The rest is noise

In April 2021, Asda announced a major overhaul of its wine aisles. Reflecting a broader shift in how people choose a bottle, the supermarket moved away from organising its aisles by country or region in favour of grouping products by grape variety. Such a change in how people understand wine is not just a British phenomenon. It’s a global one. Even in France—the historic homeland of fine wine, a country defined by countless, often unpronounceable villages and single-vineyards—one in four drinkers now chooses a bottle primarily based on whether it is a Cab, a Merlot, or a Sauvignon Blanc.

At first glance, this trend can feel paradoxical. It runs counter to much of what wine lovers tend to hold up as wine’s highest ideals. Buzzwords like terroir, authenticity, and sense of place lose some of their centrality when grape varieties take centre stage. In reality, though, it reflects broader shifts in the global wine trade that have been unfolding for decades: changes that have fundamentally reshaped our relationship with wine, influencing what we expect from a bottle, what we are drawn to and, in turn, how wine is made and how it’s being presented to us.

In the beginning the French created Terroir

France’s appellation system was established by the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO) in 1935. For all the romance that wine lovers like to attach to it, the system was designed more for commercial protection than for any deep-rooted attachment to the land, its primary aim being to safeguard the geographical origin of wine as an added economic value. Still, the fact remains that the sense of terroir, rather than individual grape varieties, sat firmly at the heart of the model. To keep that focus intact, naming the grape on an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) label was often restricted or outright forbidden (Alsace being the notable exception, with its monovarietal Riesling and Pinot Gris).

With its terroir-driven AOC system in place, France reigned as the epicentre of fine wine for decades, offering the de facto template for any wine region seeking to compete at the highest level. Indeed, while other European countries did boast some historical forms of protected regions, most modern geographical indication systems were introduced after the French model. In Italy, for instance, the system took shape in the 1960s; in Portugal in the 1980s; and in Spain as late as the early 1990s.

In comes the New World

In 1976, British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organised a blind tasting that would seriously disrupt the established order. He pitted the finest white Burgundies and red Bordeaux against first class California bottles, at the time still widely dismissed by the wine establishment. To the surprise of the French judges and much of the wider wine world, the American bottles took top honours in both categories. 

The outcome of what became known as the Judgement of Paris (1976) did more than simply demonstrate that world-class wine could be produced outside traditional French regions: it also helped normalise wines labelled prominently by grape variety rather than by place of origin. The winning Californian white (Chateau Montelena), for instance, was clearly identified as a Chardonnay, while the winning red (Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars) as a Cabernet Sauvignon. The competing French wines, by contrast, were (mostly) made from the same grapes, but their labels only displayed the appellation or château name, such as Puligny-Montrachet or Château Montrose.

The Judgement of Paris was the first sign of a vinous world moving in a different direction, one where grape variety started to sit alongside (in fact increasingly above) specific place of origin. The region may still carry weight, but for most drinkers it now often needs to be paired with a grape variety to properly anchor what’s in the glass, like Australian Shiraz, or Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc.

As people became more familiar with grape varieties than with complex appellation names, commercial pressure gradually forced French regions to adapt. What had once been a distinctive feature of Alsace wines began to spread nationwide, with more and more French appellations integrating grape variety mentions on labels.

Vive Vin de France

The clearest sign of this transformation came in 2009, when the old Vin de Table (Table Wine) category—reserved for wines that did not meet the strict criteria of France’s appellation system—was replaced by Vin de France (Wine of France, or VdF). What might appear like a simple change of wording conceals a significant cultural and commercial shift. The old “table” designation reflected a very traditional French understanding of everyday wine: unpretentious, rustic, affordable, and fundamentally tied to the “table”, i.e. the meal. These bottles could not state either grape variety, vintage, or geographical origin on the label. They were stripped back to the most essential promise of all: they were, simply, wine.