When Geography Overrides Reality

How much does geography mean to you? A great deal probably when you are buying Burgundy. I assume that most Wine Spectator readers expect a wine labeled Montrachet to cost many times more than one sold simply as Bourgogne. You probably also have a reasonably keen idea of what differences to expect between a Pauillac and a St.-Emilion.

You might not be able to describe in detail the characteristics of other, more obscure French locations such as Madiran, Maury and Montlouis, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the locals in France can. And you can be more than 99 percent sure that the wine inside the bottle comes from the place cited on the label.


But what about geographical wine names in countries with more embryonic appellation systems?

What would you expect from, and pay for, wines labeled Bendigo, Robertson and Rapel, all appellations making their way toward the international wine market from Australia, South Africa and Chile respectively?

Each of these countries is developing its own answer to France’s immensely detailed and carefully regulated appellation contrôlée system. So are the myriad wine producers of Eastern Europe, following in the footsteps of their counterparts in Western Europe, each of which has now devised its own version of the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée formula.

During a recent trip to Chile I started to wonder whether this universal dash toward establishing wine place names really makes sense.

I was making my way from the capital, Santiago, to one of the best wineries with its export director, who was making me leaf through his press dossier, leaflets, history of the company and collected wine labels, as is the wont of such creatures whenever they meet a wine writer.

I couldn’t help noticing that each of the wines he sold carried a different geographical appellation and started to quiz him about where a wine of which the company is particularly proud is grown.

He looked distinctly shifty. He started to tell me it came from Rapel but, when he saw that it was labeled Maipo, switched midway through his answer to the more northerly region, explaining that half the wine came from each region, and “for legal reasons,” the inter-region blend was being sold as Rapel in the United States and Maipo in the United Kingdom.

At the winery we sat down to a thorough tasting of the range with the winemaker, who admitted somewhat sheepishly that he had instructions from the company’s high-ups to assign one of Chile’s geographical regions (from north to south of the Central Valley, Maipo, Rapel, Curicó and Maule) to every bottling. He became noticeably evasive, however, when asked to explain exactly where the fruit for each blend came from.

I wasn’t too worried about such apparent laxity as (and I brace myself for the slings and arrows as I write this) I think the most important thing for Chilean winemakers at the moment is to make the best wine possible.

But what struck me increasingly as absurd, as my week in Chile wore on, is how few Chilean wine professionals could satisfactorily answer the question, “So what are the characteristics of [wines from] the Maule/Rapel/Curicó region?” I asked virtually everyone I could and they all prevaricated magnificently. The only thing they could agree on is that each of these regions is very varied, and that possibly wines from the Central Valley vary more according to whether they come from the eastern Andean foothill side or the western Pacific side than according to latitude, as suggested by Chile’s new appellation system . Confusing, huh?

So while it’s admirable that Chile has just, with the 1995 vintage, instituted a proper system for controlling exactly where each lot of grapes come from and into which wine they go, this is all in aid of propping up a fictional–at worst–and illusory–at best–set of significant wine regions. As a philosophy student might ask, if you can’t describe it, does it exist?