The French are finally coming to terms with generic wines. The bottles, instead of being labelled with the name of the grower and location, have names that are either trendy (Fat Bastard or Le Freak) or else amiably meaningless, such as Chamarré, a kind of butterfly.
The labels also show the grape variety. This information was previously thought unnecessary; if you didn’t know that, say, Chablis was made from Chardonnay, or Condrieu from Viognier, you probably weren’t fit to drink it. But these wines, it’s thought, will be welcome to confused drinkers everywhere, in Britain, the US or in France itself.
But it will be a slow process. The notion of terroir is embedded in French culture, and the idea of a wine that does not come from a particular place is as odious as Danish or Australian lager, mass-produced in British industrial plants, is to a Camra enthusiast.
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