The French Colonization of Algeria and the Untold History of the French Appellation System
Algeria - and French Settler Colonialism
For some, wine offers a feeling of belonging - a rootedness to beauty, wealth, and culture. For others, however, wine is a symbol of colonial and religious oppression. After the arrival of French settlers in the mid 1800s, the success of viticulture in Algeria signaled a significant loss of personal and political freedom for its native people who were forced to leave their own lands and surrender their crops and farmland for the enterprise of settler viticulture.
Although winemaking in Algeria can be traced back to 600 BC with the Phoenicians (Giulia, 5), wine was never central to its culture and economy until the arrival of French settlers. Throughout the Middle Ages, Algeria was ruled by various Muslim dynasties which meant the consumption of alcohol was prohibited in accordance with their religious laws. To this day it still remains as a part of the Arab world with a majority Muslim population.
By the time France invaded Algeria in the 1830s, it had existed under Ottoman rule for 300 years as the center of its empire (Sessions, 13). Being off the coast of the Mediterranean sea, it was an ideal military base as well as a hub for trade due to its accessible ports and agricultural potential. In fact, when France claimed Algeria for its own, it owed a massive debt to its newly acquired territory for the grains it was importing to feed its military in its ongoing imperialist expansion.
For France, the loss of Haiti in 1791 to anti-slavery movements and its other colonies in the 1814-1815 Treaties of Paris, a humiliating finale to Napoleon’s wars, meant it desired redemption. This time, however, France knew its colonizing mission could no longer be guided by the profit model of slavery. By the early 1800s, tyranny required a gentler face and this farce, under the guise of spreading civilization, was settler colonialism.
The structure of settler colonialism is better described as settler genocide because its success hinges on the ability of settlers to completely replace the natives on their own land. In just twenty years under the guiding influence of settler colonialism, Algeria’s native population was reduced from 4 million to 2.3 million (Sessions, 265) due to war, dislocation, illness and disruption of food supply
The migration of growers, largely from the Midi, who were seduced by the opportunity to settle on lands abroad after their vineyards were decimated by phylloxera, enabled France’s government to build a viticultural empire of extraordinarily productivity, i.e. commercially profitability, that benefited the mainland. Called the “Great Seduction’ (White, 42), France painted a vision of agricultural utopia just across the sea during a period when it faced immense internal economic insecurity.
For the settlers, wine was an important generator of wealth for France’s economy and a much more profitable commodity than grain. However, for the natives, many of them faced starvation as a result of settler viticulture and wine became an active instrument of their oppression and hunger.
Not only were the majority of its population Muslim and therefore religiously prohibited from drinking the beverage, but the expropriation of their lands to cultivate vines meant they were unable to plant cereal crops, the main source of their diet. Many locals were eventually forced to work on the vineyards for very little wages in order to purchase food and other necessary commodities. France’s colonization of Algeria was nothing short of devastating to its native population.
As the natives watched their coastal plains and rolling hills overtaken by vineyards that established their authority with a factory-like sheen, how must they have felt?
For wine was not just a symbol of civilization, but a division between religions that separated Christians from Muslims. Like the stripes of the French flag stretching across the fertile plains of Algeria, rows and rows of vines waved their fruits merrily in victory for civilization and profit. Holding out on the borders of lands from which they were ousted that they once called home, perishing due to hunger (White, 175), I doubt wine seemed beautiful or progressive to them then.
Natural vs. Non-Natural Wine
Nonetheless, viticulture proved to be immensely successful in Algeria. What it lacked in quality, it made up for in quantity, the chief concern of winemakers during a time of viticultural crisis when French winemakers were reduced to importing raisins from Greece to support their wine production (Giulia, 14).
However, once France’s vineyards began to recover from the damages wreaked by phylloxera, the lifeline that Algeria’s viticultural success offered to France’s wine industry started to feel more like a noose.
It is within the context of these struggles that the term “natural” wine, referring to the wines of France, was established in contrast to the “un-natural” wines of Algeria.
These words had a different connotation then than how it’s used today. The movement of ‘natural wine’ empowered by the environmental imperative towards quality would not take place for a few decades. The wine industry would have to wait until 1978 for Marcel Lapierre, a leading member of the Gang of Four, to make his first cuvée of ‘natural wine’ inspired by the viticultural philosophy of Jules Chauvet.
The binary created by the terms “natural” opposed to “non-natural” wines was effective to communicate the message that the “un-natural” wines of Algeria posed a threat to the “natural” wines of France. To address these concerns, France’s government responded with a series of laws that culminated in the appellation system. Many in the wine industry take for granted that appellation wine and quality wine are synonymous but something to consider is whether this assumption reflects and perpetuates dangerous biases towards race, class, and Euro-centric worldviews under which they were founded.
The Leakey Affair - and The Rise of the French Peasants
France’s vine growers frustration erupted when in July 1905, the French governor general of Algeria entered into a contract to sell 50,000 hl of wine to James Leakey, a wine importer in London. Leakey was a shrewd businessman who promoted the wines of Algeria as being French, comparing it to the likes of Bordeaux and Burgundy (Giulia, 17). His reasoning was political, echoing the prevailing attitude of French politicians who claimed “Algeria is France” in their efforts to consolidate France’s colonial rights over the territory (Bohling, 27).
However, to the French farmers who were financially struggling and exhausted by decades of fighting phylloxera, his opportunism felt like outright slander.
When word of these advertisements traveled to France, the scandal became known as the “Leakey Affair.” Rabble rousing newspapers such as Le Matin and L’Eclair stoked anti-Algerian rhetoric by using escalating language which called the wines of Algeria “sick” (White, 69) and published articles on “The Algerian Danger” (White, 130).
