Wine Portfolio : Rhone Valley

I now would like to discuss technical details relating to the appellation controlée system in the Southern Rhone. The Appellation Controlée system throughout France actually started in the Southern Rhone in the 1930's, in Chateauneuf du Pape specifically, as a means of establishing quality control and therefore reputation and prices.

In the Southern Rhone there are five levels of appellation controlée. From the highest level to the lowest they are:

Appellation Village Controlée: such as, "Appellation Châteauneuf du Pape Controlée"
Appellation C&ocric;tes du Rh&ocric;ne Villages Controlée: with Village name allowed on the label
Appellation C&ocric;tes du Rh&ocric;ne Villages Controlée: but Village name not allowed on the label
Appellation C&ocric;tes du Rh&ocric;ne Controlée
Vin de Pays: although technically these wines are not Appellation Controlée wines, they have certain controls such as production alllowed per hectare

Then there are wines the French call "Table Wine," which are wines without any controls in terms of grapes, production, and so on, at all. Rot-gut wine - when I first lived there, 1-liter "Star Bottle" wine because of the stars embossed around the neck of the 1-liter bottles @ 1 or 2 francs a bottle. The quality is better now, like jug wine in the US - a headache in every glass.

The French growers hate the term "Table Wine," one of the terms required on the labels of many appellation wines imported into the United States. (A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms - BATF - requirement for appellations, such as Gigondas, assuming that consumers might not recognize it as wine; Chateauneuf du Pape and Cotes du Rhone, for example, are accepted without the requirement that the label stipulates that the liquid is wine.) Our growers more or less will reluctantly put "Red Wine" or "White Wine" on a label, which are also acceptable terms. But if they have Red, White, and Rose wines, that requires them to print three different labels rather than one label with the term "Table Wine." To a frugal French farmer, that is additional cost.