New world wines in France

Vintages
This is the year of harvest of the grapes used to produce wine. The vintage expresses the climatic conditions of the year, which is an important benchmark for assessing the quality of a wine. It is usually indicated on the label on the bottle, except for wines of quality standard. Note, the champagne and wine is the only authorized assembly in France (assemblage of wines from different years of production) that does not have a vintage unless the connection is made from wines from the same crop year.
Wines of the “new world”
Wines from “New World” are a group too varied and diverse to be classified in one category. The production of wine from grapes is an ancient activity in several former colonies of Western countries (Spain, France, British Empire), such as Mexico, the United States, Argentina, South Africa or Australia.

The first experiments of wine and wineries often date back more than two hundred years.  Since 50 years, enormous progress has been made in many areas and companies of the “new world”, including California, Chile and Australia. Some areas are turning to quality, low yields, greater use of the potential of each region.
Producers, traders and agents in California gave birth between 1950 and 1970 to the category of “varietal wines”.  The historian and sociologist Julien Lefour has studied the economic and cultural change, the results were published in an article.  Other specialist wine have been studied by the geographer Jean-Robert Pitte, the sociologist Marie-France Garcia-Parpet, critics and journalists English Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and David Cobbold.

These wines seemed new to French consumers, whose market has been slow to open, but are not for the rest of the world. Wines of Chile, Argentina and South Africa were consumed in many countries of the European continent for a very long time, especially in Switzerland or the United Kingdom.

Once in France, wine usually acquired its personality by the varietals used, by the land on which the vines grew, because of the microclimates in which they benefited from the expertise of winemakers who cultivated their wine and raised, and even the quality of the cellar or the oak barrels.

Between the eighteenth and the mid-twentieth century, wine was the subject of numerous frauds and trafficking.  Production volumes increased, particularly in south-eastern France, Spain, Italy and Algeria, to meet the needs of the European population.  From the 1980s, overproduction crises were increasing, threatening the stability of European wine, especially for the French.  It was badly organized, poorly suited and even outdated compared to the dynamic new winery producing countries (California, Australia, Chile), turning instead to domestic markets (California, Argentina) or rather to export (Chile and Australia).

Today, wine is drunk in new territories around the world with new consumers (Japan, China, India, Russia, Poland, Brazil, and Venezuela amongst others).  Andre Tchernia, a historian of wine describes how different it has been vinified through the ages:  “Moreover, wines today – though we rarely see this form – are mostly flavored with oak through their stay in barrels. Some growers have even soaked wood chips to accelerate the process.”
All wines of the same name are vinified together. The special characters must be broken and the differences abolished so that wine can be defined in advance. It then passes to a local identity to a collective identity, and to simplify the process, the new wine is often produced initially with a single grape variety.

This does not stop some New World wines to be of excellent quality, quality grown in recent years, and some wines in the world can truly reflect the soil, such as Syrah Australia’s Barossa Valley or Argentine malbec.  But the biggest reaction to this uniformity comes from the United States where large wineries have rediscovered the importance of terroir and winemakers blend syrah, mourvedre, grenache and zinfandel.