Fighting for the honour of France

Caparisons are odorous, he malapropped wisely. When I read the admonition “Watch out France” I bridle, because I know that some whippersnapper country or region, inebriated on a surfeit of self-administered puffing, is trying to provoke a particularly pointless argument. All this stems from man’s predilection for creating lists, establishing hierarchies and gnawing on statistics like a ravenous capybara.

You could drown under a Niagara of Nielsen stats. I am so bored with who is top and who is not. Like politicians at election time, the export boards of each country spin the figures to claim success. Everyone’s a winner. But everyone takes a different relative starting point to develop their respective claims. France is caricatured as the arrogant frog king out of touch with the citizens of his realm; having lived for years in the chateau on the hill he is not aware that the divine right to be number one has been usurped.

By all accounts France isn’t France in all its shining diversity; it is fustian, the stain-glassed parliament of privilege, pomposity, posing and laurel-resting. One accusation levelled against France is that growers and journalists propagate the quasi-religious notion of terroir, suggesting that their vineyards are therefore somehow nearer to godliness and that the French are somehow more in love with the mythology of how unique their wines are. Come on, terroir isn’t up there or out there; it is as real as the rocks beneath your feet and every country seeks to promote its own strong regional and microclimatic identity for its vineyards and growers.

The notion that France (see how I am generalising about an entire country) ignores markets is completely bogus. If anything it is a country of extremes: massive technical innovation on the one hand and keen preservation of tradition on the other – and everything in between. The lack of a coherent marketing plan is what the critics are really having a pop at. I, for one, say thank god. One can never govern a country that has 265 types of cheeses, remarked De Gaulle. A blanket marketing approach would suffocate that originality. Growers are a law unto themselves; so some of the appellation regulations are a bit bonkers (the intention to protect and promote regionality is a laudable one) – they don’t detract that much from the ability to make great wine.

France is the spiritual home of many of the so-called noble grape varieties and historically fine wines and it will forever suffer the curse of being the front runner. Great Bordeaux – why not stick a Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon as a ringer in a competitive of first growth clarets? The question we should be asking ourselves is not whether a wine from the New World is better than its counterpart from France, but whether the wine has a strong identity, preferably an expression of its unique terroir. France’s problem, and here I would cite the respective practices of cold maceration in Burgundy and the use and abuse of new oak and micro-oxygenation in Bordeaux, is that many of the great wines, in striving too hard, have lost the character which made them unique in the first place.

This entire train of thought was prompted by a pronouncement I read on a blog that Marlborough made the world’s greatest Sauvignons. It is like that expression: “they do/make the best ever dim sum/pizzas/coffee.  Prove it! The progress of the parvenu is always impressive because the learning curve is so steep. The climate in Marlborough is good, but for me, the most impressive examples lack an element that transforms them into fantastic wines. The mineral identity of the wines from Sancerre is very particular and pronounced; Marlborough wines lack this underlying definition. From young vines, from cultured yeasts, spending virtually no times on the lees before bottling these Sauvignons are generally callow and unresolved. The best wines are more complex, but they lack the texture and mouthfeel of great Sauvignon.