In Burgundy, winegrowers protest against a project to revise the AOC

From Franck Dubray in OUEST FRANCE

The Burgundian winegrowers did not take off. Faced with a project to revise the AOC Bourgogne appellation area, examined this Thursday 6 February by the Inao national committee, which manages French agricultural appellations, they denounced the amputation of entire sectors of historic Burgundy.

The new delimitation proposed by the National Institute of Origin and Quality would thus lead to the removal of 64 Burgundy communes from the AOC Bourgogne production area, particularly in the Chablis, Dijon and northern Côte-d'Or sectors, the Burgundy trade organisations are alarmed.

The Inao project would, on the other hand, maintain half of the Beaujolais communes that can already claim the appellation today, i.e. around forty out of the 386 that make up wine-growing Burgundy.

Burgundy is Burgundy. And Beaujolais is Beaujolais. Since the end of January, winegrowers and elected representatives from Côte-d'Or, Saône-et-Loire and Yonne have been hammering away at the same time, fearing a relocation of production, overproduction and ultimately a decline in the image and price of Burgundy.

The wines of Burgundy are very seriously threatened, and twelve regional deputies and senators from all sides of the region are calling on the Minister of Agriculture and the leaders of the INAO to face what they consider to be a fault against history, geography and the economy.

However, the winegrowers are at the origin of this request for revision, a file opened in 2000: Burgundy has never completed the demarcation work started in 1937, a situation that has become problematic today, explain their representatives.

But they fear that this approach is now turning against them, denouncing the lack of listening and working in consultation with producers.

Today we're in the study phase," says Gilles Flutet, head of the INAO's Territories and Boundaries Department, who wants to be reassuring: if it were to be validated on Thursday, the project would not be immediately set in stone and all the claims would be studied during a public consultation.

To establish this new delimitation, the person in charge emphasizes the need to work on objective criteria, without limiting himself to the ground and Grape variety.

The experts' mission is to define what Burgundy wine is and they base their work on elements related to the natural environment, but also to practices and customs," he explains.

The areas that would leave the appellation area choose to use the AOC Burgundy only very little, underlines Gilles Flutet, who takes as an example the preference often given to the AOC Chablis in the Yonne.

Arguments that do not go down well with winegrowers. It's hard to understand how one can propose to exclude from Burgundy producers who have been there for centuries," says Thiébault Huber, president of the Confédération des appellations et vignerons de Bourgogne.

We must bury this proposal, whose criteria are completely unacceptable, before reviewing the method of working with INAO to reconstruct the delimitation file," he asserts.

Burgundy in Beaujolais

There have been several developments since 2000, including the rejection of a previous delimitation by the Council of State in 2014. At the time, it was the producers of Burgundy in the Beaujolais region who felt they were being discriminated against. Our target is not the Beaujolais winemakers," Mr. Huber says today.

Dominique Piron, president of InterBeaujolais, says he fully understands the anger of the Burgundians when faced with the exclusion of historic towns: the name + Burgundy + has value today throughout the world.

But it also intends to protect those who produce Burgundy in the Beaujolais, which only concerns a small part of this wine-growing region located mainly in the Rhône, south of the Burgundian border.

The Beaujolais region has historically figured as a vineyard of Burgundy, insists the Association of Burgundy producers in Beaujolais, calling for not confusing Burgundy wine and administrative Burgundy.

Beaujolais winegrowers produce Beaujolais, Crémant de Bourgogne and Burgundy wines at the same time. It is a reality of production that must be recognised and that does not stand in the way of proudly claiming our Beaujolais identity, according to the association.

Burgundy winemakers are calling for a rally on Thursday in front of the Inao headquarters in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis) where the national committee will discuss the draft revision.