Every French Wine Explained

If you've ever wondered why a single bottle of wine can cost as much as a small car the moment it leaves the cellar, or how the grape the whole world credits to Argentina turned out to be French all along, and many more secrets besides, stay with us. Bordeaux The most famous wine region on Earth is split in two by a river, and which side a chateau sits on decides how its wine is built. On the left bank of the Gironde estuary, gravel soils favor Cabernet Sauvignon, giving firm, tannic, long-aging reds. On the right bank, cooler clay suits Merlot, producing rounder, softer wines. The secret buried in Bordeaux is its pecking order. In 1855, at the request of Napoleon III, brokers ranked the top chateaus into five growths, and they did it not by tasting a single glass but simply by the price each wine was already fetching. That list was meant as a snapshot for a world's fair. Yet it froze in place. Nearly two centuries later it has changed exactly once. When Mouton Rothschild was promoted to first growth in 1973 after decades of lobbying, a first growth label like Lafitte or Margot still commands hundreds or even thousands of dollars a bottle, largely on the strength of a ranking drawn up by merchants who never tasted a drop. Much of the finest is sold en premier, as wine futures, bought and traded while it still rests in the barrel, years before a single bottle is shipped. Burgundy If Bordeaux is about the estate, Burgundy is about the dirt. Here a single grape, Pinot Noir for red and Chardonnay for white, is grown across a patchwork of tiny plots called climas, each with its own name, walls, and character. The revelation is who drew those lines. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Cistercian monks worked these slopes for centuries, and legend has it they tasted and even chewed the soil, mapping the land so precisely that their boundaries are still used today and are now protected by UNESCO. There are more than a thousand of these named climas. The most extreme is Romanée-Conti, a walled vineyard barely the size of two football fields that yields only a few thousand bottles a year, each one selling for more than the price of a used car. Champagne The sparkling wine that defines celebration began as a disaster. In the cold cellars northeast of Paris, wine that stopped fermenting in winter would start again in spring, trapping carbon dioxide in the bottle. To early winemakers this was a curse. The pressure set off chain reactions that shattered bottles and could destroy much of a cellar, so workers moved through the vaults in iron masks to guard against flying glass. They called it the Devil's Wine. Only later was the fault turned into the whole point. A second fermentation is now deliberately triggered inside each sealed bottle, building up to six atmospheres of pressure, around 90 pounds per square inch. And by law, the name Champagne belongs only to sparkling wine made this way in this one region. Everywhere else, the same method must go by another name, such as Cremant. Rhone Running south down the Rhone River, this long region is really too. In the steep north, Syrah makes dark, peppery reds, sometimes with a little white viognier blended in. In the broad, warm south, Grenache leads blends that can legally mix more than a dozen grapes. That southern hub, Chateauneuf-du-Pape, hides two stories. Its name, the Pope's New Castle, comes from the 14th century, when the papacy moved from Rome to nearby Avignon, and the popes planted vineyards here. And it was on these vineyards, in the 1920s, that a local baron named Pierre Leroy wrote the first strict rules of origin and grape, the blueprint that became France's national appellation system, and, eventually, the model for protected wines worldwide. Its other quirk lies underfoot, where large round stones called galets soak up the day's heat and radiate it back to the vines at night. Loire Following France's longest river, the Loire is a cool string of vineyards known as the Garden of France, and its trick is versatility. A single white grape here, Chenin Blanc, can be made into almost anything, from a bone-dry still wine, to a lightly sparkling one, to a lusciously sweet dessert wine that can age for a century, all depending on the vintage and the winemaker's choice. The region also drinks its own history from the ground up. Many of its cellars are troglodyte caves, carved directly into the soft white tufo limestone that was quarried to build the Loire's famous château, leaving cool tunnels perfect for aging wine. From crisp Sancerre to saline Muscadet, the Loire covers more distinct styles than any other French region. Alsace Tucked against the German border, Alsace is the region that never quite decided which country it was in. It changed hands between France and Germany four times in 75 years, and the influence shows in everything from the grape varieties to the tall, slender green flute bottles. Its wines are dominated by aromatic whites like Riesling, Gewürztraminer, and Pinot Gris, but the real oddity is on the label. Alsace is the one major French region that names its wines after the grape rather than the place, the German way, while the rest of France insists on labeling by appellation and leaves the grape a mystery. An Alsace bottle simply says Riesling on the front, a habit almost unheard of anywhere else in French wine. Beaujolais Just south of Burgundy, Beaujolais grows a grape with a grudge. Its light, fruity reds come from Gamay, and Gamay is here because it was thrown out of Burgundy to the north. In 1395, the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, banned the variety from his lands, calling it a disloyal plant that produced wine in great abundance but of doubtful quality, and ordered it torn out. Gamay fled south and found a home in Beaujolais' granite hills. The region's other claim to fame is a marketing masterstroke. Beaujolais Nouveau, a wine fermented and bottled in just a few weeks, is released at one minute past midnight on the third Thursday of every November in a global race to pour the first bottle of the new vintage. It is made by a method called carbonic maceration, fermenting whole grapes inside a tank of carbon dioxide, which gives the wine its bright, candied, banana-like fruit. Provence Sun-soaked Provence, on the Mediterranean coast, is the oldest wine region in France. Greek settlers planted vines here around 600 years before Christ, near what is now Marseille, long before the Romans or the French existed. Today the region is defined by one thing above all, dry rosé, and here is what surprises many drinkers. Provençal