How to Read a Wine Bottle: The Politics of French Wine Labels

By Eric Van Vleet

Most people’s first instinct upon grasping an unopened bottle of French wine is not to read its labels. While wine is above all a sensual experience, there is no reason it cannot be an intellectual if not political one as well. Labels help you learn about the regions and the people who produced it; this information will only help you to enjoy the wine more. French wine labels provide a staggering amount of information in such a small amount of space.

This abundance of information comes in no small part because the French wine industry is thoroughly regulated. The government has tried to protect its winegrowers and winemakers from increasing global competition. Wine labelling then is a political act as well that attempts to promote French wine against outside competition. These regulations and labels are anything but simple. They create a frequently changing vocabulary all their own. Decoding them is not just a matter of translation, but is fairly complicated for even French native speakers to understand. Being fascinated by wine and a general nerd about food and drink, I will try to guide you through the fascinating labyrinth of French wine labelling. After finishing this guide you can choose not only a wine that is delicious, but also one that fits your political beliefs as well.

First, don’t even go right for the main label. The foil capsule

covering the cork is a rich source of data. For all French wine, there will be two numbers. From left to right the first number will indicate in which département (an federal administrative unit much like an American state) the wine was produced. Each département has a number. Lot’s, for example, is 46. Therefore you already have some geographic information.

The next number probably is far less interesting as it is the number the government has given to that winery. Yet the presence or absence of the word recoltant between these numbers is telling. Having the word recoltant (harvester), actually a shortened version of Propriétaire-récoltant (harvester-owner), means that the grapes were harvested, vinified and bottled all on site. Therefore there is not a mixture of grapes from many different places, or a combination of wine from different stages, but instead from a single vineyard that completed all viticultural and vinicultural practices themselves. If you want to experience terroir, the glorious fusion of local soils and climates combined with thousands of years of human wine-making knowledge and practices that produces something that is irreproducible elsewhere, choosing a recoltant wine is a good first step in exploring the unique terroirs of France.

On the neck of the bottle also printed on this foil, is another telling label, that of the vignerons indépendant, which is a label that attempts to maintain independent winegrowers and winemakers in an age when many French wineries are owned by multinational corporations or financial speculators. This organization of independent winemakers also tries to maintain the diversity of different winemakers and their techniques in France. The difference between the recoltant and a vigneron indépendant is then an allegiance to a larger political cause as well as difficult to codify values like the pledge to “respect one’s terroir”, “respect for tradition” as well as commitments to hold tastings and to “take pleasure in presenting the fruit of one’s labor and one’s culture” (a fascinating French word for both the English world culture and also for agricultural techniques). By buying such wines you can help to support these values, while this label does not automatically increase the price of these wines.

Moving to the main label itself on the center of the bottle, you’ll see that often French wine labelling is increasingly moving away from the fancy fonts and pictures of luxurious chateaus. Whether a marketing ploy, an attempt to make their wine look more hip or to be eye-catching in large shops littered with bottles adorned by sketches of chateaus, the label itself can show some of the vineyard’s sensibilities. One of the best vineyards in the Cahors AOC, Clos Troteligotte, has a wine called K-pot with the catchphrase Sans Protection, which means roughly in English “without the use of a condom/protection”, because it is a red wine made with “natural” yeast and without sulfites. They are discarding all the winemaker’s tricks of “protection” of a uniform product which usually relies on sulfites and industrial yeasts. Needless to say, with such a sense of humor they do not put grand chateaus on their bottles.

While American wine labels often tout the grape varietal or varietals used in the wine, the French instead often label wine by different types of protected geographic labels. Champagne is not merely a sparkling wine made with Champagne techniques. Instead it has that title because it comes from the Champagne region of France and adheres to many, many rules that govern the entire process, including a set number of grape varietals that one can grow. Therefore by knowing about the AOC you will know about the grape varietals if they are not actually listed on the bottle. Only if vineyards follow these well-defined rules can they gain the lucrative appellation d'origine contrôlée (designation of controlled origin), the AOC label for their region. By 2005, there were 472 AOC wines in France, which are geographically delimited. While there are many large AOCs that very widely in quality (even the not massive Cahors AOC area has roughly 180 different wineries, each making many different wines), the AOC is often a mark of quality.

