89 Fun Facts About French Wine

In 1954 Châteauneuf-du-Pape's village council passed a still-valid law banning what from landing in its vineyards?

UFOs, then called 'flying cigars', were banned by the mayor's council in 1954 amid a French saucer craze; whether it was fear or a publicity stunt for the wine, the decree has never been repealed.

Pinot Noir's name comes from the shape of its tightly clustered bunches, which are said to resemble what?

A pine cone is what the tight bunches recall, hence 'pinot' from 'pin', French for pine; the same tightly packed clusters leave the thin-skinned grape unusually prone to rot.

Which folk remedy did desperate French growers try against phylloxera before grafting finally beat it?

A live toad under each vine was meant to draw out the 'poison'; the cure did nothing, and it took grafting onto resistant American rootstock to save the vineyards.

Which Duke of Burgundy outlawed the 'disloyal' Gamay grape in 1395, cementing Pinot Noir's hold on the Côte d'Or?

Philip the Bold banned Gamay in 1395 as a 'disloyal' plant of 'very great and horrible harshness', pushing it south to Beaujolais, where it thrives today.

Merlot's name is thought to be a diminutive of 'merle', the French word for which bird?

Blackbird is what 'merle' means in French; the grape may be named for its blue-black colour or for the birds' fondness for the ripe fruit, and nobody is sure which.

A 1991 report on the 'French paradox', the French diet's puzzlingly low heart-disease rate, aired on which US TV show?

60 Minutes floated red wine as the reason the French eat rich food yet suffer less heart disease, and US red wine sales jumped by about 40% within a year of the broadcast.

In Sideways, Merlot-hating Miles drinks his prized 1961 bottle from which Bordeaux estate in a fast-food restaurant?

Château Cheval Blanc 1961 goes down from a disposable styrofoam cup; the joke is that this Saint-Émilion is blended partly from Merlot, the very grape Miles refuses to drink.

Which Médoc commune, with only 3,000 acres of vines, is home to three of Bordeaux's five first-growth châteaux?

Pauillac holds Lafite Rothschild, Latour and Mouton Rothschild; Mouton made it three only in 1973, the sole promotion to first growth since the 1855 classification was drawn up.

Bordeaux's wine brokers ranked the châteaux of the 1855 classification chiefly by what, rather than by tasting?

Their trading price, together with each château's reputation, decided the 1855 list, which is why a 19th-century market snapshot still sets Bordeaux's pecking order.

Mouton Rothschild's 1973 label, the year of its promotion to first growth, honoured which artist, who died that April?

Pablo Picasso, who died on 8 April 1973, was honoured on that year's label; since 1945 Baron Philippe de Rothschild had put a different artist's work on almost every vintage.

Which diarist praised 'a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan' after drinking it at a London tavern in 1663?

Samuel Pepys found it had 'a good and most particular taste' at the Royal Oak Tavern; the wine was Haut-Brion, which Charles II had been serving at court since 1660.

Pomerol, whose Pétrus sells for first-growth prices, is the one major Bordeaux district without what?

An official ranking has never been drawn up for Pomerol, often put down to its late rise: it joined Bordeaux's most prestigious names only in the second half of the 20th century.

Traders from which country drained the swampy Médoc in the 17th century so its famous vineyards could be planted?

Holland supplied the engineers: Dutch traders drained the Médoc's marshes, and the reclaimed land gradually surpassed the older districts as Bordeaux's most prestigious.

Whose 1152 marriage to Henry Plantagenet put Bordeaux's vineyards under English rule and launched the claret trade?

Eleanor of Aquitaine brought Bordeaux with her lands, and it stayed under the English crown for three centuries, until France retook the province in 1453.

Bordeaux's 'en primeur' campaign, held each spring after the harvest, sells the new vintage in what state?

Still ageing in the barrel, the wine is bought as a future, often a year or more before bottling, which can make it cheaper than it will be on release.

Bordeaux mixture, the copper spray devised by botanist Millardet in the 1880s, was developed against which vine disease?

Downy mildew was the target: Millardet noticed that roadside vines daubed with copper and lime to deter grape thieves stayed healthy while the rest of the vineyard sickened.

Burgundy's UNESCO-listed vineyard plots, each precisely delimited and named, are called what?

Climats are named plots, each with its own soil and microclimate, which is why Burgundy's best wines carry a vineyard's name rather than a grape's; UNESCO listed them in 2015.

Which Burgundy vineyard's 1945 vintage, the last from its pre-phylloxera vines, sold for $558,000 a bottle in 2018?

