Location, location, location

Wine bottles

France, Italy and Spain are renowned wine regions. Add to that America, Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina and you have 98% off the wine producing regions of the world. What do these countries all have in common? They are all situated between thirty and fifty degrees latitude. Coincidence? Absolutely not.

Major factors that effect aspect and position of vineyards are sun and light.

If you head north of the fifty degrees the hours of sunlight diminishes and so does the temperature. Vines require both these factors to be encouraged to flower and produce fruit.

Take England as an example, we have a fantastic and relatively new wine producing area in the south, especially West Sussex, home to some world beating sparkling white wine producers. It lies at 50.9 degrees latitude almost too far north for wine to be commercially made. It wasn't a random decision when this area decided to make sparkling wine. This type of wine is well suited to northern latitude. The lack of heat and sunlight doesn't allow the sugars in the grape to be converted into alcohol so works well with higher acidity grapes such as Chardonnay, which in turn is a major grape used in sparkling wine (Champagne latitude is also northerly at 47.8 degrees), thus follows the same principles that wine makers use to decide which grapes to plant in various parts of the world. Some grapes thrive in heat such as Shiraz, (Australia) and Grenache (Spain and Southern Rhone).

So whilst traditional wine producing areas are ideally located there are a lot of other countries that fit in this corridor that we hear very little about.

So what about the two biggest land masses that it intersects India and China? Where are these sleeping giants in the wine world? Well they are producing and selling in large volumes, indeed China is in the top ten of wine producers in the world. Ninety percent of its wine is for local consumption. However, Chinese wine has begun appearing on shelves in California and in Western Canada. These wines are being written off as inferior quality, much the same way that Chile, Argentina and even Australian wines were derided just fifteen years ago.

So too India has been producing wine for hundreds of years. They fell foul to the phylloxera pandemic in the nineteenth century but now wine sales are growing twenty to thirty percent year on year.

With an abundance of cheap labour and cheap land, keep an eye out in your local supermarket because it's heading to a store near you.

Note: In 2008, wine merchant Berry Brothers and Rudd predicted that within 50 years the quality of Chinese wine will rival that of Bordeaux. A sobering thought. 

Food & Wine by Paul Sheerin
Pshearse@gmail.com