Why France Matters – part un

“There is a world within French wine and the wines and wine styles of France have certainly impacted the entire wine world.”

These words greeted me from the Foreword of the French Wine Scholar Study Manual, my 270-page companion for a six-week long study of all things French wine.  Along with attending 24 hours of lectures and tastings, my classmates and I were expected to nearly memorize this manual that confronted us with seemingly countless details of France’s 14 vineyard regions.  It has been a few weeks since our final exam and at last I am ready to reflect on the experience of trying to become a French Wine Scholar.

The place to start is with “why?”  Why spend the effort to learn about French wine?  The wine world – “old” and “new” – is a huge place; I have learned that much in my study thus far.  So it seemed prudent to begin to go deeper – and what better place to start than France? After all, many of the grapes now grown all over the world originated there – among them favorites like Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Syrah.  France is the “adopted” home to still more varieties that came from elsewhere. The case can be made that France is the spiritual home of the world’s wine culture.

Beyond its influence as a source of grape varieties, France also represents the “baseline” of the world’s wine styles.  The discovery of the relationships between grape varietals and their ideal climate and soil type has been going on in France for centuries.  There has been time for trial and error.  Wine lovers may observe that certain varieties have left France and achieved even greater heights in other places (Malbec’s success in Argentina is a famous example).   But such comparisons are even more interesting when France’s wines and traditions are understood.  Only then can one fully appreciate the differences found elsewhere.

I was a music major in college and graduate school.  At the heart of every music curriculum, alongside learning to play an instrument or sing, is the study of music theory and history.  One learns scales, chords and the classic harmonic progressions.  One spends hours writing four parts in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach and learning the iconic forms used by composers of the past.  One memorizes the historical periods and how the musical style of one led to another. The expectation is not that every music student is going to be a composer or historian but that understanding the rules and conventions of western music allows a performer to appreciate and interpret the choices made by the greatest composers.  

 Of course, it’s possible for a musician to practice and develop enough technique to play or sing the notes that are on the page without any deeper study.  It’s even possible to “play by ear,” with virtually no instruction at all. Likewise, countless wine lovers enjoy their favorite new world Cabernets and Chardonnays without ever tasting the wines of Bordeaux or Burgundy from which they stemmed (pun intended).  Both the untrained music lover and wine drinker may be enjoying themselves immensely – and that’s a great thing. At the same time, there is a lifetime of learning to be had in the serious study of both music and wine.  And, for the wine world, France represents the headwaters from which so much of wine culture has flowed.