Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [50]
This different aesthetic—Europe’s subtle-and-understated to the New World’s bold-and-splashy—emerges not just in wine and food but wherever taste is expressed. Europe gave us classical music; America rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues. European fashion expresses subtlety and refinement; we broadcast our attitudes and feelings on T-shirts and caps. Europe’s architecture is represented by stone castles and stately manor houses; the New World’s by imposing skyscrapers in steel and glass. Sure, there’s plenty of cross-pollination in this globally oriented world, but these iconic examples of Old World versus New World cultural styles come from tradition and taste.
And so it is with the wine styles. Europe’s classic wines are literally bottled tradition, sometimes many centuries in the making. They respect the trial-and-error experience of countless generations to develop the combination of grapes, vineyard farming practices, and winemaking methods to yield a particular wine style that will make the most (in terms of wine quality) of each plot of land or vineyard region. This explains a lot about the European convention for using not grape varietal but rather regional wine names—a district (Champagne), a town (Margaux), a vineyard area (Sancerre), or even a single estate (Château Latour)—the plot of land where the grapes were grown rather than the grapes themselves. We are familiar with so many European regional names—Chianti, Chablis, Beaujolais—but it’s hard to imagine a wine called just “Napa.”
So linked are these regional names to the quality reputation of Old World wines that, beginning in the 1930s in France, the major Old World countries wrote into law minimum standards for each important growing area. The purpose was to stop the use of famous regional wine names by vintners who didn’t uphold the style and quality tradition of the region in question. The laws are known as appellation laws, because “appellation” means a place-name that has a wine style associated with it. There are appellations for other things—Roquefort cheese from France, which is legally defined; Walla Walla onions from the eponymous town in Washington State; and prosciutto di Parma, the famous Italian ham from Parma, Italy, also legally defined, are examples. With wine, the idea is to ensure that what gets bottled under any particular wine appellation upholds the authentic style of that appellation. (Both the Italians, with Chianti, and the Portuguese, with Port, lay claim to being first with the idea of wine appellations. But the French model is the modern standard for appellation laws.)
Controlling Authenticity of Old World Wine Styles
Following are the names of the appellation laws for the top-quality regions in each major Old World wine country. The laws control the authenticity of the wine style associated with each appellation by specifying the following things:
Permitted grapes—for example, you can’t use Cabernet Sauvignon grapes to make Champagne
Boundaries of the growing area; to be named to an appellation, the grapes must come from within its boundaries
Maximum vineyard yield (which is a form of quality control, as we noted in Chapter 3)
Minimum alcohol content—helps to ensure the grapes reach a minimum level of ripeness before they are picked
Viticulture—controls some vineyard practices like irrigation
Vinification—this usually controls minimum aging requirements, among other things
Depending on the country, the following words are what you will see on the label of any Old World wine made according to their appellation law’s standards.
The French law, on which all the others were modeled, is called Appellation d’Origine Controlée (AOC), which translates as “controlled appellation of origin.” It is sometimes shortened to Appellation