It is the highest rank a region can achieve. While not a foolproof way of selecting a wine, the AOC label is a safe bet. If you can combine it with a recoltant and/or vignerons indépendant label, then it’s even better. Many of the labels discussed here are not mutually exclusive.

Below AOC, there is the indication géographique protégée (protected geographical désignation), (IGP) which often is not as strict as an AOC, but can produce wonderfully drinkable wines like the whites and rosés produced within the Côtes du Lot IGP. As the French government modified its classifications to be in accordance with European Union-wide rules, the IGP classification replaced the vin de pays (regional wine) labelling system in France. These IGP wines are definitely worth checking out if one is burdened by too many choices in the wine shop.

Finally, there is merely vin de France (French wine) which does not have to abide by any of the strict AOC or less strict IGP criteria and is merely wine produced in France. The main label cannot indicate any other geographical information, even though clearly it was produced in some specific locale. Therefore this vin de France can be used for wine grown outside any AOC or IGP geographic area or even from wine within these areas but for people who do not want to abide by the grape varietals or practices associated with AOC or IGPs. For these reasons, this is the category that has the widest variation. You can find fascinating wine made by rebels who buck trends and produce a vin de France that is much better than many of the AOC producers, just as you can find boring industrial wine that is cheap for a reason and sold under this label. I would suggest that you should do some research before buying a more expensive wine labelled vin de France as it is so much less defined than an AOC or even an IGP.

A growing trend in French wine is organic production (vin biologique/vin bio). French organic standards also carry the European organic label (AB). Winemaking and winegrowing includes a surprising number of herbicides and pesticides, so organic wine is well worth considering. The Nature and Progress label (Nature et Progrès) is even stricter in some ways than the organic label. This wine contains less sulfites, often uses ‘wild’ yeasts and the picking of the grapes is often done by hand (vendange à la main), which has long been a reason for the community to join together and party after the work was done, but has grown increasingly rare amidst a highly mechanized wine industry. In select cases vineyards will not have the Nature and Progess label but instead have a vendange à la main (harvested by hand) label.

Finally there is even an incipient certification scheme for biodynamic wine (Biodyvin), a system of viticultural that conceptualizes the farm as linked not only to its surroundings but as well as to happenings in the universe. It is a kooky and engrossing concept, and one that we will cover in a later post. This Biodyvin label for these biodynamic wines is uncommon but the popularity of these wines is justifiably growing as they are often incredibly unique and in some cases have the vast complexity of a good gueuze or lambic beer.

Even with all of these labels, and I am surely still missing some, but must stop somewhere... here’s the takeaway...You can see how the different wine labels are trying to achieve different things. The recoltant and vignerons indépendant labels are trying to protect the amazing combined abilities of viniculture and viticulture in one place. The AOC and IGP labels are trying to create and defend a regional character for wines based on a codified practices and grape varietals, while the label Vin de France treats French wine as something of a singularly wonderful assemblage. While these labels are more concerned with political-economy, organic, Nature and Progress and Biodyvin labels to varying degrees are a critique of the negative environmental effects of winegrowing and winemaking. You can mix and match labels. A single wine might carry nearly all these labels at the same time. One does not have to choose geography over political economy over the environment. While finding the perfect match of labelling might take some time, many will be delicious wines that are trying to save the glories of French independent viticultural/viniculture all while limiting their negative ecological impacts. All in all, let French wine labelling guide an enriching drinking experience and not to overly complicate it.

Un dîner presque parfait: A Window into French Dinner Party Culture?

