Paris - The long-scorned table wines of France are becoming sexy at last. As the French government attempts to legislate the country's wine industry out of its crisis, a growing number of wine makers, frustrated by outmoded industry regulations, are using the lowly table wine to unleash their creativity and attract new customers. While Italian table wines have long enjoyed a stellar reputation, in France the classification has for decades been derided as "plonque" or rotgut.
But as the domestic wine market dried up and foreign sales for all but the up-market Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne wines slumped, many wine makers decided the problem was the stifling system under which they worked and saw the table wine as a means of liberating themselves.
The results have been nothing less than sensational.
According to Pierre Quinonero, who owns the highly reputed Domaine de la Garance in the south of France, "If the wine is good today, it is more likely to be a table wine."
Quinonero's top-shelf wine from 2007 happens to be a table wine, Les Armieres, which the influential trade magazine La Revue du Vin de France (The French Wine Review) rated one of the best Languedoc wines of the year, calling it a "magnificent pure wine, straight and sincere, polished, very well made."
Quinonero said he makes table wine because it enables him to make the best wine possible. "I refuse to enter into a norm," he said. "I forbid myself to make a bad wine."
He slammed the French system for bringing about what he calls the standardization of wines, rather than producing a diversity of tastes that reflect the variety of French soils and wine makers.
"With cheese, the system of classification works," he said. "For example, when you find a cheese in the supermarket that is classified Roquefort, you can be sure that it's of high quality. With wine, it's just not so."
The French system of classifying and regulating the origin and quality of its wines is known as Appellation d'Origine Controlee (Regulated Classification of Origin), or AOC. Its regulations specify the region from which a particular wine must originate and the conditions under which it must be produced.
It was created in 1935 as a response to the great demand for wine during the first half of the 20th century and the rampant fraud and adulteration that accompanied that wine boom.
Currently, French wines are categorized in four grades: Appellation d'Origine Controlee (AOC), Appellation d'Origine Vin de Qualite Superieure (AOVDQS), Vin de Pays and Vin de Table.
AOC wines comprise the most prestigious and most expensive wines and are subject to the strictest regulations, including a specified production zone, low maximum yields, the varieties used, the minimum alcohol content, cultivation techniques, tasting criteria and sometimes even specific aging conditions.
Table wines are the least regulated of all classifications, and that has opened the door for wine makers like Quinonero.
"The regulations are badly managed," Quinonero said, and charged that because they reflect a majority view they all taste alike.
"They eliminate what is minority in the interest of a certain standardization. That kills creativity," he said.
The four friends who have banded together under the un-typical, un-French sobriquet of the Rhone Gang agree wholeheartedly with this grievance, and they have stretched the looseness of French table wine regulations almost to their limit.
The Rhone Gang consists of three independent and successful young wine makers and the wine agent Arnaud de Chanonie, founder and president of the Avitus wine agency.
Chanonie said the name was born when he and his colleagues were greeted in Japan with the statement, "Ah, here comes the Rhone Gang again."
On the Rhone Gang's web site (which is available only in English, Japanese and Korean) they describe themselves as "wine makers (who) dreamed of a day when they were not in a hold up by all the bureaucratic limitations of the current AOC and (could) explore their artisan roots by creating new blends like their fathers and grandfathers did when free trade and free idea exchange were the norm and not the exception."
"Table wine gives space for freedom to people who want to make wine differently. It gives flexibility in price, labeling and wine making," Chanonie said.
For example, the Rhone Gang's table wine called, ironically, Hold Up, is, he said, "a blend of varietals never used together before," Pinot Noir and Grenache.
But what's inside the bottle isn't the only remarkable aspect of Hold Up: its label looks more like the cover of a new hiphop CD or a whimsical poster for a spaghetti Western than the traditionally staid sticker you find on a bottle of French wine.
Chanonie said the reason he and his associates made a table wine is because "we wanted produce different wines." Working with the classification was "very useful to have freedom and flexibility."
He said that the traditionally bad reputation of French table wines has had no negative impact on sales. The Hold Up from 2006 and another table wine produced by the Rhone Gang, Wanted from the year 2005, had sold out, both abroad - in the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea and Singapore - and in France.
But things are far from ideal even in the most unrestricted of French classifications.
For one thing, regulations forbid table wines from displaying the vintage on the label, so wine makers must resort to tricks. For example, Chanonie's Hold Up 2006 has the phrase "hold up Nr. 6" in small print in the bottom right-hand corner of the label.
And the regulations force restaurants to place table wines at the very bottom of their wine lists.
"Even producing a table wine in France is a hell of a challenge," Chanonie sighed.
