By what attributes do appellations d’origine contrôlée (AOCs) convey their imaginary? Through their “objects”—the producers, the wines, and the culture (or the terroir…)—which combine three properties:
A significant influence on the relationship consumers have with wine, shaping its aesthetics and the way it is consumed.
A form of universality, reaching the entire population—not just the wealthy or the cultural elites, nor solely the working classes, but the full socio-economic spectrum of those who love and consume wine.
A powerful representation of the culture of origin, rather than a mere pastiche of what already exists in global culture or what remains of world cultures.
Appellations assert their imaginary all the more when the country is influential—that is, capable of naturally setting itself up as a model of success and exemplarity. Is France such a country? There are two possibilities: either France is a superpower big and strong enough, like the United States, for everyone to want to emulate it, or it is a superpower large and powerful enough for everyone to accept living in cultural autarky, like China.
France is neither the United States nor China. But it was once a superpower. Until the early 20th century, everyone wanted to be like France. Its demographic weight, political and military power, and economic strength made it truly influential on the world stage. Since the end of the Second World War, things have changed. The preeminence of French culture is no more. Since the early 1950s, we have had to defend our ideas. We no longer have the luxury of watching them grow and conquer the world on their own. While the first wine AOCs were born in 1936, the most recent was created in 2025. At a time when the wine industry is experiencing an unprecedented crisis, it is legitimate to question a model born in favorable circumstances but nearly 90 years old. Before that, let us try to identify, through history, what characterizes the “French imagination,” keeping in mind the necessary combination of the three properties previously defined.
In 1950, Edith Piaf sang the famous, if somewhat tiresome (because outdated), Hymne à l’amour, recently revived by Céline Dion at the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics, more than 70 years later. In 1947, Dior’s New Look (a name given by Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow) shook the world and repositioned Paris as the global capital of fashion. And what about L’Étranger and Le Petit Prince, which have sold 10 and 200 million copies respectively? There are few literary equivalents, except for the Bible, the Quran, Mao’s Little Red Book, Don Quixote, and Harry Potter (so British, isn’t it…). At that time, France still shone and effortlessly imposed its touch.
Alain Delon et BB
In the 1960s, France produced Jacques Dutronc. Intriguing, but a lightweight compared to the Beatles. In cinema, however, it struck gold: Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon. Marilyn (Monroe) was in the ropes. Brigitte was beautifully elusive, and Delon as beautiful as he was detestable. The Nouvelle Vague had arrived, and France was once again conquering, embodied by these two actors who carried the entire French cinema, Nouvelle Vague included. More French and magical than Delon and BB, you simply cannot get.
In the 80s and 90s, electronic music came to the fore: Jean-Michel Jarre versus Daft Punk. One is named Jean-Michel, embracing a popular musical style that appeals to both housewives and audiophiles worldwide. The other lives in the US, draws on sampling and American culture, and initially targets a technophile avant-garde. And Johnny Halliday? A French superstar, completely unknown in the US. Jean-Michel conquered the world by being French: specificity, universality, and resonance. Sorry to the stars of the so-called French Touch and the French darling Daft Punk, but they became global before they became universal.
Jean-Michel Jarre
Since the advent of the web and social networks, globally known stars abound. But which one truly conveys an imaginary that is both deeply rooted and unique, making it universal? Even Beyoncé, after 22 years of solo career, has to turn to Country music to justify her musical lineage! When anything is possible, everything becomes uprooted. As pastiches of an internationalized, uniform fashion, these stars bloom as quickly as they fade.
Some will argue that Juliette Binoche (well-known in Asia, but much less in the US), Louis Garrel, Amélie Poulain, or the group Justice are international stars… Let’s call them hapax—certainly brilliant, but too fleeting to carry the French imaginary over the long term.
Perhaps, in the end, it is no longer possible to create a “lasting” imaginary. In a hyper-connected world, where speed is inversely proportional to our memory, there may no longer be room or time to sediment a fertile matrix. Yet this is precisely what French video games like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed and, more recently, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (created by a small team of 30) have managed to do. Historical settings, a focus on heritage, and Jules Verne-style storytelling: you can’t get more French than that.
