Are appellations losing their allure?

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the French wine appellations system, a model since imitated across the wine world. By regulating where and how a wine is produced, it set out to prevent fraud while guaranteeing quality, and in doing so became one of the most significant value creators in modern history. Vineyards a few kilometres outside a given appellation look on with envy at their more illustrious neighbours.

Pomerol—the smallest of Bordeaux’s major fine wine regions, renowned for its Merlot-based wines—is among the most sought-after of all. To put its name on a label is a guarantee of premium price and the adulation of others.

Like most exclusive clubs, though, membership comes with non-negotiable obligations. Inspectors with clipboards assess every potential breach. Despite its noble intentions, the system is largely impervious to change, and with the wine world in flux, it can prove a straitjacket that does more harm than good.

For Château Lafleur, which announced in August 2025 that its wines would be marketed as ‘Vin de France’ rather than ‘Pomerol’, the decision was grounded in challenges that have become impossible to ignore. The estate had played well within the rules, but climate change has changed the calculation. “It’s becoming crazier every year,” says Omri Ram, cellar master at Lafleur. “The climate is pushing us here in Bordeaux towards something that reminds us more of Napa.”

The constraints on vineyard management are many. Shading isn’t permitted. Nor is mulching—the practice of depositing compost, leaves, or straw to improve soil health. Most fundamentally, irrigation is forbidden in any form—“one of the hot subjects of last year”, Omri says, without a hint of irony.

The rules around the vines themselves are equally rigid. Planting density has a minimum that, in hot and dry years, the team finds too high. Yield ceilings made historical sense, but today’s sun and heat demand higher yields to keep the wines balanced. “We actually need to have higher yields to make sure the wines are still balanced and are not marmalade or equivalent,” Omri says.

What were once nuisances now read as threats. “All of these are becoming not just limiting, but dangerous if you want to continue making the wines that we’ve made for centuries, while everything around us is changing at an exponential speed,” he says. “You can’t expect to do the same things your grandfather did while the climate is totally not the same and get the same results.” Even so, the move is a personal one. “It’s not a crusade,” he adds. “We took our own decision, which is 100% based on viticulture pragmatics—there was no fight or war.”

The response was swift and overwhelmingly positive. “We had to drop our phones for three days because we were still harvesting!” Omri says. The first reactions came from producers in Australia, South Africa, and California. “They were like—‘what took you so long?’” he adds. He cites Dagueneau in the Loire and Soldera in Italy – the latter famously left the Brunello appellation—as the highest-profile precedents in their respective countries. “We’re definitely not the first and won’t be the last,” he says.

This is not liberty for liberty’s sake. The Guinaudeau family own the estate and farm it themselves, a rarity in Bordeaux, where ownership, management, and farming are usually separated. “For us, it’s one package,” Omri says. “We are very strict.”

For Omri, the episode reveals a paradox in how the system works. “Many appellations have a lot of regulation on lots of things, and then, funnily enough, there’s zero regulation on a bunch of other things that would be way worse,” he says. Soil amendments, vineyard sprays, and cellar additions during winemaking and ageing are often left untouched by appellation rules. Where irrigation is permitted by special decree, there is little guidance on how to do it or which water sources to use.