France retains its reputation for wine

It’s still the benchmark, even though New World wines have come far

I’ve been spending a lot of time with French wine recently — some with modern French wine, as I’ve been to France four times in the past few months, and some with historical wine, as I’ve been completing a history of French wine (which will be out in October).

France has a special place in the world of wine, but it’s changed over time.

When I was first introduced to wine in the 1960s, French wine was simply thought of as the best in the world.

Everything else was secondrate, if that, and wine from places like New Zealand, South Africa and Canada was thought to be, on the whole, undrinkable. (It was.)

You can see how things have changed.

There might still be some residual sense that wines from Ontario are not very good, despite the many excellent wines the province produces.

But I don’t think any fair-minded person would argue that wine producers here and elsewhere in the New World aren’t doing a very good job, on the whole.

But France is still the benchmark for many wines, and I still hear winemakers say they try to make their wines in a Burgundian style, whether they’re Pinot Noirs or Chardonnays.

Burgundy is the region that’s most highly regarded, and there are wineries in Ontario that consciously model themselves on Burgundy, either in the names they adopt for their vineyards or, in one case, in the distinctive Burgundian tiles they’ve used on the roof of the winery.

Burgundy was a bit of a latecomer as a prestigious region in France. It was Bordeaux that made all the noise in the Middle Ages.

But by the 1700s there were three famous regions: Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne.

We really don’t know what sort of wines they made because, until the late 1800s, French vineyards were planted in many varieties, often on a random basis.

Red Burgundy was often Pinot Noir plus another black and a white variety, while Bordeaux’s vineyards were a riot of varieties.

All the grapes were picked at once, with the result that green, ripe, and overripe grapes went into the vat.

All wines were what are called “field blends” — not the blends carefully made by winemakers (87 per cent of that variety, 12 per cent of that and one per cent of another), but a blend of varieties as they existed in the vineyard.

They would have been awful to our taste, but over time wine became embedded in French culture, and as French culture was thought to be superior, wine went along for the ride.

By the late 1700s, there was little doubt in the minds of Europeans in Europe and the wider world that French wine was the best.

And it’s clear that that belief is dying very slowly.