What does this mean? That imagination is indeed alive, and the vectors of imaginary (what I call “objects”) are “reincarnated.” In 33 days, Clair Obscur sold more copies than the international box office of the high-profile film The Count of Monte Cristo in a year. In other words, we must use our symbols—Versailles, tête de veau, Charles de Gaulle, etc.—as long as it is done with wit and modernity. We must even favor them, as the indestructible architraves of the French imaginary. But this should not prevent us from looking outwards and listening to the world, aiming for—not just waiting for—the international market. Let’s now return to our appellations.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
In a France that is losing influence, appellations are dying because they have become caricatures of themselves, waiting for the world to come to them. They are no longer the embodiment of the French wine imaginary, but a pastiche of a globalized geographical definition. Napa Valley, Coonawarra, Chablis, or Puglia—same story. About our French appellations, “They define wines not as they are, but as they would like them to be,” as I wrote recently in my latest book Le temps d’un vin. By seeking to be both the imaginary and its own vector, the appellation has emptied itself of substance—that is, its “objects.” “It is not the appellation that defines the wines, but the wines [its objects] that define the appellation,” I also wrote in the same work. Every time the appellation tries to solve its problems internally (specifications, geomorphology, production rules, etc.), it fails when confronted with reality. It fails to convey the unique experience of a multifaceted wine imaginary. Again, as I wrote: “The appellation of origin is not the experience itself, but the artifice that allows it to persist.” An example? Champagne and Châteauneuf-du-Pape—relatively flexible appellations, with diverse yet distinctive wines… Should we abandon appellations? No! Absolutely not! The concept of appellation is brilliant, but it needs a bureaucratic revolution, both in substance and form. In substance, first, by avoiding solutions that are inherent to the problems to be solved. Multiplying DGCs (Complementary Geographical Denominations) or recognizing ever more crus, premiers crus, and grands crus will not change the nature of AOCs as they exist today—and ironically, more and more producers are now creating blended cuvées from intra-parcel selections (older vines, clonal selections, geological variations, etc.), relegating the parcel, DGC, or cru to a mere stage in winemaking! In form, then, by returning power to those who have relinquished it: the producers! No specification has ever succeeded in guaranteeing typicity or even promising a minimum quality, except perhaps marginally. The ideal appellation: a geographic boundary and grape varieties. Done. Utopia? Naivety? Journalistic polemic? Cancel culture? Anti-bureaucratic rant? Anti-system crisis? None of the above.
Vincent de Gournay
What does the history of bureaucratic revolutions teach us? Let’s quote Jean-Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), an 18th-century French economist famous for his critique of overregulation and bureaucracy in France. This quote is reported by his disciple and friend Turgot in the “Éloge de M. de Gournay,” published in 1759: “Not governing too much is one of those great principles of government that has never been known in France. The lack of laws is less harmful to public prosperity than the frenzy to regulate everything; this is, however, our great malady. Reading the code of regulations that exist in the kingdom on various matters of commerce, one could boast of knowing the most impertinent and absurd collection that has ever existed. (…) Each regulation gives authority and credit to some fool or some rogue. Inspectors are needed in every town where cloth is made, to see if the prescribed measure is observed; others are needed in the ports, to see if more than the permitted quantity is shipped. (…) Here, offices, clerks, secretaries, inspectors, and intendants are not established for the public good; rather, the public good seems to exist so that there may be offices.”
On the eve of the French Revolution, this prescient text reminds us that the main achievement of 1789 was to wipe out a vast array of regulations and standards that hindered French activity. The Revolution thus accomplished in depth what the monarchy had only ever done superficially. It is one of the rare episodes where a state managed to impose upon itself a profound and necessary overhaul.
Regulations and services accumulate over time, often without notice. It is not their existence per se, but their gradual multiplication that ultimately harms the clarity and coherence of the system. Sometimes, it becomes essential to return to fundamental principles to rethink the organization of law and its offices. The period from 1789 to 1812 illustrates this perfectly, as do the years 1945 and 1958.
Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié dit Baron Le Roy
As for wine AOCs, for more than half a century, no “clean-up” has been done. And AOCs are just one example among many. Perhaps it is time to consider such a clean-up before those three letters—A-O-C—become a pastiche like so many other French creations that have failed to evolve. Because beyond revolution, there is the conquest of future consumers. Not you, dear readers, but those who, for now, do not yet drink wine. Let us not imagine for a moment that they will willingly lose themselves in the labyrinth of a system from which they will derive no benefit, except at the cost of efforts worthy of preparing for the first-year medical school entrance exam. The concept of appellation is remarkable in many ways. It has preserved diversity. Its restrictions have often forced producers to be inventive, sometimes even brilliant. Some rules have even led to significant qualitative progress (the certification of Champagne presses in 1995, for example). Moreover, some appellations are doing very well despite the current worrying situation. But that is the tree that hides the administrative forest into which no one dares to venture.
For appellations to once again become vectors of imaginary—once reformed, we hope—they must finally be able to export themselves. In other words, we must once and for all consider the digital route as a communication channel for the future and stop being exclusively elitist or solely popular, but truly universal, freeing wine from all those dusty codes that prevent it from breathing. Château Margaux will always remain the great Château Margaux, whether served with roast lamb or a ham-and-butter sandwich! To modernize does not mean to simplify, let alone abandon, but perhaps to “liberalize” customs in order to better recognize them… Allow me one last quote, again from the same book: “Each era believes it holds the canonical taste of wine, but a dive into history transforms this unique taste into a plural one and the historical wine into an anthropological wine that no history can exhaust. Whatever the times may think, wine traverses them, absorbing values that are more or less contingent. In other words, wine is eternal not because it imposes a unique taste on different lovers, but because it suggests different tastes to a unique lover.”
Meanwhile, some vineyards are trying to move the lines. Starting with the Fronton vineyard and its fascinating endemic grape variety, Bouysselet, currently banned in white AOC wines. Some châteaux, inevitably handcuffed to their appellation, explore the field of possibilities without overturning the table. (Re)discover Clos du Clocher and Château Jean Faure, a Pomerol and a Saint-Émilion quite unlike any other. Finally, another subject—sad, but impossible to ignore: the loss of a remarkable individual, Frédéric Panaïotis, cellar master at Champagne Ruinart, for whom we wished to write a few words. Happy reading.
Olivier Borneuf