Romanée-Conti made only 600 bottles in 1945 before its old ungrafted vines were torn out; the replanted vineyard gave no vintage again until 1952.

Monks of which order created Burgundy's walled Clos de Vougeot vineyard, from the 12th century onward?

Cistercians from Cîteaux Abbey, the order's mother house, assembled the Clos de Vougeot by purchase and donation over two centuries; today the 50-hectare walled vineyard is split among more than 80 owners.

Chablis grows on Kimmeridge Clay, a Jurassic soil named after a village on the coast of which English county?

Dorset's village of Kimmeridge gave the clay its name, and the same Upper Jurassic seam resurfaces across the Channel under the vines of Chablis and Sancerre.

Legend says Burgundy's Corton hill went over to white grapes because which emperor's wife hated red stains on his beard?

Charlemagne's fourth wife, Luitgard, supposedly ordered the switch, and the white-wine slope still carries his name as Corton-Charlemagne, one of Burgundy's greatest Chardonnays.

A traditional kir adds crème de cassis to a white made from which Burgundy grape, Chardonnay's lesser-known neighbour?

Aligoté is the classic base of kir, long known simply as blanc-cassis until Dijon's mayor Félix Kir made it famous by serving it to visiting delegations.

Pouilly-Fuissé, often confused with the Loire's Pouilly-Fumé, is a Chardonnay from which subregion of Burgundy?

Mâconnais is Burgundy's southern end, and Pouilly-Fuissé's vines surround the Rock of Solutré, where Stone Age hunters left a vast deposit of horse and reindeer bones.

In Burgundy's four-tier hierarchy, which level sits above premier cru, despite the name suggesting premier is top?

Grand cru is Burgundy's top rung, with premier cru just below; the Médoc's 1855 classification does the opposite, putting its premiers crus, the first growths, at the very top.

Beaujolais's cru Moulin-à-Vent, renamed when it gained AOC status in 1936, takes its name from what local landmark?

A windmill gives Moulin-à-Vent its name, and it is one of ten Beaujolais crus alongside villages such as Fleurie, Morgon and Brouilly.

Beaujolais's signature method ferments whole, uncrushed grapes in a sealed, oxygen-free tank; what is it called?

Carbonic maceration starts fermentation inside each intact berry, giving fruity, low-tannin reds so quickly that Beaujolais nouveau can go from vine to bottle in under six weeks.

Champagne's vineyards sit on a subsoil of what, left behind when ancient seas receded 70 million years ago?

Chalk drains well and holds the sun's heat for the vines, and Champagne's houses dug their cool cellars straight into it, some in old chalk quarries running for kilometres.

Châteauneuf-du-Pape's list of permitted grapes, led by Grenache, traditionally runs to how many varieties?

13 is the traditional count, but the 2009 rules stretched the list to eighteen by counting the white, pink and black forms of some grapes separately; Château de Beaucastel is one of the few estates to blend all thirteen.

Côte-Rôtie's Syrah reds may be co-fermented with up to 20% of which white grape, added for its aroma?

Viognier, the perfumed white of neighbouring Condrieu, goes into the vat with the Syrah and is thought to deepen the red's colour as well as scent it; most growers add far less than the 20% allowed.

The 'fumé' in the Loire's Pouilly-Fumé, across the river from Sancerre, refers to what?

A smoky, gunflint aroma from the flinty soils of Pouilly-sur-Loire is one meaning; the other is the grey, smoke-coloured bloom on the ripe grapes, which locals call 'white smoke'.

Chinon's reds and rosés, from the Loire Valley, are based on which grape, a junior partner in Bordeaux blends?

Cabernet Franc makes Chinon's lighter-bodied reds almost on its own; DNA tests in the 1990s showed it is a parent of the far more famous Cabernet Sauvignon.

Which region, German-ruled from 1871 to 1918, is France's only AOC area to label most wines by grape variety?

Alsace bottles Riesling, Gewürztraminer and Pinot Gris under the grape's name rather than a village, a Germanic habit that makes it the odd one out among France's appellation regions.

French Pinot Gris was sold as 'Tokay' until 2007, when the EU reserved that name for which country's famous sweet wine?

Hungary's Tokaji, made from Furmint rather than Pinot Gris, won the name back under a 1993 deal with the EU, and 'Tokay Pinot gris' was used as a stepping stone until 'Tokay' vanished in 2007.

The term 'crémant', used for French sparkling wines made outside Champagne, originally described what?

