Wine appellations are like football teams. There are a few world-famous teams like Real Madrid, Manchester United and Bayern Munich, of whom even people with only a passing interest in the sport will probably have heard. Their vinous counterparts would be regions like Bordeaux, Champagne and Rioja, or specific brands like Chateau Latour and Dom Perignon.
Then there are the rest: football teams like Fulham – the one I loyally support – and Minervois – the southern French region where I am involved in producing wine. It would be an unusually keen soccer fan in Italy or Germany who would even have heard of Fulham, and the chance to buy tickets for a match between my team and Brentford, a nearby and similarly less-than-starry outfit would fill them with no excitement at all. The parallel event in the world of wine might be a comparative tasting of Carignan-based wines from Minervois and its neighbour, Corbières.
Just as there are apparently 7,000 football teams in England, there are probably a similar number of wines produced every year by the Languedoc Roussillon region’s 3,120 vignerons. Most of these producers would be as focused on the appellation in which they happen to be located as the teams would be on the particular league – England has 480 – in which they play.
The world of football is more meritocratic than wine, however, and more like a snakes-and-ladders board. In theory, a team that plays exceptionally well can climb its way from one league to another to become overall champion, as the English team Leicester City did last year, while Château Mouton Rothschild is famous for being the only Bordeaux estate to be promoted after being classified as a second growth in 1855. In board game terms, wine has a greater resemblance to Monopoly. Inheriting grand cru vines in Burgundy or a first growth chateau is very like landing on the dark blue property squares: you have an inalienable right to charge higher prices.
More humble wine producers and entire regions do sometimes manage the apparently impossible. Thanks to the efforts of people like Alvaro Palacios and Rene Barbier – the equivalent of star goal-scorers in a football team – the Catalan region of Priorat has leapt from near obscurity to the top rank of Spanish wines. Bolgheri has achieved a similar feat in Italy, thanks to its own set of star players. But these are exceptions to the rule. The chances of Minervois ever standing alongside Margaux are close to zero.
Famous wine regions would of course claim to maintain their position at the top of the pyramid because of the supremacy of their terroir, while football teams are reliant on something far more ephemeral: their players. In fact, it could be argued that money has a significant role to play in both sectors. Champions League teams can afford to pay astronomical sums to get the best players. It would be interesting to taste the wines that some of the best situated Minervois estates could produce if they had access to piles of cash as large as their counterparts in Margaux.
Until recently, European wine producers had no more way of stepping outside their regional appellation systems than a football team could step aside from its league, but today, for anyone who cares to look, the situation is more liberal. Most vignerons with Syrah vines in the Minervois region, for example, follow the logical course of labelling the wine they produce as AOP Minervois – which may work well in France and Belgium. But in most export markets the appellation will have little or no resonance for most consumers, and still less attraction as a reason to buy at a premium price. Using the less exalted Languedoc AOP might be more profitable: a slightly larger number of consumers might have heard of it as a geographical region. Alternatively, the producers could think a more laterally and opt for the less specific Vin e Pays/IGP d’Oc or the non-specific Vin de France designation.
These last options would strike the majority of Minervois producers as perverse, but they could make sound commercial sense. While there are a few successful, super-premium examples of Minervois, most of the examples on sale in France carry price tags of just four or five euros. You could buy five of these bottles for just one of Mas de Daumas Gassac, the self-styled Grand Cru of Languedoc which can ‘only’ call itself Vin de Pays de l’Hérault. The Italian wine industry was revolutionised by Tuscan producers like Antinori, Gaja and Frescobaldi who bravely opted to make wines outside their DOCs.
Truly successful football teams don’t rely on the skills of their players; they also know the value of strategy and tactics. And that’s an example a few more European wineries might do well to follow.
Robert Joseph
