The impulse that has called the Type-Wines into being was the necessity
of finding some expedient that would enable the proprietors of the less
famous growths of well-known regions to sell their wines remuneratively,
which was becoming more and more difficult. There was also a strong
desire on their part to profit by the recently established _appellations
d’origine_ for even the most lowly and inferior wines grown within these
areas, and the ambition to compete in foreign markets with the cheap
wines of countries such as Algeria and Australia, that are all of them
inevitably Type-Wines, sold as often as not under the titles of one or
other of the most famous viticultural regions of France (_e.g._, Algerian
“Chablis” and South Australian “Hermitage”). True, these descriptions
would be illegal in France and those countries which, under recent
commercial treaties, now admit yearly quotas of French wines and thereby
assure the authenticity of their appellations; but in England the
International Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, which
nominally secures respect for these same appellations in all signatory
states, seems to be a dead letter, if indeed it was not stillborn.
These Type-Wines, already familiar in France, are not easily explained
without giving a concrete and somewhat detailed example. For many decades
wines have been available in commerce which bore the names of one or
other of the great sub-divisions of the Bordelais, such as St Estèphe,
Pauillac or Margaux in the Médoc, and Graves, St Emilion and Pomerol as
representatives of the other districts entitled to be sold as “Bordeaux.”
It was notorious that these wines, which were not always genuine,
differed enormously in quality according to the standing of the firms
which selected them and the vintages to which they belonged: vintages
that were often passed over in silence because the wines in question were
a blend of two or more. Nevertheless, wines sold under these labels, that
made no claim to have been grown on any territorially defined plot of
ground within the borders of their several districts—a particular Château
or Cru—represented the cheapest authentic, or putatively authentic, kinds
of Bordeaux with which the general public was familiar. The Co-operative
Movement among French wine-growers, which had started in the Midi, a
region devoted to the production of cheap wines on a vast scale, without
much pretension to quality, where it was decidedly beneficial to the
interests of the growers and the public alike, eventually spread to
certain of the less-known districts of the Bordelais. One of the latest
recruits is the Commune of Margaux.
The Commune of Margaux, one of the two most famous in the Médoc, has for
centuries been reputed for producing some of the very finest Bordeaux
wines there are; its supreme glory being the First Growth of Château
Margaux itself. In addition, the Commune boasts four Second Growths,
four Third Growths, one Fourth Growth, about a dozen recognised superior
Bourgeois and ordinary Bourgeois Growths and something like thirty _Crus
Artisans_ and _Crus Paysans_, which represent the tail of the Bordelais
hierarchy in point of reputation. There are besides some half-a-dozen
large growths planted in _Palu_ soil (rich, alluvial clay) on the
foreshore of the Gironde and on certain low-lying islands in the stream.
Palus vineyards give a very much larger yield of appreciably coarser
wines than those planted on the gravel soil further inland, which is
geologically typical of the Médoc proper. In point of production the ten
_Crus Classés_ of Margaux yield about 650 _tonneaux_[5] of wine a year,
which is easily sold at high prices; the Superior Bourgeois, Bourgeois,
Artisan and Peasant Growths account for another 550 between them, the
best of which finds a fairly ready market in good years, but much of
which has nearly always to be sold at unsatisfactory prices; while the
Palus growths produce some 1,100, the sale of which, though prices are
relatively low, is on the whole more remunerative because the vintage is
much heavier and the cost of cultivation much less. Yet each of these
growths, high as humble, every litre of the total average yield of
20,700 hectolitres, has an identical right to the common appellation of
“Margaux.” Anyone who lives in the Commune of Margaux and has a strip of
garden in which there is room to grow a row of a dozen vines of sorts,
tended, perhaps, little and carelessly, can sell his wine as “Margaux”
with the same legality as his neighbour who may cultivate a considerable
and reputed vineyard in the most approved scientific manner.
Formerly the _Crus Bourgeois Supérieurs_ and the _Crus Bourgeois_
commanded a ready sale at prices not utterly disproportionate to those
attained by the _Crus Classés_, while the ratio between the two orders
of growths was nearly always the same, whatever the prices realised for
the First Growths, which always set the tone of the market. Nowadays
the public knows far less about wines, and a predominantly _parvenu_
generation wants to buy the best, and nothing but the best, and is
guided almost entirely by names and labels and very little by vintages
or careful tasting. Moreover there is no longer the same prejudice
against consuming comparatively new wines in this hasty age, and, as a
consequence, the laying down of wines that are slow to mature is the
exception rather than the rule. The result is that it has become so
difficult to sell some of the best and most ancient in fame of the _Crus
Bourgeois_ at a reasonable profit—to say nothing of the _Crus Artisans
et Paysans_—that vines are being grubbed up wholesale. It was to meet
this state of affairs that a Co-operative Communal Cellar was founded in
Margaux. The avowed object is to utilise all wines made in the territory
of the commune, excepting only those that sell readily on their own
names and merits, so as to produce year in and year out, irrespective
of good or bad vintages because blended from both, a uniform wine with a
flavour as typical of the best Margaux growths as the nature of a single
composite mixture may allow. It is needless to say that such a Type-Wine
“Margaux,” bearing full guarantees of territorial authenticity though it
would, must be a hollow parody of a real wine, because it is a synthesis,
a standardisation, of many, blended to the taste of the uncritical
majority of the public. Should this experiment prove commercially
successful, and the example of Margaux prevail, there would soon be an
end to all individuality, to all those finer shades of years and growths
that are the delight of the true wine-lover; and the ambition of Margaux
and its emulators would be to produce an ever-greater quantity, trading
on an ancient and no longer justifiable local renown for quality that was
only attained in the past by a deliberate and consistent sacrifice of any
idea of securing bumper vintages.
It is the rapid rise of the “_Monopoles_,” the very existence of which is
an impious challenge to the fair name of wine, that has stimulated the
wholesale vatting of these standardised regional growths.