The Sober Revolution

Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne. The names of these and other French wine regions bring to mind time-honored agricultural and vinicultural practices. Yet the link between wine and place, in French known as terroir, was not a given in French winemaking In The Sober Revolution, Joseph Bohling inverts our understanding of the history of the French wine industry by revealing a far more modern connection, one with profound ties to such issues as Algerian independence, alcoholism,… (more)

Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne. The names of these and other French wine regions bring to mind time-honored agricultural and vinicultural practices. Yet the link between wine and place, in French known as terroir, was not a given in French winemaking In The Sober Revolution, Joseph Bohling inverts our understanding of the history of the French wine industry by revealing a far more modern connection, one with profound ties to such issues as Algerian independence, alcoholism, drunk driving, regional tourism, and integration into the European Economic Community.

In the 1930s, cheap, industrial wines from the Languedoc region of southern France and from French Algeria dominated French markets. Artisanal wine producers, worried about the impact of these inferior products on the reputation of their wines and their economic viability, created a system of regional appellation labeling to reform the industry in their favor by limiting supplies and linking quality to place. At the same time, the loss of Algeria, once the world’s largest producer of wine grapes, forced the industry to rethink the production of wine. Bohling uncovers how, over the next decades, appellation producers were joined by technocrats, public health activists, tourism boosters, and other dynamic interests that blamed cheap industrial wine for a host of issues that were hindering their efforts to modernize France, including the health hazards of France’s excessive wine consumption. Today, scholars and food activists often look to the appellation system as a counterweight to globalization and the industrial food system. But, as The Sober Revolution shows, France’s luxury wine producers were themselves savvy modernizers.