The French winemaker whose wines are illegal in his home country

Winemaker Maxime Chapoutier will be arrested if he tries to sell two of his new wines in his native France.

“There would be a wine frenzy in France, and that would be great,” he says. “Sometimes you have to be persuasive to make a difference.”

The two bottles in question, one white and the other red, may not be allowed in France because they are made from a mixture of French and Australian wines.

Under French and European Union law it is illegal to make wine combining EU and non-EU fruit. In France in particular, the authorities consider things like this very important.

The French wine industry has a well-known word called “terroir”, which is used for all the natural factors that affect the grapes that grow in the vineyard, such as soil, climate, and elevation. As a result, wines from certain regions are held in high esteem.

Add a fixed appellation or a cluster of wine regions in France, and the idea of ​​combining French and Australian wines to create an international hybrid would confuse many French wine lovers.

Yet Maxime has done it, and it’s all because of one word – Brexit.

Although they can’t sell the two wines in the EU, they can in the UK now that London no longer has to comply with food and drink regulations imposed by Brussels.

Maxime has produced wines in collaboration with UK online retailer The Wine Society, where they are called Hemispheres Red and Hemispheres White. The red is made from the syrah grape, or shiraz as it is called in Australia, while the white is a combination of the marsanne and viognier varieties.

Portions of Australian red and white wine are exported to the UK, where they are blended with wines from the northern Rhone and Roussillon regions of France before being bottled.

Maxime, who works at the famous Rhone wine company Chapoutier, says that while he respects France’s focus on terroir, there must be a place for it to be marketed internationally.

“Chapoutier has been making wine for over 200 years, driven by terroir, and biodynamic,” he says. “But more and more people are rejecting French wine because they don’t understand the complex appellation rules.

“We have to change for consumers and make wine to be available, which the mix of countries can help to do. Maybe the EU law will change. It is also natural to send wine from Australia to Europe more, because you don’t have the weight of all the glass bottles.”

Another wine company that is now making wine by combining grapes from two continents is the Australian company Penfolds. They sell reds made from Australian and Californian grapes, and some that are a blend of Australian and French. Again they cannot be sold in the EU, but they can in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere.

Penfolds refer to these blends as “worldly wines”, and say they “have something that can best be described as worldly”. Whatever that is supposed to mean.

Unsurprisingly, some traditional winemakers disagree. One such person is Jas Swan, an independent winemaker based in Germany.

Although the combination of two continents from Chapoutier and Penfolds is carefully made from good grapes, and the price is reasonable, they are afraid that if the trend is growing it will mean very cheap, very cheap wines being sold.

“I believe that this type of wine will not have any problems, even before they leave their continent,” he says. “Those wines would have seen only mechanical work, heavy additions to make them purer, and made to be easy to drink for the masses.

“Why can’t consumers be more sophisticated? Shopping is madness.”

Peter Richards, holder of the world’s highest wine industry qualification, master of wine (MW), also sniffs. “The idea of ​​blending wine in other countries is not something I find repulsive,” he says. “My concern is that this is creating novelty for novelty’s sake.”

His wife, Susie Barrie, also a MW, adds: “I am still convinced that a wine made from a blend of grapes from different countries can be the best in taste.”

In contrast, wine writer Jamie Goode says that the growth of two countries’ wines “is a very interesting idea”.

“If the wines are good, and they’re made well from good grapes – not just putting together the cheapest wines and cutting a big chunk out of the wine – then that’s exciting.

“The most important basis of good wine is the concept of terroir – that wine comes from a place, and its taste reflects the place in unique ways.

“In some ways, there’s a lot of skill needed to combine the right wines to create something interesting from different regions.”

Pierre Mansour, director of procurement at The Wine Society, says he and his colleagues came up with the idea of ​​producing two wines made from grapes from different countries as part of the company’s 150th anniversary celebrations.

“We were thinking about the future of wine, and we wanted to do something new. In the end, we thought that one area of ​​knowledge was coming together, to make a wine that would reduce climate change in a certain country.

“And because of the air quality, it is very unfriendly to send a lot of wine from Australia to the UK. But at the same time we expected that the ‘terrorists’ would say ‘to hold this is very against the head coach of France. wine’.

“So we went to Chapoutier, thinking they would say ‘you’re crazy, how dare you mock us’, but they were nice. They were very happy.”