TYPE-WINES
The impulse that has called the Type-Wines into being was the necessity of finding some expedient that would enable the proprietors of the less famous growths of well-known regions to sell their wines remuneratively, which was becoming more and more difficult. There was also a strong desire on their part to profit by the recently established appellations d’origine for even the most lowly and inferior wines grown within these areas, and the ambition to compete in foreign markets with the cheap wines of countries such as Algeria and Australia, that are all of them inevitably Type-Wines, sold as often as not under the titles of one or other of the most famous viticultural regions of France (e.g., Algerian “Chablis” and South Australian “Hermitage”). True, these descriptions would be illegal in France and those countries which, under recent commercial treaties, now admit yearly quotas of French wines and thereby assure the authenticity of their appellations; but in England the International Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, which nominally secures respect for these same appellations in all signatory states, seems to be a dead letter, if indeed it was not stillborn.
These Type-Wines, already familiar in France, are not easily explained without giving a concrete and somewhat detailed example. For many decades wines have been available in commerce which bore the names of one or other of the great sub-divisions of the Bordelais, such as St Estèphe, Pauillac or Margaux in the Médoc, and Graves, St Emilion and Pomerol as representatives of the other districts entitled to be sold as “Bordeaux.” It was notorious that these wines, which were not always genuine, differed enormously in quality according to the standing of the firms which selected them and the vintages to which they belonged: vintages that were often passed over in silence because the wines in question were a blend of two or more. Nevertheless, wines sold under these labels, that made no claim to have been grown on any territorially defined plot of ground within the borders of their several districts—a particular Château or Cru—represented the cheapest authentic, or putatively authentic, kinds of Bordeaux with which the general public was familiar. The Co-operative Movement among French wine-growers, which had started in the Midi, a region devoted to the production of cheap wines on a vast scale, without much pretension to quality, where it was decidedly beneficial to the interests of the growers and the public alike, eventually spread to certain of the less-known districts of the Bordelais. One of the latest recruits is the Commune of Margaux.
The Commune of Margaux, one of the two most famous in the Médoc, has for centuries been reputed for producing some of the very finest Bordeaux wines there are; its supreme glory being the First Growth of Château Margaux itself. In addition, the Commune boasts four Second Growths, four Third Growths, one Fourth Growth, about a dozen recognised superior Bourgeois and ordinary Bourgeois Growths and something like thirty Crus Artisans and Crus Paysans, which represent the tail of the Bordelais hierarchy in point of reputation. There are besides some half-a-dozen large growths planted in Palu soil (rich, alluvial clay) on the foreshore of the Gironde and on certain low-lying islands in the stream. Palus vineyards give a very much larger yield of appreciably coarser wines than those planted on the gravel soil further inland, which is geologically typical of the Médoc proper. In point of production the ten Crus Classés of Margaux yield about 650 tonneaux[5] of wine a year, which is easily sold at high prices; the Superior Bourgeois, Bourgeois, Artisan and Peasant Growths account for another 550 between them, the best of which finds a fairly ready market in good years, but much of which has nearly always to be sold at unsatisfactory prices; while the Palus growths produce some 1,100, the sale of which, though prices are relatively low, is on the whole more remunerative because the vintage is much heavier and the cost of cultivation much less. Yet each of these growths, high as humble, every litre of the total average yield of 20,700 hectolitres, has an identical right to the common appellation of “Margaux.” Anyone who lives in the Commune of Margaux and has a strip of garden in which there is room to grow a row of a dozen vines of sorts, tended, perhaps, little and carelessly, can sell his wine as “Margaux” with the same legality as his neighbour who may cultivate a considerable and reputed vineyard in the most approved scientific manner.
Formerly the Crus Bourgeois Supérieurs and the Crus Bourgeois commanded a ready sale at prices not utterly disproportionate to those attained by the Crus Classés, while the ratio between the two orders of growths was nearly always the same, whatever the prices realised for the First Growths, which always set the tone of the market. Nowadays the public knows far less about wines, and a predominantly parvenu generation wants to buy the best, and nothing but the best, and is guided almost entirely by names and labels and very little by vintages or careful tasting. Moreover there is no longer the same prejudice against consuming comparatively new wines in this hasty age, and, as a consequence, the laying down of wines that are slow to mature is the exception rather than the rule. The result is that it has become so difficult to sell some of the best and most ancient in fame of the Crus Bourgeois at a reasonable profit—to say nothing of the Crus Artisans et Paysans—that vines are being grubbed up wholesale. It was to meet this state of affairs that a Co-operative Communal Cellar was founded in Margaux. The avowed object is to utilise all wines made in the territory of the commune, excepting only those that sell readily on their own names and merits, so as to produce year in and year out, irrespective of good or bad vintages because blended from both, a uniform wine with a flavour as typical of the best Margaux growths as the nature of a single composite mixture may allow. It is needless to say that such a Type-Wine “Margaux,” bearing full guarantees of territorial authenticity though it would, must be a hollow parody of a real wine, because it is a synthesis, a standardisation, of many, blended to the taste of the uncritical majority of the public. Should this experiment prove commercially successful, and the example of Margaux prevail, there would soon be an end to all individuality, to all those finer shades of years and growths that are the delight of the true wine-lover; and the ambition of Margaux and its emulators would be to produce an ever-greater quantity, trading on an ancient and no longer justifiable local renown for quality that was only attained in the past by a deliberate and consistent sacrifice of any idea of securing bumper vintages.
It is the rapid rise of the “Monopoles,” the very existence of which is an impious challenge to the fair name of wine, that has stimulated the wholesale vatting of these standardised regional growths.