By Eric Van Vleet

We never had a television before in France and so passed our screen time either with Netflix or podcasts. This time around, our rental has basic cable so we have become anthropologists exploring the French TV ‘culture’. While most shows are either unintelligible or unappealing to us, we stumbled upon on one true gem: Un dîner presque parfait (A Nearly Perfect Dinner). Here is the hyperlink to watch it. It’s a free and amusing French lesson!

Un dîner presque parfait is a French reality TV cooking competition that pits five contestants, none of whom who usually know each other, all from the same city who take turns throwing a themed dinner party. Their peers judge them on a scale of 1-10 based on three criteria: 1. Food, 2. Table decoration and 3. Ice-breaker/game (animation). Each meal includes an aperitif (drink and small bites), entrée (the starter/appetizer), plat (main course) and dessert. Contestants judge each other periodically throughout the night in a secret location, so the host does not exactly know their ratings. Only at the end of the five days are the scores revealed often to shock and awe, anger and joy. There is often a lot of emotion for a 1000 Euro prize.

The show gets surprising mileage out of such a simple and repetitive concept. Watching it, a television anthropologist can learn surprising things about France, or at least those willing to be on the show. You soon learn how many people are striving to become D-list French celebrities. The show has featured dating show contestants, other reality TV stars, a former Miss France and actors/comedians who often flail in the kitchen, as they are only marginally famous in France for anything but their cooking skills.

These “celebrity” exceptions aside, you learn that there are generally some really talented home cooks who come on the show who have no interest in becoming reality TV celebrities. Watching them work is a pleasure. Their menus are often shockingly ambitious and it is not rare that they appear to pull them off. You also learn that these wannabe chef contestants have an amazing collection of silicon baking devices in many shapes, immersion blenders, reusable whipped cream dispensers (siphon), agar-agar powder, blow torches, pastry bags with different tipped nozzles, digital scales and many other kitchen toys. Whenever contestants have such equipment, the quality of food is remarkably high. If amateurs are cooking this well, there is no doubt why the overall quality of food in France remains so high.

You also learn that among these contestants there is an oddly causal form of racism/exoiticism that is often somehow innocent, but no less startling. Twice contestants have had “Mexican”-themed dinners that were about as authentic as a similar dinner party as hosted by Trump. They seem to expect their host to be dressed up like Mariachi and speak in a Speedy Gonzalez accent. The food as well is less authentic than Taco Bell, but is a hit as long as it is not too spicy for a French palate that often does not endure any heat.  When throwing a dinner party based on a faraway country, the lesson from the show seems to be go really broad as possible in order to woo your invitees.

Even with France’s economic slump being central issue of the upcoming elections, there are still a surprising number of unemployed contestants on the show. These unemployed people range from 20 to even 50-years-old. Maybe they are hoping that they can twist their TV appearance into a job. The editing of the show does not really allow us to learn much about any one contestant, save for what they say on their day’s show. Still, it is odd that about every other week there is at least one unemployed contestant and nothing is really said about it at all.

After so many episodes Lili and I couldn’t help but to have picked up some tips on how to throw a successful televised and themed French dinner party. First, keep the atmosphere light, fun and preferably flirty. Second, don’t spend your time only worrying about the food. The ice-breaker/activity and decorations are just as important and are too often overlooked. Third, the most successful ice-breakers include some kind of movement and competition or can be an educational activity about food. Each routinely get high scores. Fourth, for the food, do not pin your hopes on people liking fish, there not being vegetarian or that most like meat cooked rare.

Fifth, smoked salmon or avocado and shrimp make great appetizers while and chocolate ganache poured in molds for dessert is always a crowd pleaser. Sixth, do not keep your guests waiting too long between courses and make sure that the food arrives hot. Seventh, the French are obsessed with food not being too heavy. Keep it light, but keep them fed. With these tips you could win on Un dîner presque parfait. They have had a few Americans on the show, though no American has yet won.  If you follow our tips, you may just be the one to do so!

