Stealing Champagne

What’s In a Name? Apparently Everything

In the world of wine we tend to believe that the place or vineyard that the wine comes from has an influence on quality.  In other words certain areas become more famous than others as their quality shows through. The most famous example in the United States is the Napa Valley; the most famous example in Washington State is the Walla Walla Valley.

In order to protect these place names from fraud and dilution of quality Europeans passed laws protecting these names with the so called appellation system (appeller is the French verb for ‘to call’, as in “that area is called Washington”). Here in the States we are creating more and more American Viticultural Areas (AVA’s) all the time. Currently in Grant County we have one AVA – the Wahluke Slope – and one in progress around Quincy to be called ‘Ancient Lakes of the Columbia Valley’. There will be at least one more AVA in Grant County before all is said and done, the Royal Slope.

For the nonce the AVA system differs from European appellations in that there are no quality laws. In European appellations grapes can only be planted in designated areas, grapes must reach certain ripeness levels, and so forth. American AVA’s may evolve in that direction one day but for the moment the only point of an AVA is to state that the grapes come from the designated region.

Ironically we are the only country in the world that does not respect the European appellation system. The most famous example is Champagne. Everywhere else in the world sparkling wines have various names but only sparkling wines made in the Champagne region of France should be called Champagne. The French sue the U.S. on a regular basis and were unsuccessful until this last year. A bit of a compromise was reached in that future producers of American sparkling wine will not be able to call their wines Champagne. Wineries already producing ‘American Champagne’ will be able to continue calling their wine Champagne. I am sure the French will continue to agitate for removal of the term Champagne from American wines in the future.

Here in the States we were not satisfied with just stealing Champagne. The French Burgundy region has one winery that produces the world’s most expensive Pinot Noir (Domaine Romanée Conti). The French region of Chablis produces some of the world’s finest Chardonnays. And is Sauterne really an inexpensive white wine for alcoholics?  Actually some of the world’s finest desert wines come from the Sauternais region of Bordeaux and are called Sauternes. For a period of time a winery in Ellensburg was calling their Chenin Blanc Vouvray after the famous Loire Valley appellation. They did so because for some reason there was a time when Seattle drank more Vouvray than any other city in the U.S.

Nor do we limit ourselves to the French.  In the early days Riesling in Washington was called Johannisberg Riesling, taken from the very famous Schloss Johannisberg winery in Germany.  And the last example I can think of is Tokay which came from the very, very famous late harvest wines of the Tokaji region of Hungary (spelled Tokay in English).

Many of these terms are slowly being removed as the Europeans sue us in the World Trade Organization for using these names. Really the only one left that one sees regularly is Champagne. We make a sparkling wine here at White Heron and even I will occasionally slip and call it Champagne. We actually named it Felicitas after the Roman goddess of happiness.