French wines are illegal in their native country

Winemaker Maxime Chapoutier would be arrested if he tried to sell two of his newest wines in his hometown.

“In France it is likely because of these wines and that would be a good thing,” he said. “Sometimes you have to be provocative to drive change.”

Both questions, white and red, would be illegal in France because they are made from a mixture of French and Australian base wines.

According to French and European Union law, it is forbidden to make wine that combines EU and EU fruits. In France in particular, the authorities take such things very seriously.

The French wine industry has celebrated the word “Terroir”, which applies to all the environmental factors that affect the vines that grow in the vineyard, the soil, the climate and the elevation. As a result, the wines of a certain place are held in the highest esteem.

Add in France’s strict appellation or classification system for wine regions, and the thought of mixing French and Australian wine to create a global hybrid would terrify avid French wine lovers.

However, the maxim has done just that, and thanks to one word, Brexit.

In fact, he can’t sell both EU wines, he can do it in the UK, London no longer has to follow any food and drink set by Brussels.

Maxime has created wines with UK online retailers wine with the wine society, where the red hemispheres and the white hemispheres are called. The red is made from the Syrah grape, or Shiraz as they call it in Australia, and the white is a blend of the Marsanne and Viognier varieties.

The ingredients for Australian red wine and white wine are bottled in the UK, where they are blended with wine from the Northern Rhône and Roussillon regions of France.

The maxim, which works for the famous family celebrations of Chapouter’s family, said that while respecting France’s vision, there should be room for global mixes.

“Chapouter has been making wine for more than 200 years, very terroir-driven and biodynamic,” he said. “But more and more people are turning their backs on French wines because they don’t understand the complex regulatory rules.

“We have to adapt to consumers and make wines that international blends do. Maybe the EU law will change. It’s more ecological to buy Australian wine without packaging, because you don’t have the weight of all the glass bottles.”

It is another wine company that makes wines by combining grapes from two continents. It sells Australian and Californian grapes and blends of Australian and French. Again they cannot be sold in the EU, but they can in the UK, USA, Australia and anywhere else.

Penfolds refers to these blends as “the wine of the world” and says that there is “another one that can be described for the whole world”. All it supposedly means.

Not surprisingly, some traditional growers are not in favor of this development. One person is Jas Swan, an independent grower based in Germany.

Chapouter’s and Penfouts’ two continents while taking care of quality grapes, and accordingly, the fear is that if the trend grows, they go on sale.

“I think that those kinds of wines would not have left anything, even before leaving the continent,” he explained. “Those wines would have seen only heavy additives to keep them machine-worked, clean, and easy to drink for the masses.

“Why haven’t consumers been more discerning? Consumerism is madness.”

Peter Richards, the wine industry’s highest-qualified master of wine (MW), is also sniffy. “The notion of cross-blending for wine is not inherently something I find scary,” he says. “My concern is more about creating novelty for novelty’s sake.”

His wife, Susie Barrie is also a MW.

On the contrary, wine writer Jamie Goode says the development of wine from two continents is “a really fun idea”.

“If the wines are good, and if they’re made well from good vineyards, and it’s not just a gimmick of mixing cheap bulk wines and then squeezing a huge margin on the wine. Then it’s quite interesting.

“The foundation of fine wine is the notion of land. Wines come from a place, and their flavor expresses this place in a unique way. But not all wines have to be earthy wines, and there must be a place for such wines.

“Somehow, it takes a lot of skill to blend the right wines to create something interesting that comes from such disparate places.”

Pierre Mansour, the wine society’s purchasing manager, he and his colleagues came up with the idea of ​​creating two wines with grapes from different continents as part of the company’s 150th birthday celebrations.

“We were thinking about the future of wine, and we wanted to do something innovative. In the end, we thought that innovation was stirring an area, we thought about creating wine that could be affected by climate change in a particular country.

“And from one carbon footprint to another, it is more environmentally friendly to ship from Australia to the United Kingdom. But at the same time,” Terroiriste “we wanted to say” to hold this, basically against the main French Wine’.

“So we approached Chapouter, ‘You’re crazy, thinking they can say how dare you, but they were great. They were very enthusiastic. “