The Culture of Wine: France
As part of my podcast, there is a new series called “The Culture of Wine,” available exclusively on Patreon.com. It looks at the historical, geographical, regional, political, and metropolitan cultures in which wine is made and sold. The series moves through 17 countries: first up, France. Here’s an overview of what’s in the first episode.
When we think of wine, we think of France, of Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Champagne, of wine on the farm table, the café, or the bistro, of French grape varieties and styles of wine which have influenced producers around the world.
Part of the appeal of French wine is the sheer variety of wines made across the country: red, white, rosé, sweet, sparkling, and fortified, and you can add brandy, eau-de-vie, vermouth, and wine-based liqueurs to that list. The range of wines is thanks to the different climates, but it’s also because the historical culture of France is so fluid.
We now think of France as one fixed concept, in language, attitude, personality. Napoléon had the ambition to make every village a mini-Paris so that France could project a strong, defined identity of itself.
This centralised project took a long time to complete. Before the Second World War, fewer than half of all French people spoke French as their first language. It was only after the war that the vision of France we have now became fully formed.
Geographically and culturally, I look at France as an irregular circle shaped by outside forces. Following the circle clockwise, there’s Brittany and Normandy, apple regions, whose landscape looks like Cornwall and Devon in south-west England. The Breton language is related to both Cornish and Welsh; its French name is Petit Bretagne, in contrast to Grand Bretagne across the English Channel. Meanwhile, the Normans became rulers of England in 1066; the English monarchs didn’t speak English until the 1400s.
The other side of the country is Lille, which really ought to be part of Belgium. Further south is Alsace, which has switched between France and Germany over the centuries, place names and styles of wines more German than French. Savoie in the Alps used to be its own duchy encompassing Piemonte and Sardinia. Burgundy too was its own duchy. Provence, with its Niçois dialect, was inaccessible until artists, appreciating its rural escape from modernity, accidentally made it an irresistible tourist destination. The southern Rhône was the home of a breakaway papacy in the 1300s. Languedoc defined itself as not being French. Roussillon, under the Pyrenees, is Catalan France. By the Atlantic is Basque France. Bordeaux was the last region the English lost, back in 1453, its wine history shaped by the Atlantic, the English, and the Dutch. Loire’s wine development, too, is due to the Dutch. Which brings us back to Britanny, of which the Loire city Nantes used to be the capital.
Inland from Bordeaux in south-west France are remote, historic regions with strangely-named grape varieties. Going into central France, there is less wine made on the vast, volcanic Massif Central. These are places that often take a long time to get to, which has meant that the wine industries haven’t developed as much as more accessible regions.
The history of wine in the context of France can be summarised by Champagne. It’s a region where countless wars have been fought and where trade has been centred since Roman times. Trade brought in merchants from Paris, the south, Germany, the Low Countries, and England, making the wines popular. It’s another story, but champagne would not taste like it does now were it not for the English, trade, and war.
And then there’s Paris, its aristocracy building châteaux in the Loire whose wines are widely available in Parisian bars. Trends in Paris turned to far-away Languedoc when the railway connected the two in the 1860s, which in turn altered the production of Chablis and now non-existent regions around it. Paris has influenced French culture and wine, and is central to how we think of France: what is more French than a Parisian bistro? But trying telling that to someone from Marseille—there’s a reason French football fans are so antagonistic towards other teams.
France now has a clearly expressed identity. But the history of France is an ever-revolving cycle of different cultures—all of which can be tasted and celebrated in its many, many wines.
listen to the episode on Patreon.com
