This fact alone has elevated some French wines to almost mythic status. Indeed, French winemaking techniques, viticulture practices, even French grape varieties have been adopted by wine regions around the world. Like French food, French wine has been (and largely remains) the benchmark against which greatness elsewhere is judged.
But France’s impact extends even further. The country has molded the very way we think about great wine. It was in France that the fundamental concept of terroir (the idea that the site determines the quality of the wine) became pervasive and flourished
Traditionally the French have been so convinced that nature and geography make the wine that there has never been a French word for winemaker. Instead, the term commonly used, vigneron, portrays man’s role as more humble. Vigneron means “grape grower.”
France’s near obsession with geography (plus numerous episodes of wine fraud, including cheap wine being passed off as more expensive wine) resulted, in the 1930s, in the development of a detailed system of regulations known as the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC). This system designated those places where, today, most of the best wines in France are made, and then went on to define how those wines must be made. Given the emphasis on place of origin, most AOC wines are logically known by their geographic names (Sancerre, Côte-Rôtie, Volnay, and so on), not by the names of the grape varieties from which they are made.
Luckily for the French, their homeland is blessed with numerous locations in which fine wines can be made. The first of these areas was established in southern France, near Montpellier. Here, at the archaeological site of Lattara on the French coast, wine was imported from Etruscan cities in central Italy. By approximately 500 b.c., the enterprising French had established a small wine culture all their own. Later, with Roman help, viticulture spread throughout what is now southern France. Indeed, Provence gets its name from the Romans, who called it nostra provincia— “our province.”
By the fifth century a.d., with the collapse of the Roman Empire, the vineyards of France increasingly fell under the control of the Catholic Church. In particular, such powerful monastic orders as the Benedictines painstakingly and systematically planted vineyard after vineyard until vines stretched north beyond Paris.
From the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, the vineyards of France flourished
