Vacation in the Appellations
By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish
The French do a thing with Champagne that we Americans find strange. They forbid any sparkling wine produced outside a specific region to carry the label “Champagne.” Examples from beyond the borders of this tiny geographic area must be sold under other names, such as “sparkling wine.”
“Guys, that’s stupid,” you say. “It’s elitist, and smacks of protectionism, or at least a needless amount of government meddling in consumer affairs.” The French, believe it or not, would disagree. The law, termed an Appellation, protects not only the grape growers and producers of Champagne from economic oblivion from competing with the wider world; it also protects the traditions and the very essence of the Champagne style, immortalizing the bubbly wine against the greater cultural tableau.
Jeez, we just used the phrase “greater cultural tableau.” Maybe we ARE elitist…
Anyway, to truly see the value of appellation laws, just look at the lack of them in beer. Big brewers’ marketing machines build share-grabbing ad campaigns based on co-opted traditions, watered down, repackaged, and sold at discount price.
The most egregious example is what they did to pilsner, an almost two-hundred-year old Czech style that revolutionized beer.
Pilsner popped into existence in 1842, in the city of Pilsen, in whatever the Czech Republic was back then. Unsatisfied with the brown beer of the day, which tended to vary in quality from bad to abysmal, the people of Pilsen built a brewery and hired the famously asocial brewer Josef Groll, who at the time was doing some of the earliest work with lager yeasts in Munich. Groll combined lager yeast and newly available pale malts. His resulting brew changed beer forever.
In contrast to the brown beer of the day, pilsner came out a striking deep gold, with a foamy, soapy head. The Czech Saaz hops imparted a snappy, sharp bitterness at the end of every sip, beckoning the taster back into the glass for another.
The beautiful, delicious beer caused a lager revolution that spread across Europe, and subsequently the world. That very taste change holds North America in its thrall today, except the beer produced by the largest breweries bears little resemblance to the original pilsner style.
That tidbit, however, does nothing to deter international brewing chains from calling their beer a pilsner directly on the bottle label. As a result, millions of Americans have no idea what a pils is supposed to taste like, but think they do! How does this do justice to one of the finest and most important beer styles in brewing history?
An appellation law could have protected pilsner, instead of allowing the style’s co-option by mega-money businesses and the wringing out of the style–and the region’s–very soul.
It’s the products of small regions that are most threatened by cultural identity theft, and some governments understand this. In 1997, the German government extended appellation-type protection to Kölsch, the light specialty ale of Cologne.
In a world full of larger problems, this sounds kinda petty, but many folks take the preservation of culture, and of culinary heritage, very seriously. And mass-marketing strips people of both, converting the things that make a place historic and special into bland plastic, assuredly inoffensive to as large a slice of the market as possible. It does a disservice to the consumer, and prompts consumers to do further disservice to themselves. EPCOT center is a nice place to visit, but who wants to live there?
Now please excuse us. There are a couple of Pilsners with our names on them.
Bruce is a certified beer judge and former commercial brewer. Mark owns a laptop and likes beer. For more on beer, check out the beercraft blog, updated regularly, at http://www.beercraftsite.com. Send your questions, suggestions, or comments to beercraft@rochester.rr.com.
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