Chester: Real Ale and a Real Life Groundhog's Day

By Eric Van Vleet

Our travels through the UK were guided by a far bit of chance. While still in the US we emailed dozens of organic farms across the island hoping to string together a three month working holiday. We wanted specifically to learn about cheese and cider making. While hoping to learn these skills, the geography quickly become complicated. These farms were located all throughout the UK. While in the end we didn’t only work with cheese and cider, we met great people and saw a side of the UK not available to many tourists.

Our tourism was guided by where we could make a convenient stop between farms. While London and Edinburgh are musts for all tourists, we went as well to lesser known lovely places like Newcastle, Aberystwyth, Shrewsbury, Leicester, Norwich, Birmingham and Chester.

Chester, England is undeniably charming. It has beautiful historic buildings, Roman ruins, has an amazing cathedral where Lili saw the Royal Family, stone city walls and a canal system. For these and other reasons, Chester is not unlike Bruges. Also, it is economically prosperous, shuts down surprisingly early at night and has amazing pubs and breweries. While Lili and I both found the city charming during our first stay, after a weekend there, we never imagined we would return. Yet, when we were able to volunteer for a month at the Chester Christmas Market, as a farmer asked us to sell their spirits and cheese there, we couldn’t pass it up. By chance alone, we spent more time in Chester than in any other place in the UK.

At the market we would make the same sale pitches for eight to ten hours a day for 31 straight days. In order to not get jaded, we needed to behave as if we making these pitches for the first time, every time, for a month straight without respite. In effect, we were living in Groundhog’s Day, one of the greatest films ever made. That film asks a few fundamental questions, big questions for genuinely funny comedy: 1. What do we do with a reality that is singular and on endless repeat, a reality of which no one else can truly understand? 2. Is such endless repetition a cause for despair or a chance to finally better ourselves without having to worry about the progression of time? In the movie, Bill Murray copes with such questions in many different ways from cynically taking advantage of the situation to suicide to celebration. Our response to life in a Christmas-y Groundhog’s Day in Chester on repeat was not so varied.

Lili and I merely drank some of the best beer on the planet, ate food that made us rethink British cuisine and adapted a sales strategy that was as much about having fun as just trying to close the deal. Like Murray in the last third of Groundhog’s Day we tried to fit the perfect food and drink day together. Luckily Chester had enough places to do so. The real challenge was to combine visits to all the right places in a single day.

Near the market and city hall there is a hotel/restaurant/brewpub called the Pied Bull. The building has been there since at least 1533. Like any great British pub, and there are still many of them left, the place is immediately warm and welcoming. The Pied Bull not only supports quality locally breweries and UK “real cider” makers, they brew amazing, often pun-y beer, with names like “Sensibull”, “Gullable” and others. Their brewers, like many British brewers, are amazing at balance. Nothing is meant to blow you away, but instead to delight you and be easy drinking. Hops here are not used as a weapon like in many West Coast American IPAs, but instead like a spice that adds complex flavoring to their amazing malts and subtle yeasts. Rarely do their beers eclipse 6% ABV, which is common for traditional British beers. It means you can try more!

Another amazing Chester brewpub/restaurant not far from downtown, The Brewery Tap restaurant and the adjoining Spitting Feathers brewery, have an amazing ever-changing food and beer menu. The pub is so old that they have a brochure detailing its history. The food honors local recipes, while focusing on quality ingredients and good portions at a reasonable price. After a long day at the market, it was always welcoming, comforting food. While not a brewpub, the Harkers Arms also has amazing British food and a wide variety of cask ales, with a canal side location too. In Chester one did not have to choose between good beer or good food, but many pubs serve both. No one uses words like gastro-pub; many fine standard pubs have good food.

These aforementioned pubs focus on cask ales, which are not served from carbonated kegs, but instead are dispensed by a hand pump that produces an entirely different mouth feel than standard keg beer and is much less carbonated. While some British craft breweries do not produce cask ales, both these brewpubs do as well as curating a quickly rotating selection of guest cask beers. The cask ale one of Britian’s great gifts to the world. It is a different experience than keg beer. These brewpubs curate and brew them amazingly well.

