Women in restaurant

Music

01.00.00.00

Clark:  The French are utterly convinced that in the marriage of food and wine, they are the undisputed masters.

00.10

And France's finest restaurants really do set the benchmark, no question. So in some quarters mention say Australian wine and see what reaction you get.

00.23

Loiseau

Loiseau:  All these wines that are coming into France from all over the world are - if I can be vulgar - a little like prostitutes.  They taste of wood or vanilla... they don't have the depth of French wines - but some French people are being swept away by this trend  and saying "If it's the fashion, I'll do it."

00.34

Restaurant interior/

Loiseau's kitchen

Clark:  To many, Bernard Loiseau is France's best chef. Three Michelin stars.

01.08

Monsieur Louiseau is something of a legend. 

01.14

Loiseau:

Missing - marriage of food and wine

And he's worried that the marriage between his food and French wine could be on the rocks.

01.41

Enormously proud of his own culinary innovations he is at heart a traditionalist.

01.52

Loiseau

Loiseau:  The whole world has passed through these doors - De Gaulle, Picasso, Dali, Orson Welles... Francois Mitterand - all the greatest artists - and I told myself when I took over this place that I mustn't betray this tradition.  To create the present you have to know the past.

01.58

Loiseau's kitchen

Clark: Which is why he's horrified at some of the changes going on in the French wine industry. He's worried that French winemakers are following fashion, and abandoning the traditions that have helped set French wine apart.

02.21

Loiseau

Loiseau:  The trend is everywhere... It's in the supermarkets... It's like McDonalds - it's lowered all our standards but I'm saying to French winegrowers, ignore this fashion - Continue making wine like you used to - like your grandparents and your parents before you.

02.34

As well as making truly great wine, for years the French have also made some truly awful wine.

03.06

Upsot of Morrison tasting wine

Raising the standard of everyday French wine is partly about technology and know-how and partly about marketing.

03.15

David Morrison is an Australian winemaker working in France.

03.28

David Morrison

Australian Winemaker

Morrison:  Our ethos, if you like, is we're trying to make a wine for 4.99, we try to make a wine that looks like it should be sold for 5.99. And that's essentially the way we go about it. We try to make it look and taste a lot better than the consumer is actually paying for it off the shelf.

03.36

Clark: It's an approach which some argue is at odds with the finest French traditions. 

03.51

Court music/Gvs of vineyard/

Chateaux

03.56

Jaboulet-Vercherre:  Well the first thing we know is that it was planted at the 8^th century. Which mean it should have been probably the first vineyard planted in Pommard. Since Tsar Peter, Peter the Great was one of the biggest lovers of Clos de Commaraine in the 17^th Century. Thomas Jefferson came here at the beginning of the 18^th Century and since you have the Queens of England, Mother and Daughter still buying this wine and mainly drinking it.

04.10

Clark with Jaboulet-Vercherre

Clark:  Pierre  Jaboulet-Vercherre's family are relative newcomers. They've been in the wine business since 1834, but in Burgundy for only 80 years.

04.53

Jaboulet-Vercherre: All the countries in history who have been...

05.03

Jaboulet-Vercherre

willing to rule the world have imposed their wine. The Greeks, the Romans, the French, and they still do.

05.08

So what does Pierre  Jaboulet-Vercherre think of wines from the new world? From Australia, California, Chile and the like?

05.21

Jaboulet-Vercherre

Jaboulet-Vercherre:  For me, the new world wines are very important for the wine consumption. They open a new wine consumer. They look young, they look seductive, they are nice, gentle, not too expensive. And it's nice for us that the new world wines do the job. 

05.29

Clark:  So they're a beginners wine are they?

05.50

Jaboulet-Vercherre:  Yes, they're a beginners. And one of 100 new consumer will want to look at a bottle of Pommard, one of out 1,000 will wish to drink it, and one out of 10,000 will drink it.

05.53

Grape pickers

Grape pickers singing

06.08

Clark: The polite dismissal of New World wines conveniently ignores some big shifts in the French wine industry.

06.16

Clark:  For more than a decade new world winemakers have been helping to develop areas of France which might one day challenge the supremacy of Bordeaux and Burgundy.

06.24

Morrison:  The south of France, for me, is the new world of France. It's starting to producing wines that are totally changing everybody's image of this particular area as it has been up til now.

06.34

Clark:  That old image was one of cheap plonk - but the vineyards of the south of France are being transformed.

06.49

Clark and Morrison

Morrison:  We're looking at picking these grapes on Monday, so in a couple more days. I think this vineyard - yeah, this vineyard is going to produce a very good wine. Something as good as we could expect from Bordeaux. But we'll get half the money for it.

06.56

Morrison:  Australian wines have always been extremely forward, fruity, friendly wines if you like, wines that people can understand easily. By coming to the South of France our methods have allowed the people here to discover some of the fruit, and some of the quality of the wines that up to now have been masked by bad techniques, by bad machines, by bad storage, by bad bottling.

07.16

Languedoc

Clark:  For years now, local cooperatives in the Languedoc region of southern France have looked to foreign winemakers for expertise and investment.  And it's starting to pay off, quality and prices are going up.

07.48

Regis

Regis:  The wines of Languedoc-Roussilon are starting to get some recognition - and it's odd that it's not Bordeaux and Burgundy, which recognises this, but foreigners - Americans, South Africans or Australians who've come here to invest.  This is being described as the new Eldorado for wine and it's partly thanks to you Australians.

08.01

Woman in supermarket

Clark:  But this is about much more than a few winemakers from Australia and New Zealand rocking the boat.

08.32

Delphine Rousseau from Fortant de France Winemakers

Rousseau: The truth is that mostly women buy wine in supermarket in France in France and most women don't know what to buy.

