and cheese.) An amendment to the _Loi des Appellations d’Origine_, called the _Amendment Capus_ after the name of the Senator who introduced it, is now before the French Chambers, the object of which, should it, as seems probable, be ratified, is to limit any given “_appellation d’origine_” ampelographically as well as territorially: that is, to confine it to wines grown from those auguster vines that are historically as much an integral part of the wine itself as the traditional area of ground and the geological nature of the soil it has always been grown on. The first important effect of this amendment to the existing state of the law would be that Gamay wines grown in Côte d’Or communes would no longer be entitled to any local appellation of origin (such as “Pommard”), unless it were the generic name “Bourgogne,” the lowest, because the most general, qualification of all for any Burgundy, red or white. A given wine, enjoying the right to a special secondary appellation, can always be made to descend the scale from the particular to the general in bad years, or for any other cause that may have marred its quality; but a wine can never be promoted to a higher category than that in which it was born and bred. A simple instance for exemplifying this point is afforded by the official grouping in the Beaujolais. The local appellations of origin here recognised as “_pouvant revendiquer les usages loyaux, locaux et constants_,” are Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Morgon, Juliénas, Brouilly, Thorins, and Chénas. Now none of these wines can under any circumstances appropriate to itself the name of one of its fellows. Chénas may not style itself Moulin-à-Vent; nor, for that matter, though there is no sort of temptation to do so, may Moulin-à-Vent style itself Chénas. Yet all are Beaujolais and “Beaujolais” is the common name to which every other wine grown in that region has an equal right. Thus any of these seven “named” wines may call itself simply “Beaujolais,” and being a Beaujolais has a clear title to the seemingly magnificent, but in reality exceedingly common and unassuming, patronymic of “Bourgogne.” There is only one Mackintosh of Mackintosh, but Andrew Mackintosh, gillie to THE Mackintosh, is as much a “Mackintosh” as the exalted Chief of the Clan.

None the less any wine-merchant has the right to sell a wine, or blend of wines, French or foreign, called by some fantastic name, or whatever title of his own invention he chooses to employ, provided it is not identical with an existing appellation of origin. More often than not the bottler selects a name nicely calculated to seem a genuine territorial appellation to the unwary, such as Château This or Clos That, Roc d’Or or Monvalloir; or, keeping within the law, slightly adapts the spelling of some classic growth with fraudulent intent: Romani for Romanée, etc. Several of the more important Bordeaux and Beaune firms sell Monopoles purely on the strength of their own names and previous reputations as Chose’s Blue and Green Labels, or Red and Yellow Capsules, much as English grocers sell different qualities of well-known brands of tea. Where Saints’ names are invoked because of their prevalence in Bordelais communes, the wines they consecrate are no more catholic for the doubtful compliment of a spurious, or impersonated, canonisation. Certainly good St Vincent would have none of these imposters either as brother saints or tipplers.

According to M. Raymond Baudouin, a typical recipe adopted by the Côte d’Or alchemists is

25% genuine Côte d’Or Burgundy for flavouring.

30% good Côtes du Rhône wine to eke out this flavouring.

20% ordinary Algerian wine to reduce the cost.

25% natural wine (_i.e._, wine with no special flavour or other salient characteristic) to drown the taste of the hot Algerian blending wine and still further reduce the cost of production.

The Bordeaux houses are said to employ

25% genuine Bordeaux.

30% good Midi wine.

20% ordinary Algerian wine.

25% neutral wine.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that these formulas are only approximate, and that the actual ingredients of each Monopole vary in nature and ratio with the firm of wine-cooks concerned. Indeed, there are some Côte d’Or houses which claim that their Monopoles are blended exclusively from pure, territorially genuine, Burgundies: a claim which, whether justifiable or not in fact, is best rejected on principle, because there is seldom any inducement to blend a wine good enough to be sold unblended.

A widely organised conspiracy now exists to foist these vinous compounds, which may conceivably be wine and even French wine, but are certainly neither Bordeaux nor Burgundy according to any legal or loyal interpretation of those terms, on purchasers of single bottles and diners at restaurants because they yield much bigger profits than ordinary wines. Thanks to our national ignorance of wines, Monopole brands of White Graves (one boasts that it is supplied to the House of Lords), and other so-called “Oyster-Wines,” have already gained a certain footing on the English market because they are supposed to offer “more regular and uniform quality” than wines bearing straightforward territorial designations, together with a sustained standard of flavour, independent of vintage vagaries: a thing which it is simplicity itself to produce once “_coupage_,” or scientific blending, is resorted to. In the Côte d’Or, where the demand for authentic Côte de Nuits and Côte de Beaune Burgundies is anything up to five times as much as can be genuinely produced, while bad vintages are much more frequent than good, the evil of the “_Marques Personnelles_” has made such rapid progress that already more Monopole wines than territorial growths are sold and the integrity of the sacred name of Burgundy is definitely compromised. Many of these mixtures are quite agreeable to drink, provided always that they are taken for what they really are and not for what they pretend to be, but to offer them to one’s friends is an unpardonable insult, however merited the insult may sometimes be. The proper sphere for these beverages—if, indeed, they can be said to have any proper sphere other than the hoodwinking of the credulous and ignorant for whom they are lavishly and alluringly labelled in regulation Burgundy and Bordeaux bottles—is for splashing down a hustled and jolted meal in a dining-car. A Monopole may be defined as the _Train Bleu_ wine par excellence, since it can always be relied upon to be none the worse for the most violent shaking before taking.

A word of caution is, however, necessary because in French commercial usage this dangerous word “_monopole_” can have two very different interpretations. The first, which is infinitely the more common, as we have just seen, applies to blended wines sold as proprietary brands under the euphemism which the law requires to be printed in the wine-merchant’s price-list but not on the label of the bottle: “_exclusif de toute considération d’origine et de cépage_” (_cépage_ means in this context the types of vine traditionally associated with particular growths of wine). The second, and entirely respectable sense, which the same term may have, is in the case where a certain firm may own or lease the whole of a particular vineyard and can thus claim that it possesses a “monopoly” of its wine. An outstanding instance is provided by Romanée-Conti of Vosne, perhaps the most famous vineyard in the whole world, which is “_Monopole de la Maison De Villaine et Cambon_” for the very good and sufficient reason that this old and honourable firm owns the freehold of the hallowed hectare and a half and bottles every drop of its priceless wine in its own cellars.

Strictly speaking, Champagne (where the term originated and where it is still extensively used), practically all other sparkling wines and most Ports, Sherries, Madeiras and Marsalas are likewise Monopoles, because they are sold under the names of different makers—each separate shipper representing one or more proprietary brands—instead of under the names of particular vineyards or communes. In each of these cases, however, the blending formula, which has made the reputation and constitutes the most jealously guarded secret of each firm, relies wholly on wines enjoying co-equal local appellations. Every drop of Première Zone Champagne is territorially genuine “Champagne,” although as many as six separate communes, each with its own appellation of origin, may have contributed to its composition. The only way to avoid pitfalls is to know your Côte d’Or communes and “_climats_” and your Bordeaux districts, with their constituent communes and satellite _Crus_, _Clos_ and _Châteaux_ (the latter is almost the work of a lifetime), more or less by heart, and to apply the cold test of geography to every bottle you are invited to buy. Even then you have no real guarantee in England, for English wine-merchants seem to be able to label wines, or other vinous mixtures, with more or less any names that suit their fancies, and yet enjoy virtual immunity from prosecution, so long as they do not describe as “Port” or “Madeira” wines that were not originally shipped from Oporto and Funchal with the appropriate Portuguese Certificate of Origin.

ADULTERATION