If a number of forward-thinking French folk get their way, the Old World may yet find a way to compete against the dominance of the global brands of the New. But they had better be quick. The idea is, as reported by John Lichfield in The Independent Review (and posted to me by one Leonard Paul Evans AO OBE), is that a group of Loire Valley producers would assemble wines made from fruit selected from ‘almost all’ the various Loire regions, which they would sell as ‘Vin du Val de la Loire’, or just ‘Loire Valley wine’. The new brand would comprise white, red and ros̩ styles and would, in theory, be able to match the volumes of significant international brands like Rosemount and Beringer. No longer would France be fighting against the New World with its hands tied behind its back, courtesy its age-old appellations system and the heritage that spawned it. Of course this demands a not insignificant flexibility on the part of the French, who would necessarily have to establish a sort of parallel system of recognition of their wines that didn’t penalise wines blended from what are presently seen as different wine regions. The new generation generic wines will need some measure of prestige through a form of classification, or else any attempt to sell them will surely fail. As you might have guessed, the opposition to such a concept is considerable. According to some, the idea is a straightforward betrayal of what the French wine industry has always stood for. Another view, which has some merit in my opinion, is that the New World will still retain an edge in efficiency and scale of production. Otherwise, somebody is going to have to create the sort of gigantic winery the Casella family is constructing near Griffith to keep as much production of Yellow Tail under one roof as possible. Somehow, I can’t see that happening in the Loire. The other issue is that those presently making good Loire Valley wine are already selling it. This scheme is likely to appeal to growers and makers presently in some difficulty, most probably because people don’t want to drink what they’re making. This scheme would perhaps work if it was initiated in a green-fields fashion, ie with a brand-new series of large and mechanised vineyards. That would guarantee some measure of quality control of fruit, and would make management so much easier than dealing with perhaps hundreds of small individual growers, each entirely unused to being a small cog in somebody else’s large wheel. The fact that influential French producers are seriously entertaining what they consider to be ‘Australian’ philosophies of wine production shows just how far the world has moved over the last decade. One day they will all wake up to the reality that it is the AOC system they treasure so dearly that has opened the door for the New World to successfully invade their export markets. My bet is that by then, for all but their wine producing elite, it will be too late.