A creamy, gentler fizz was the original idea: crémants carried lower carbon-dioxide pressure than champagne, though today the name guarantees the champagne method under each region's own AOC rules.

Jura's vin jaune spends over six years under a yeast veil in casks that, unlike other wines' barrels, are never what?

Topped up is exactly what the casks are not: evaporation opens an air gap, the yeast film grows across the surface, and six years and three months later a nutty, sherry-like yellow wine emerges.

Which ancient people brought winemaking to southern Gaul when they settled its coast around 600 BC, long before Roman rule?

Greeks from Phocaea in Asia Minor founded Massalia and soon had vineyards around it; the Romans later spread the vine up the Rhône and across the rest of Gaul.

Which Mediterranean region, France's oldest wine country, now makes more than half of its wine as rosé?

Provence makes more than half its wine pink; its name goes back to the Romans, who called their first province beyond the Alps simply Provincia.

Bandol, the dark, age-worthy red of the Mediterranean coast, must by law be at least half which grape?

Mourvèdre ripens so late that it struggles further north but thrives on Bandol's warm coast; the reds must then spend at least 18 months in oak before release.

Cahors's 'black wine' of south-west France must be at least 70% which grape, known locally as Côt or Auxerrois?

Malbec is the Cahors grape, and while Argentina made it world-famous, the Lot valley had been shipping its inky 'black wine' for centuries before.

Louis Roederer first bottled Cristal Champagne in clear glass so that no bomb could be hidden from which Russian tsar?

Alexander II wanted to watch the bubbles and be sure no explosive sat beneath them, so Roederer had a Flemish glassmaker blow a clear, flat-bottomed bottle in place of the usual dark green one.

At the 1976 'Judgment of Paris', French judges tasting blind ranked which US state's reds above top Bordeaux?

California took first place with a 1973 Stag's Leap red, a result that stunned a wine trade used to treating France as unbeatable.

Which future US president, then minister to France, toured Bordeaux in 1787 and shipped six cases of Haut-Brion home?

Thomas Jefferson sent the cases to his Virginia estate, making Haut-Brion the first recorded first growth imported to the United States.

Which settlement ending World War I also reaffirmed that only wine from France's own region may be called Champagne?

Treaty of Versailles negotiators repeated a protection first written into an 1891 trademark agreement, which is why sparkling wine made elsewhere has to find another name.

Beaujolais Nouveau goes on sale each November at one minute past midnight on the third occurrence of which weekday?

Thursday was fixed as the release day by France's appellation authority in 1985, and Americans now pour the weeks-old wine at Thanksgiving, which falls exactly one week later.

Which Champagne house, run from 1805 by a 27-year-old businesswoman, invented the riddling table that clears sediment?

Veuve Clicquot takes its name from the French for widow: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot took over when her husband died, made the first known vintage Champagne in 1810 and devised riddling in 1816.

Which future French king, born in Pau, was by tradition baptised with Jurançon wine and a rub of garlic?

Henry IV was born in the Château de Pau, in the old kingdom of Navarre, and the wine-and-garlic christening was repeated for a later royal heir in his honour.

Châteauneuf-du-Pape, 'the Pope's new castle', recalls the 14th-century papacy's move from Rome to which French city?

Avignon housed the popes for about 70 years, and John XXII, the second of them, built the castle that still stands as the symbol of the appellation.

Which French chemist showed in the 1860s that briefly heating young wine to about 50°C stopped it turning sour?

Louis Pasteur devised his heat treatment to rescue wine and beer, and it was many years before anyone used the process that bears his name on milk.

Which French term sums up the soil, climate and setting behind a wine's character?

Terroir is the idea France's whole appellation system rests on: the law protects the place a wine comes from, since the same grape grown elsewhere is expected to taste different.

Which Champagne house began its long on-screen association with James Bond in the 1973 film Live and Let Die?

Bollinger has used the spy as a marketing device ever since, and its bottles were still turning up decades later in Casino Royale and Skyfall.

Which Champagne house put a black border on its UK labels after devoted customer Winston Churchill died in 1965?

Pol Roger had been Churchill's favourite since 1908; he named one of his racehorses after it, and the house's top wine is now the Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill.

Which 1.5-litre bottle, double the standard size, is the biggest that most Champagne houses can riddle in the usual way?

Magnum is the practical limit because anything larger is too heavy to turn, so the giant show bottles are usually filled from magnums afterwards, losing a little pressure on the way.

Which cathedral city, where French kings were crowned for centuries, is home to many of Champagne's biggest houses?