Even if Chester only had the Pied Bull and the Brewery Tap, it would be a destination beer town. They also have two amazing Samuel Smith-run pubs, The Falcon and The Boot, which have both cask and non-cask ales. They have many of the brewery’s beers with a half pint of some beers costing less than a quid! These two pubs are dark, have amazing wood interiors and importantly no TVs, strobe lights or anything that gets in the way of polite conversation or relaxed sipping in silence. They are exceedingly pleasant places to be where you can strike up conversations with strangers and spend a long afternoon or evening.

Contrary to these pubs that are hundreds of years old, Chester has embraced craft beer as well. Not far from the Harker’s Arms, the Cellar has many cutting-edge British craft brewers like Beavertown or Siren as well as those from global brewers. Ironically we had a high ABV stout from Tampa’s own Cigar City there. Kash, located near the train station and dangerously close to our hotel, made us feel like we were back in any good American craft beer bar. They even have decent burgers and hot wings. They stock both English and many Welsh craft beers, which is nice as one can see the mountains of Wales in the distance from some vantage points in Chester.

After a month long search for the perfect day in Chester, I know that it includes a few half pints at the Pied Bull, dinner at the Brewery Tap with a few more cask ales, then a stop at the Falcon or the Boot before a trip to outside the historic center to either Kash or the Cellar. Again no matter what anyone says, there is nothing wrong with the half pint. You only get to try more of what is some of the greatest beer in the world. With each of these places having ever-rotating beer menus, you can keep trying to try to fit together the perfect beer day. If one place does not pull through, there’s always another day. Instead of hoping to finally escape Groundhog’s Day, in Chester you may hope for many for days to come.

In Search of the Perfect Full 'Franglish' Breakfast

By Liliana Valderrama

After reading Eric's recap of the Full English, I became nostalgic and decided to make my own with the beautiful ingredients France has to offer. So feast your eyes on the above photo. These are the raw ingredients collected at the local farmers market and butcher shop. We did not want to make a trip out to a big box store for canned beans, so they are omitted.

I cut the potato into thin slices. In the UK you would either get a frozen large hash brown or French fries. I prefer took cook with duck fat, it is so available or sunflower seed oil.

Next I caramelize the pork belly or the extra salty thick bacon.

Oh no I become thirsty. I remember I have a pear cider in the frigo. Cheers!

I slice and saute the mushrooms, salting and peppering all of my ingredients, of course.  

I cook the blood and Toulouse sausages. 

And my plate comes together!

It was a big plate, we shared it and it was better than the Edinburgh Larder. If you want to replicate these results go visit your local butcher shop. Factory farmed supermarket meat wont cut it. Bon' app.

"The Donald" Trump Diet: Garbage in Garbage Out

By Eric Van Vleet

Donald J. Trump, the “real” Donald Trump of Twitter fame, who regularly speaks of himself in the third person, who (for now) is the President of the United States of America, who won the electoral college vote with no small help from Russian hackers, who lost the popular vote and who had a decidedly smaller inauguration crowd than President Obama. Trump has recently accused Obama and “his people” of orchestrating protests and “leaks of classified information”. This is the same “birther” who maintained racist accusations that Obama was not a ‘real’ American citizen, and then tried to blame Hillary Clinton for this lie.

If all of this is not offensive enough, he once owned a steak company whose products were inexplicably sold in freezer cases at the Sharper Image. This, our dear readers, is only the beginning of his bad culinary judgement. (If you want to check any of the claims or information his essay has been intensively hyperlinked. Follow as many as you can for an informative, though dark foray through the state of the nation past and present. As best as I can tell, they are all “facts” and not the most Orwellian coinage imaginable, (“alternative facts”). But back to food.

