Last month another wine négociant was found guilty of wine fraud. This time it was quite audacious.
Didier Chopin had been buying bulk wines from Spain and Southern France, blending them and adjusting the flavours before carbonating the wine, bottling it and selling it as Champagne.
He is estimated to have sold hundreds of thousands of bottles between 2022 and 2023 with a value of several million Euros. He wasn’t selling this fake Champagne in dodgy Parisian cafés or exporting it to gullible importers in Asia. He was mainly selling it to the Leclerc supermarket chain, who pride themselves on having the most authentic wine range of any French supermarket!
His sentence was a €100,000 fine and a four-year prison sentence, three of which are suspended. His wine company was fined a further €300,000. To me that sounds pretty light, given the amount of money he made.
There are strict rules surrounding the classification and labelling of French wines. Most French wines are marketed based on the origin of the grapes used. There are three categories of regional branding. Appellation d’Origine Protégée (AOP) is the top tier, covering famous names like Chablis, Sancerre, Bordeaux and Côtes du Rhône, as well as lesser-known areas like Corbières and Muscadet.
The second category covers wines from larger geographical areas and less strict rules on use of grape varieties. They were formerly known as Vin de Pays but are now called Indication Géographique Protégée (IGP). Examples include Pays d’Oc and Val de Loire.
Finally, wines which do not conform to the IGP or AOP regulations and wines blended from multiple regions can be sold under the category of Vin de France.
Desirable appellations like Champagne, Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Haut-Médoc can sell for many times the price of those with a lesser AOP or an IGP, or those having only the Vin de France classification.
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A lot of French wine is not estate-produced and bottled, contrary to popular belief. Many of the bottles found in supermarkets, especially in other countries, have passed through the hands of négociants and been blended (legally) with wines from many different growers and wineries.
These companies buy grapes, juice and wine from multiple sources, including caves cooperatives and independent estates, to blend, age and modify into wines which they sell under their own label or that of a corporate client, for example a supermarket own-brand or the house wine of a restaurant chain.
Multi-source wines
Some of the best-selling wines in France are such multi-source wines. If you have bought wines bearing the brand names Roche Mazet, Gérard Bertrand, Paul Mas, Mouton Cadet or JP Chenet, you have been drinking wines blended from many different vineyards.
As long as wines from AOPs are only blended with other ones from the same AOP, the négociant can use the AOP name on the bottle. Even if wines are transported in tankers and bottled hundreds of kms from their region of origin, a paper-trail which certifies the source and category of the wine is used to guarantee authenticity.
This system is administered by the douanes, the French customs authority responsible for payment of appropriate duties and protecting the consumer from fraud.
The douanes regularly verify producers by audits of the physical stocks of wine and the inventory records. The paper trail can be quite complicated which is why it can take years before the douanes have enough evidence to intervene.
Because consumers are willing to pay significantly more for a prestigious or well-known AOP than a lesser one, there is always the temptation to fraudulently blend or reclassify wine higher up the prestige hierarchy. Not many tasters could actually tell if their bottle of Châteauneuf actually contained 20% Côtes du Rhône or even some Grenache imported from Spain, particularly if the négociant has been smart in their fraudulent blending.
Négociant reblends
It’s also true that an AOP label is no guarantee of high quality. There are plenty of mediocre Saint-Emilion and Bourgogne wines out there, even those bottled by individual estates.
Négociants may have the best interests of the consumer in mind if they decided to improve a poor-quality but famous AOP wine by adding a better-quality wine from another AOP or IGP to balance out a defect. They are perfectly entitled to do that, so long as they reclassify the wine legally to a lesser AOP or to Vin de France. If they sell such a blend under the original AOP, they are committing fraud.
As well as cutting prestigious wines with cheaper ones, some négociants are bold enough to rebrand whole batches of cheap wine as something more desirable by illegally altering the paper trail.
So while the consumer may not necessarily be getting a worse bottle of wine when négociants illegally blend in ‘lesser’ wines, they are not getting what they think they are buying and the négociant is getting paid more than they should.
Perhaps more importantly for the wine trade, these forms of fraud undermine consumer confidence in France’s wine regulations and AOPs, which can damage sales of honestly labelled wines.
Wine scams: What to look for
One of the easiest ways to protect yourself from being a victim of such fraud is to only buy estate-produced wines. In France, the legal distinction between a négociant and a récoltant is quite distinct. A récoltant grows, makes and bottles their own wine and cannot buy in grapes or wine from other sources. So their ability to blend fraudulently is extremely limited.
A capital letter ‘N’ on a wine’s tax capsule signifies it was made by a négociantBalkansCat
You can spot a récoltant wine by looking at the top of the the tax capsule. It will either have the words “Récoltant” or “R” for short. If it says “Négociant” or has the letter N or E, it’s bottled by a négociant. So inspecting the top of the bottle is just as important as knowing the name of the AOP when trying to choose a good and authentic wine.
It is also worth noting that independent wine shops or cavistes are more likely to know the true source of the wines they sell than a supermarket, that seem to be the targets of this kind of fraud.
Jonathan Hesford holds a WSET Level 3 and a Postgraduate Diploma in Viticulture and Oenology from Lincoln University, New Zealand. He is the owner and winemaker of Domaine Treloar in Roussillon, www.domainetreloar.com.