Reims is known in French as the Coronation City, and many of the grandes marques that are based there open their cellars for tours and tastings.

Carménère, a Bordeaux grape presumed extinct, was found in 1994 growing in which country, long confused with Merlot?

Chile had imported the cuttings from Bordeaux in the 19th century, and it took a French vine expert to spot that vines long taken for Merlot were really the lost grape.

The Dordogne and Garonne rivers meet just below Bordeaux to form which estuary, dividing the Left Bank from the Right?

Gironde water separates two styles: the Left Bank's Médoc and Graves, the home of the 1855 classification, and a Right Bank whose wines are built more on Merlot.

Which powerful wind, driving cold air down the Rhône valley, keeps the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape dry?

Mistral gusts carry moisture away from the vines, and the wind's knack for drying out mud and stagnant water earned it the local nickname 'mud-eater'.

Whose inheritance laws, splitting estates among all heirs, left some Burgundy growers owning only a row or two of vines?

Napoleon's rules kept subdividing the most precious holdings generation after generation, so a single prized vineyard ended up shared among many small growers.

Sancerre, a Loire appellation that also makes reds from Pinot Noir, is best known for whites from which grape?

Sauvignon Blanc earned white Sancerre a place among France's original appellations in 1936, while the reds had to wait until 1959 for the same status.

Vouvray, made dry, sweet or sparkling depending on the year's weather, is devoted almost entirely to which Loire grape?

Chenin Blanc keeps such high natural acidity that growers let the season decide the style: cool years give dry and fizzy Vouvray, warm ones bring sweet wines with immense ageing potential.

Muscadet, the dry white made near Nantes, comes from which grape, dominant since a 1709 freeze killed most local vines?

Melon de Bourgogne, as its name admits, came from Burgundy, and it is the sole variety allowed in a wine whose own name refers to a supposedly musky taste.

Which black grape, named for the flour-like down under its leaves, makes up about a third of Champagne's plantings?

Meunier is French for miller, a nod to leaves that look dusted with flour, and with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay it goes into almost all Champagne.

Madiran's dark reds from south-west France rely on which grape, since adopted as the national variety of Uruguay?

Tannat crossed the Atlantic so successfully that Uruguay calls it the national grape, though the wines it gives there are lighter and softer than Madiran's.

Chaptalisation, named after chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, adds what to unfermented grape juice to boost alcohol?

Sugar goes in before fermentation not to sweeten the wine but to give the yeast more to convert, a rescue for grapes that have not fully ripened on the vine.

In the traditional method used for Champagne, where does the second, bubble-forming fermentation of the wine take place?

Inside the sealed bottle is the costly answer: each one is closed with a crown cap while the yeast works, whereas cheaper fizz usually gets its sparkle in bulk by the Charmat process.

Since French law bans mixing red and white wine outside Champagne, what gives most French rosé its pink colour?

A short soak on grape skins is all it takes, since the colour of red grapes sits in the skin, and the method is so simple that rosé may be the oldest type of wine there is.

The label phrase 'mis en bouteille au château', a practice Mouton Rothschild adopted in the 1920s, promises buyers what?

Bottling at the estate was a break with custom: Bordeaux châteaux used to ship their wine off in bulk to merchants, who did the bottling somewhere else.

The Pommery house was first to sell which style of Champagne in 1874, the one now printed on most labels?

Brut arrived when Champagne was noticeably sweeter than it is now, and it was a widow, Louise Pommery, who steered the house into becoming one of the region's biggest names.

Which Bordeaux wine town, named after a Breton monk who lived in a rock shelter, has been a UNESCO site since 1999?

Saint-Émilion's monk lived in an oratory cut from the rock until his death in 767, and the monks who followed him were the ones who began selling wine from the area.

Which sweet-wine estate alone was ranked Premier Cru Supérieur in 1855, a tier above every other Bordeaux white?

Château d'Yquem owes its standing to a site unusually prone to noble rot, and it passed by marriage in 1785 to the Lur-Saluces family, headed by a godson of Louis XV.

Which Bordeaux first growth, in 1771 the first claret ever sold at Christie's, shares its name with its home village?

Château Margaux was transformed in the early 1700s by a manager named Berlon, who banned picking in the early morning so that dew on the grapes would not dilute the wine.

The 1855 classification of Bordeaux's top estates was commissioned so visitors could find the best wines at which event?

A Paris world's fair, the Exposition Universelle, was bringing visitors from around the globe, and the organisers wanted France's best Bordeaux wines picked out and put on show for them.

