Like you, perhaps, we wonder about why the price of a certain wine is as it is. We know that it has something to do with the costs or production, the reputation of the winemaker or estate and the ever-present, ever mysterious factor of consumer notions of what’s cool to be drinking now (We’re looking at you, Sancerre). One way to think about it might be … just spitballing here … that we’re actually paying by the word.
Yes, the number of words required to meet a given appellation’s labelling requirements tends to rise with the price. Or is it the price that rises with the number of letters? It’s hard to say.
To explain: Appellation authorities generally organize the wine under their purview in sets of nesting boxes, with the biggest box describing wine that can be made with fruit from the largest geographical area and to correspondingly baggy standards of production.
Thus, the rules governing the labeling of wine as generic Côtes-du-Rhône allow fruit to be sourced from no less than 168 townships spread over five contiguous départements in the south of France. However, adding a single word, so that a Côtes-du-Rhône becomes Côtes-du-Rhône Villages, will put you in a much smaller box, since only 21 of the 168 townships qualify for the villages designation. These townships have the exclusive right to use their name on the label. So the full designation becomes, for example, Côtes-du-Rhône Villages Sablet. More words; more money. In smaller boxes, production standards tend to be correspondingly more strict.
But these boxes can shrink further. A progressive diminution of container size corresponding to rises in price is particularly evident in Burgundy, where the generic stuff can be sourced from any of more than 300 communes, and will be labeled with the single word ‘Bourgogne.’ A smaller box is reserved for wine from a specific set of townships with a tradition of superior quality. These wines carry names like Nuits-Saint-Georges and Volnay.
Since any shift to a smaller box results in an increase in specificity, your next step will be drinking wine sourced from a single vineyard in a single village; go a step beyond this and you’ll be dipping into something from one of the 640 single-vineyard sites designated premier cru, the label of which might read like this: Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru Estournelles-Saint-Jacques. The smaller box needs more words to describe its contents. More words mean more money.
A further example appears in the appellation structure of Brittany, on France’s Atlantic coast. Here, the generic catch-all is Muscadet, with Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine issuing from a more delimited area and offering a step-up in quality. Here, wines receiving an extended maturation on lees can be labeled Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Sur Lie, a gratifying two word bump. In 2018, four new upscale subzones were created in the region, so that it’s now possible to encounter a Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Sur Lie Monnières-Saint-Fiacre — a solid ten word wonder with the resounding sonority of an old fashioned cash register.
Still, when its comes to kilometer-length wine naming, it’s a hard go to beat the Germans, who, in addition to their wonderful habit of daisy-chaining simple words together to create compound blockbusters, like to be very specific indeed about what’s in the bottle. Thus we have the likes of Christmann Gimmeldinger Meerspinne Riesling Grosses Gewächs, which doesn’t seem quite so talky when you realize it’s providing the name of a producer, a township, the name of a vineyard (the German equivalent of premier cru, in this case) and that it is a Riesling and dry. Here too, more words more money.
As with all such things, there will be exceptions to the rule. In Burgundy, any of its region’s 33 grands crus will announce its august presence with nothing more than its own name, solo and tout court, with no reference to a sub-region or village affiliation. So it is that with Montrachet, Musigny, Richebourg and Corton — as with Beyoncé, Madonna, Pelé and Everest —one word is worth all the money.