The charges of fraud and adulteration felt hypocritical to Algerian producers. That year French winemakers bought record quantities of sugar to chaptalize their wines to make ‘sugar wines’ (White, 72). In fact, many questionable winemaking practices had their origins in France, not Algeria.
As Algerian wine inundated the global market with seemingly limitless expansion, French growers despaired as the prices of their own grapes plundered. Under the pressures of unemployment and economic duress, a 1905 demonstration in Béziers of 15,000 French growers led by Marcelin Albert, a French cafe owner and winegrower who became the leader of the 1907 revolt of the Languedoc winegrowers, launched a petition that demanded accountability from the elected bodies of France against fraud.
“Long live natural wine!” they shouted, “Down with the poisoners!” (“La Cave”). The protestors took inspiration from the dramatic language of French publications that accused Algerian producers of making “non-natural” or “sick” wines in contrast to the “natural” wines of their own regions.
Within a month of Leakey’s contract with Algeria, the first law regulating “frauds and falsifications” was passed by France’s government listing conditions for the production of ‘natural’ wine (Giulia, 18). The new law required that wines had to clearly indicate its origin to avoid “misleading commercial practices” and explicitly called out Algeria as a region of concern.
Algerian producers were struck by the hypocrisy of these policies. Nonetheless, legal boundaries referred to as appellations were drawn for France’s major wine regions. Between 1908 and 1912, France’s government established the regional boundaries of Bordeaux and Champagne, as well as Armagnac and Cognac.
These regulations were formed in direct response to Algerian overproduction and were motivated by France’s desire to transition away from an orientation around mass production and consumption to an emphasis on artisanship, luxury, and distinction in metropolitan regions (Bohling, 22).
To strengthen its new global image as the center of luxury wine production, France’s government continued to tighten its wine regulations. In 1927, a law was established for appellation wine to restrict grape varieties and methods of viticulture. Finally in 1935, France’s government created the Appellations d’Origine Contrôlées (AOC), which combined the law of 1927 with specific production criteria that extended not just to grape variety but also minimum alcohol content, and maximum vineyard yields (Giulia, 18).
Along with the AOC, the appellation law of 1935 created the INAO to govern over the regulations of the AOC. The INAO was a state agency responsible for codifying and regulating luxury vine growing, winemaking and brandy making practices (Bohling, 26). The INAO leaders successfully promoted the image of France as the home of luxury wine, a strategy that simultaneously prepared its wine industry for global markets while marginalizing the country’s tormented history of industrial wine production (Bohling, 26).
Although Algerian wine production would continue to increase, growing from 10 million hl in 1925 to 20 million hectoliters by 1935 (Giulia 19), the exclusionary tactics of the AOC meant Algerian wines could never compete with the luxury wines of France. After all, France’s wines possessed terroir, a limiting and inimitable factor of quality production that greatly profited French hegemony over the wine industry.
After World War II, increasing tariffs meant that Algeria could no longer seek out new markets (Bohling, 26) for its wines. Meanwhile, a war for freedom was occurring inside the colony. From 1954-1962, the people of Algeria demanded to be free from France’s colonial rule in the Algerian War of Independence.
When Algerian winemakers applied for AOC status in the 1960s, it was predictably denied (Bohling 26). Once Algeria ceased to be a colony of France, its wine industry collapsed. By this time France had successfully shifted the image of wine from a common, everyday item to luxury. Therefore, it no longer had a need for the mass produced wines of Algeria and its wine industry came to an end as quickly as it rose. However, during its peak Algeria was exporting twice the amount of wine than France, Italy and Spain combined (Giulia, 3).
Today, the boom and bust of Algeria’s wine industry is told as if it’s a curiosity of wine history. However, the end of Algeria’s wine industry is intricately tied to the construction of our modern attitudes towards wine. Its decline was in fact fundamental to France’s appellation system, which emerged in the post-War global economy as an alleged exemplary industry standard on quality wine production.
The success of the appellation system was a direct result of the ability of France’s government to control and define what is considered “quality” wine production. In many ways, the appellation laws were less about quality and more about monitoring quantity in order to control wine prices - a law of supply and demand.
For wine does not exist in a poetic vacuum untouched by the realities of industry. It is a part of our economic and political reality as much as a spiritual siren, for those who love wine, beseeching us towards life - or the image of it, status.
Therefore, when those of us in the wine industry speak about inclusion, diversity and equity, the values the natural wine movement in particular has embraced wholeheartedly as champions of counter-culture, what does it mean to recognize that the language of natural wine was built, along with appellations, from ideologies that have exemplified its power to exclude others? Has the natural wine movement emancipated itself from its morally ambiguous past or does its history continue to shape its beliefs and evolutions to this day?
Bibliography
White, Owen. The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria, Harvard University Press, 2021.
Meloni, Giulia and Johan Swinnen. “The Rise and Fall of the World's Largest Wine Exporter—And Its Institutional Legacy.” American Association of Wine Economists, vol. 9, no. 1, 2014, https://www.wine-economics.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Vol9-Issue01-01-Giulia-Meloni-and-Johan-Swinnen.pdf. Accessed 26 January 2023.
Bohling, Joseph. The Sober Revolution: Appellation Wine and the Transformation of France, Cornell University Press, 2018.
Sessions, Jennifer E. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. Cornell University Press, 2017.
"La cave de Maraussan", languedoc-roussillon.culture.gouv.fr (in French)