The kir, once simply called blanc-cassis, now carries the name of Félix Kir, post-war mayor of which Burgundy city?

Dijon elected the priest and Resistance veteran in 1945, and he let one local cassis maker put his name on the drink before granting its rivals the same right.

Which merchant, nicknamed the king of Beaujolais, almost single-handedly made Beaujolais Nouveau a worldwide craze?

Georges Duboeuf began by cranking his family's hand-operated grape crusher at the age of six, and admirers also called him the pope of Beaujolais.

Which Paris hill, ringed by vineyards in the 15th century, still has a small working vineyard on Rue Saint-Vincent?

Montmartre's surviving plot is a last trace of the vines, gardens and orchards that once surrounded the hilltop village, and its small harvest is toasted each October at a neighbourhood festival.

Vin Mariani, an 1860s Bordeaux wine tonic endorsed on a poster by Pope Leo XIII, was infused with which plant's leaves?

Coca leaves gave up their cocaine to the alcohol in the wine, and the delighted pope awarded the tonic's Corsican-born inventor a Vatican gold medal.

Dubonnet, a wine-based aperitif of 1846, was devised to help French Foreign Legionnaires take which bitter medicine?

Quinine was so unpleasant that the French government ran a competition to make it drinkable, the same problem that gave colonial troops in Asia the gin and tonic.

Which northern Rhône appellation, a single hill above the town of Tain, is seen by some as the spiritual home of Syrah?

Hermitage is planted mostly with Syrah for red wine, but a small share of the hill is given over to whites made from the Marsanne and Roussanne grapes.

Which southern Rhône appellation, a reputed favourite of Louis XIV and the novelist Balzac, makes nothing but rosé?

Tavel is one of the few rosés that can improve with age, and Ernest Hemingway was another of the writers said to be devoted to it.

Phylloxera, the root-eating aphid that devastated French vineyards from the 1860s, came from which part of the world?

North America also supplied the cure: its native vines were not susceptible to the pest, so two French growers proposed grafting European vines onto American rootstock.

Which weapon do showmen slide along a Champagne bottle's neck to snap off its glass collar, cork still inside?

A sabre works best blunt: the blade runs up the neck and knocks the collar clean off at the lip, so professionals now use a purpose-made unsharpened Champagne sword.

Tronçais oak, prized for Bordeaux wine casks, grows in a forest that minister Colbert planted in 1670 to supply whom?

Navy shipbuilders were the customers Colbert had in mind two centuries ahead; today the forest's oaks, some 80% of its timber, are prized by coopers instead.

Which nickname, borrowed from the humble place the wine was supposedly made, stuck to Bordeaux's 1990s cult winemakers?

Garagistes took their name from estates like one founded in 1989 on a single hectare, where much of the work was done by hand and foot in the owners' garage.

Which slang word for wine became famous as the name of the ration issued to French troops in the First World War?

Pinard was all but unknown in Paris before the war, yet it ended up as perhaps the most famous word in the whole vocabulary of the French foot soldier.

Which Roman emperor's edict of AD 92 ordered half the vineyards in provinces such as Gaul to be torn up?

Domitian acted during a widespread grain famine, and his ban on new vines stayed in force for nearly two centuries until Emperor Probus repealed it.

Which shallow, faceted silver cup did Burgundian winemakers use to judge a wine's colour in dim, candle-lit cellars?

Tastevin facets and a domed base catch whatever light there is and bounce it through the wine, so its clarity shows even by a single candle.

Which race's 1967 winner, Dan Gurney, began the tradition of drivers spraying Champagne over the crowd and each other?

Le Mans 24 Hours started a habit that podiums everywhere copied, though in 2004 Bahrain's Grand Prix swapped the fizz for a non-alcoholic pomegranate and rose-water drink.

In Champagne making, which step freezes the upturned bottle's neck so pressure shoots out the plug of spent yeast?

Disgorging works because the sediment freezes into a small block of ice in the neck, and when the crown cap comes off the wine's own pressure pushes it out.

Which American critic won worldwide attention by calling Bordeaux's 1982 vintage superb when many rivals had doubts?

Robert Parker's 100-point scores went on to shape the prices of newly released Bordeaux, and his nose and palate were insured for a million dollars.

Which Champagne house, the oldest established, began in 1729 with bottles given away to a cloth merchant's customers?

Ruinart sent out its first wine with bubbles in January 1730 and did so well that within six years it had dropped the cloth trade altogether.