Clark: So how do they decide?

Rousseau: Out of five women only one buys the wine cos she knows anything about it. Four of them buy it because it's a nice bottle, a nice label.

Clark: They like the look of the label and that's it?

Rousseau: Exactly. They don't know about the wine

08.37

Fortant de France is a French company, run by French winemakers, and it makes the sort of varietal wines we're familiar with in Australia. Wines labelled after the grape variety - Chardonnay, say, or Cabernet or Sauvignon. That's a very un-French thing to do.

09.06

Tolleret

Tolleret:  People are more and more convinced that they have to respect the consumer, they have to be precise in what they are doing, and in what they have to show to the consumer.

09.20

Music

09.35

Clark:  Fortant de France's approach is high tech, serious business. Traditionally French wines are identified by place, not the type of grape. Yet more than 30 percent of Fortant de France's sales are within France, and it's growing.

Tolleret:  Because even is some people think that these varietals are not serious wine. It shows that in terms of quality and

09.44

10.02

Tolleret

in terms of price, they are big competitors for all the wines in the world.

Clark:  This is precisely the sort of thing that worries Bernard Loiseau.

10.15

Loiseau

Loiseau:  The danger for me is varietal wines - I am totally against them.  Today, you take a bottle labelled cabernet or Chardonnay...  and if you do a blind tasting you don't know where it comes from. You taste it thinking it's from a particular region then you find out it's from Chile. Every country has to be careful not to lose its identity.

10.19

Clark:  Burgundy is a good place to start if you want to understand a little about the extraordinary diversity of French wine.

10.51

It's a patchwork of tiny holdings, each producing distinctly different results.

10.58

Dominique Lafon is among Burgundy's best wine makers, and he owns a small piece of Le Montarachet, the most prized of all white wines.

11.08

Lafon: It's the most expensive land in Burgundy

Clark: Worth what?

Lafon: Worth roughly, we're never sure because there's not many for sale to buy, close to fifty million francs a hectare

11.17

A bottle from here might start at around the $500 mark.

Lafon:  To get an understanding of what's going on here, I have half an hectare of Mersault Genevrieres, which is produced separately. I have three quarters of an hectare of Mersault Perrieres. That's another wine I make. And I have 1.7 hectares of Mersault Charmes, which is fairly big for the area.  They are all three very different wines and my clients who know these wines, know the differences and are expecting something from these three vineyards.

11.42

Clark:  In Burgundy the vineyards have the look of manicured gardens. Every stage of the winemaking process is done with the utmost care.

12.10

Lafon:  When the sugar is turned to alcohol, these goes on... down, down, down... See how this one is nine ninety-seven this morning, it's going to be dry at nine ninety-two.

12.19

Clark:  And Dominique Lafon's aim is to interfere as little as possible.

Lafon:  And I'm always amazed when I have winemakers come for harvest to help me,

12.32

12.37

from New Zealand, Australia, or California. They all, always want to do something.

12.44

Clark: So, the argument goes, new world winemakers try to make the grapes fit their idea of how a of how a wine should taste, which means reliable but rarely exciting wines.

If French winemakers go the same way then the whole character of French wine could change.

12.51

13.03

And if you're as passionate about food and wine as Bernard Louiseau then maybe there is cause for concern.

13.13

Loiseau's kitchen

Loiseau: It's great that there are good wines from Chile, South Africa or California but we in France have to keep our identity, if not we'll be drowned in world wines and we'll have problems recognising all out little vineyards.

13.21

Wine Shop

Clark: Yet by common consent the French are drinking less but better wine than they did a generation ago.

13.43

Morrison

Morrison:  We work with English supermarkets to make wine their clients want. We're doing exactly the same thing here in France. Making contact with the supermarkets and the agents to do exactly the same for the French market.

Clark: And you think the French are going to drink what you want to make?

We're showing them something different, something that they haven't discovered. It's a potential they haven't discovered in their own country.

13.49

14.06

14.11

Winery

Clark:  At Fortant de France it's full steam ahead, never mind what Bernard Loiseau thinks.

14.17

Tolleret

Tolleret:  I'm sure that Monsieur Loiseau travels a lot through the world, but he can only be convinced by the work that people do and even if it's varietal wine, it's not prostitute at all. It's wine which expresses the quality of the soils and the region where it's from. And also expresses the style of the winemaker of the company who do this wine.

14.22

Clark:  For many though, that's a huge change from the way the French have been making wine for centuries.

14.49

Clark:  You need only scratch the surface of French wine to understand just how much there is to know and treasure.

14.57

Jaboulet-Vercherre in cellar

Jaboulet-Vercherre:  Nuits St. George 1959. Richbourg, 1953. Two bottles left.

15.04

Clark:  The French have set the mark for one, and they're not about to throw it all away.

15.12

Jaboulet-Vercherre:  Montrachet 1969 and we are going to taste it, if you please.

Clark:  I'd be delighted.

Jaboulet-Vercherre:  If you accept?

Clark:  I accept.

15.17

15.54

Clark:  And even if you wanted to, is it possible to standardise wine?

15.30

FX:  Pop.

Jaboulet-Vercherre: Beautiful noise.

15.36

Clark:  The French wine industry has always taken account of foreign tastes - that's nothing new.

15.38

Jaboulet-Vercherre:  Look at this colour.

15.45

Clark:  It's golden isn't it? Intense.

Jaboulet-Vercherre and Clark taste wine

Jaboulet-Vercherre:  Every connoisseur in the world knows Montarachet is the best white wine in the world. And when you will be able to find this wine 30 years after in a new world wine, you will imagine that new world wines start to be good wines, great wines. And I hope they will succeed.

15.55

Clark:  In the meantime perhaps, let's simply pay homage to the French for bringing us this far.

16.19