Wine appellation tells buyers what to expect

Everyone, and every wine, has to be from somewhere.

Have you heard the one about the Minnesota farmer? One day, he sees a car coming up the lane. It's a land surveyor, and he's got news. "We've redrawn the state line 5 miles to the north," the surveyor says. "Because of that, your farm is no longer in Minnesota -- it's now in Iowa." Relieved, the farmer puts his hand over his heart, and says, "Thank God -- at my age I don't think I could have made it through another Minnesota winter."

Hey, you're a great crowd.

A state has to begin and end somewhere -- how else would we know which governor to blame? The wine world has similar delineations that define areas known as appellations. Simply put, an appellation is a place -- a region, small or large, where grapes are grown to make wine. In drastically varying degrees, appellations have rules about grape-growing, winemaking and the information allowed on labels, among other things.

There are dozens of appellations in the French region of Bordeaux alone -- places such as Medoc, Pomerol, Graves and Sauternes. Appellations can be like Russian nesting dolls -- one inside another, inside another -- and like Alaska and Hawaii, separated but connected. In France and other parts of the Old World, appellation rules not only regulate wineries, sometimes with granular specificity -- they also protect them.

The classic example is Champagne, which like Kleenex, Frisbee and Velcro often gets used generically. For a sparkling wine to carry "Champagne" on its label it must be from that region -- that appellation -- and adhere to the rules of the appellation. Insert other European appellations at random (Chianti, Cava, Cote-Rotie), and you have a similar issue: If a wine is not from there, and wasn't made according to local rules, it can't use the name. However, a trade agreement restricting the labeling included an exception for wineries that were already marketing their products as champagne, as long as the appellation of origin is listed (Korbel's California Champagne, for instance).

To get into the nitty gritty of even one appellation would be tough to do here, so instead let's just call this our intro to appellations and move on to why there are appellations in the first place. The laws of an appellation shape the final product -- the wine -- but the single most important part of all of this is geography.

The act of mapping, naming and protecting a place stems from the French concept of terroir, which wine people rely on to explain the uniqueness of wines. While the word terroir doesn't translate directly to English, it is related to terrain, so naturally it refers to the soil. But it's also about climate, weather patterns, vineyard elevation, aspect and slope, and other factors of nature.

Some might say that it even includes farming techniques and winemaking philosophy. They might say that terroir refers to everything about a place, including its traditions. Let's not get into a debate about that; let's just agree that terroir refers to the qualities of a place, an appellation or perhaps an area even smaller (say, a section of a vineyard), and that it affects the wine produced there.

The takeaway is, an appellation is a place and terroir is what that place has to offer the grapes grown there. Old World winemakers identify so much with places that many of their wines are named for where the grapes were grown rather than the grapes themselves. It's not a chardonnay -- it's a Burgundy or a Pouilly-Fuisse. (But it's a chardonnay.)

You've seen the initials, or the spelled-out words, of various appellation systems on bottles. In France it's AOC (Appellation d'Origine Controlee), and in Italy it's DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) or DOCG (Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita), which guarantees an even higher quality of wine. Trento DOC, Barolo DOCG. Other countries have their own acronyms. The United States uses AVA (American Viticultural Area), which is kinda-sorta the equivalent except that it doesn't do much more than define a geographical area. The reams of European rules are nowhere to be seen in California, Oregon, Washington or anywhere else in the United States.

It's simple here. A label can carry the name of a place as long as a certain percentage of the grapes used to make the wine were grown in that place. The wine can be labeled a varietal ("chardonnay") as long as it contains a certain percentage of that grape variety. Other than that, American winemakers are free to grow what they like where and how they want, and experiment with winemaking techniques.

In Monterey County, Calif., one of the appellations is Arroyo Seco. If Monterey were in Europe, we would call a wine from there either a "Monterey" or an "Arroyo Seco," as in, "Care for a glass of Arroyo Seco?" Instead we say, "Care for a glass of chardonnay? It's from Arroyo Seco in Monterey." This is a simple example. Look into the appellations of Burgundy and you will see just how deep the rabbit hole can go.

The rules of appellations? That's debatable. If you had to follow them you might love them or see them as stifling limitations. But if you were a winemaker with a great piece of land, or a farmer with an aversion to harsh winters, you might be happy that someone drew those lines where they did.

Weekend on 02/04/2016

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