South of France comes together
Sun, good food and wines, the beach, crumbly old ruins — who doesn’t like the South of France? That’s what the organizers of a new initiative to put the wines of the region under a new banner. A blue banner that is (see right).
While this is a promising idea for reinvigorating exports as well as overcoming the jumble of appellations (AOC) in the area, I’ll be watching for defection.
The most crucial aspect to threaten this new branding, about a week old, is the fact that appellation wine producers expect a premium over vin de pays producers yet this unites them in the same category. If the AOC producers in the area see the blue banner dragging down their prices, they’ll be the first to scrap it. Stylistically the wines are not always similar since most AOC wines are blends while the vdp wines must be 100% varietal.
But the vin de pays, which outnumber the AOC wines by 4 to 1 in terms of volume, do well in exports thanks to grape names on the labels. If AOC producers in the region saw any value in adding similarity to the labels of the vdp wines, varietal names should be the first thing to add. After all, the US has yet to see its first shop specializing in the wines of the region so more information leads to better educated consumers.
tags: wine | French wine | Languedoc
On March 2nd, 2006 at 7:55 am ,Bertrand wrote:
“South of France” is a poor expression in terms of helping the foreign consumer.
More explicit localizations like “Produced in Languedoc”, “Produced in the Loire”, “Produced in the Bordeaux region”, “Produced in Provence”, could be added to the existing appellation on a given label (respectively, for example : Faugères, Savennières, Medoc, Bandol) and allow the consumer to have an image to grasp when he tries to “scan” the wine.
On March 2nd, 2006 at 5:49 pm ,tedo wrote:
Yeah, not sure where I fall in on this. Its an interesting idea I guess, and its encouraging to see the French wine industry do something, but I’m don’t know if I understand what they hope to accomplish with this in the long run.
On August 26th, 2006 at 6:18 am ,Anonymous wrote:
I’ve just been looking at some French wine region maps at http://www.francesouth.com and I was wondering where exactly the South of France wine region starts?
Is it just the Languedoc Roussillon and Provence regions or does it include the Rhone, Bordeaux or Burgundy Regions etc?
I think “South of France Wine” is a good idea for marketing purposes but it’s just a bit confusing for the buyer.