Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne. The names of these and other French
regions bring to mind time-honored winemaking practices. Yet the
link between wine and place, in French known as terroir, was not a
given. In The Sober Revolution, Joseph Bohling inverts our
understanding of French wine history by revealing a modern
connection between wine and place, one with profound ties to such
diverse and sometimes unlikely issues as alcoholism, drunk driving,
regional tourism, Algeria's independence from French rule, and
integration into the European Economic Community. In the 1930s,
cheap, mass-produced wines from the Languedoc region of southern
France and French Algeria dominated French markets. Artisanal wine
producers, worried about the impact of these "inferior" products on
the reputation of their wines, created a system of regional
appellation labeling to reform the industry in their favor by
linking quality to the place of origin. At the same time, the loss
of Algeria, once the world's largest wine exporter, forced the
industry to rethink wine production. Over several decades,
appellation producers were joined by technocrats, public health
activists, tourism boosters, and other dynamic economic actors who
blamed cheap industrial wine for hindering efforts to modernize
France. Today, scholars, food activists, and wine enthusiasts see
the appellation system as a counterweight to globalization and
industrial food. But, as The Sober Revolution reveals, French
efforts to localize wine and integrate into global markets were not
antagonistic but instead mutually dependent. The time-honored
winemaking practices that we associate with a pastoral vision of
traditional France were in fact a strategy deployed by the wine
industry to meet the challenges and opportunities of the post-1945
international economy. France's luxury wine producers were more
market savvy than we realize.
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