rosé is not an afterthought or a way to use up spare grapes. It is the main event, accounting for the great majority of the region's production, and it is made deliberately from red grapes given only a few hours of skin contact. The most prized examples are so pale they are almost colorless, and that whisper of pink now sells at luxury prices around the world. Languedoc-Roussillon Sprawling along the southern coast towards Spain, this is the giant of French wine, the largest vineyard region in the country and for a time the largest in the world, once producing a veritable lake of cheap table wine. But buried in its history is a genuine bombshell. The world's first documented sparkling wine was probably not champagne at all. In the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire near the town of Lemieux, monks are recorded making a sparkling wine called Blanquette de Lemieux in 1531, more than a century before champagne perfected its own bubbles. Today Languedoc has traded quantity for quality, reinventing itself as a source of bold, affordable reds and characterful wines that finally shed the old reputation for plonk. It still grows more of France's wine than any other region, and its vast, sun-drenched vineyard has become one of the great centers of the natural wine movement. Sauternes In a small district within Bordeaux, a golden dessert wine is made from grapes that look utterly ruined. A fungus called noble rot shrivels the ripe semillon grapes like raisins, concentrating their sugar into an intense honeyed nectar. The surprise is that no one planned it. The story goes that the technique was discovered by accident. When a harvest was delayed, the owner away, and the grapes left to rot far longer than anyone would dare, only to produce something extraordinary. It takes a whole vine to make a single glass of Sauternes. One reason the finest bottles cost as much as a fine red. The results are so unpredictable that the greatest estate, Chateau de Quim, will refuse to release any wine at all in a year it judges unworthy, throwing away an entire harvest rather than put its name on a lesser bottle. Chablis In the far north of Burgundy sits Chablis, which makes a lean, mineral, unoaked Chardonnay so distinct that many drinkers never realize it is the same grape as a rich Californian one. The reason lies deep underground, and it is very old. The soil here, called Kimmeridgian, is packed with the fossilized shells of tiny oysters from a warm sea that covered the region around 150 million years ago. Growers swear that ancient seabed is what gives Chablis its famous flinty, almost salty edge. The cool climate carries a cost, though. Spring frosts can wipe out a crop overnight, so growers fight back by lighting thousands of candles and small heaters among the vines through the night to keep the buds from freezing, turning the hillsides into a field of flickering lights. The best plots, the Grand Cruz, all sit on one south-facing slope above the village, Cahors. In the southwest, far from the coast, the town of Cahors makes a wine so dark it earned the name the Black Wine. It is built on Malbec, and here is the fact that stuns most drinkers. Malbec, the grape the whole world now associates with Argentina, is French, and Cahors is its ancestral home, where it has grown for centuries. The wine was historically so deep, tannic, and powerful that Bordeaux merchants openly bought it to strengthen their own thinner reds in weak years, until Bordeaux moved to shut the practice out and protect its own name. When phylloxera and hard frosts later devastated Cahors, it was Argentina, with cuttings taken abroad, that turned Malbec into a global star. By law, a red Cahors must be at least 70% Malbec, a grape the locals still call by its old French name, Côte, Jura. East of Burgundy, in the foothills of the Alps, the small Jura region makes some of the strangest wine in France. Its signature is Vin Jaune, or yellow wine, made from the Savignon grape and aged in barrels that are deliberately never refilled as the wine evaporates. A film of yeast called the veil grows across the exposed surface, protecting it from spoiling, and giving it a nutty, tangy flavor much like a dry sherry. It must age this way for six years and three months before release, and it comes in its own unique bottle, the Squat Clavelin, which holds 62 centiliters rather than the standard 75, the only non-standard bottle size allowed under European Union law, said to represent what remains of a liter after the long aging. Savoie High in the French Alps, wrapped around ski resorts and mountain lakes, Savoie is one of France's smallest and least exported wine regions. It grows a set of obscure local grapes almost no one outside the area has heard of, crisp whites from Jaquers and reds from the peppery Mondos, grown on steep slopes at some of the highest altitudes in French viticulture. The catch with Savoie is simply that most of it never leaves. The wines are light, fresh and made for the mountains, poured into glasses beside fondue and raclette in the ski chalets, and the region drinks nearly all of its own production locally, which is exactly why so few people beyond the Alps have ever tasted them. Its vines cling to tiny pockets scattered across the mountain valleys, growing a set of native grapes found almost nowhere else on Earth. Corsica The island of Corsica sits closer to Italy than to the French mainland, and its wine has never forgotten it. For centuries it was ruled by the Italian city of Genoa, and that heritage runs right down into the vines. Its flagship red grape, known locally as Nialuccio, was long thought to be Corsican, until genetic testing revealed it to be identical to Sangiovese, the grape behind Italy's Chianti. Ringed by mountains that rise straight from the sea, Corsica is the most mountainous wine region in France, its vineyards scattered across sun-baked coastal slopes and high stony hillsides. Even its white grape, Vermentino, is known here by an Italian name, and many of its wines carry a wild, herbal scent that locals trace to the maquis. The result is a French wine region that tastes, at heart, gloriously Italian, a fitting reminder that a country's borders and its vines do not always agree. From a ranking frozen since 1855 to a grape that turned out to be Italian all along, French wine is really a collection of small worlds, each with its own soil, its own rules, and its own buried secret. Geography, history, and centuries of law decide what goes into the glass, and what it is allowed to be called. Let us know in the comments which region we should go deep on next.