Selling the French Past, Selling Wine, and Erasing Labor from Terroir

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhile the word terroir was used sparsely in wine literature dating back to the Middle Ages, our current approach to the term is largely a result of debates that began in France in the early twentieth century. It was in those debates that French wines were said to be vins de terroir because they were vins d’histoire, an expression of a “naturalized” wine-based civilization that had existed over millennia. This article examines the unsuccessful attempts by social scientists and historians to write that history with a focus on labor as a central element of terroir. I demonstrate the flexible redeployment of the language of terroir across the political spectrum at a critical moment in the creation of twentieth-century French wine policy.