As we do not separate what you are from what you eat on this blog, the diet that he adheres to explains the confabulations that spew from “the Donald’s” maw. We would like to propose that our “president” has consciously or unconsciously invented a new fad diet: Garbage In, Garbage Out. This diet including consuming garbage food and then spouting trashy and offensive falsehoods. Fueled by Doritos or a Big Mac your greasy fingers can then launch another offensive tweet against adversaries real and imagined.

People are saying it’s the best diet. No one has a better diet than the Donald. No one cares about food more than me. While his doctor said “the Donald”, himself a rotund fat-shamer, was bordering on obese (a border I would say this wannabe wall-builder has crossed), his physician supposedly said he would make the healthiest person ever to serve as a president. Such a claim almost itself writes the next Bill and Ted movie, Bill and Ted Complete Physicals of all Past U.S. Presidents.

Ever the billionaire populist, “The Donald” reflects the weight of his constituency even if they may pay more taxes. Despite the freedom his hands have had for other illegal activities, those tiny, tiny hands love fast food. They trust fast food. He is partial to fast food because he has a Nixonian paranoia about cleanliness, though, of course, he does not want government agencies to help ensure this food safety. He believes fast food just to be “safer”. Why have trained chefs cook your food, when you can have a teenager who is counting down the minutes until he can smoke a spliff behind the dumpster make it?

When he dines upscale “the Donald” orders a steak extremely well done, (not a Trump steak), and then slathers it in ketchup. He will go off menu to demand the ketchup. There might be microbes living in a properly cooked medium rare steak, so he demands that it is cooked to hell. Soon enough, when his paranoia heightens, he assuredly will hire a team of taste testers.

After calling Mexicans “rapists”, “drug dealers”, “bad hombres” and even to show just how little he thinks about the contradictions of what he says, “and some of them are good people.” He had his assuredly capable chefs at one of his garish properties rip off Taco Bell’s Taco Bowl. He tweeted the photo (surprise, surprise) of this “taco bowl” as his olive branch to the Mexican people on Cinco de Mayo. The ‘proper’ way of celebrating the holiday for entitled rich white American bros like himself is to get trashed and commit the kind of crimes that of which many women have accused him. Yet, what is still more terrifying is that Trump doesn’t drink, so even that thin excuse for his behavior is nonexistent. Being a preternaturally vengeful human, so much so that the New York Times created a Trump insult dictionary, it is so ingrained in him that even a seemingly friendly gesture like presenting his Taco Bowl to “hispanics” comes off as an elaborate slam.

His deranged fear of microbes in food is not unlike his manic delusions of supposedly hired protesters, fake news and terrorists. Everyone is out to get him.  Haters are lurking everywhere. Just because he cannot see or taste them, doesn’t mean they are not there for President Drumpf. Just like the Birchers who saw “Reds” in their cereal bowls, Trump sees his enemies everywhere, even in his food. Better “safe” than sorry for "the Donald”, no matter how enriching an actual unpredictable experience could be of eating real food, even "ethnic" food. His beloved fast food joints churn out an industrial product devoid of any connection with the environment and people who produced it. For “the Donald”, the environment is nothing but an impediment to illusory coal jobs and people are only there to stoke his ego, including still campaigning as a sitting president. Homogeneity is the goal of fast food. It scorns any real and meaningful difference, not unlike our 45th president.

In his version of an America “made great again” a steak produced by a farmer and prepared by a chef is seared until all that was once “great” about it is gone. America is a place where evidently even a raving billionaire cannot eat well for fear of floral and faunal bogeyman. For the rest, the message is eat your big buckets of KFC and taco bowls and love him unconditionally. Love him even if he would murder random bystanders on the street. He has already called on his followers to commit violent acts to anyone who opposes him. His message about food to America is this: feel free to thoughtlessly take in the same fast food garbage and regurgitate the same hateful garbage just like “the Donald”. Garbage in, garbage out, America.