1935 · France
France creates the AOC system
The Comité National — later the INAO — was established to define and police appellations, and the model spread worldwide.
What happened
The 1935 decree created the body that became the Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité and gave it power to define appellations: their boundaries, permitted varieties, yields, minimum alcohol and cultivation methods.
The motivation was fraud. Phylloxera had cut production drastically, and the shortfall had been filled by wine sold under names it had no right to — a crisis that had already produced riots in Champagne in 1911 and in the Languedoc in 1907.
Châteauneuf-du-Pape had pioneered the approach locally in the 1920s under Baron Le Roy, whose estate-level rules on delimitation and grape varieties became the template.
The model was copied widely: Italy’s DOC in 1963, Spain’s modern DO framework, and eventually the EU-wide PDO and PGI system.
It is worth being clear about what an appellation guarantees. It guarantees origin and conformity to a set of rules. It does not, and was never designed to, guarantee that the wine is good.
How firmly this is dated
Documented. Recorded contemporaneously. The date is not in question.
The founding decree-law of 30 July 1935 and the institutional record of the body it created.
People: Joseph Capus, Baron Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié
What this follows from, and leads to
A timeline is a list; these are the links between its entries.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO) — INAO, France
- eAmbrosia — the EU geographical indications register — European Commission
- Regulation (EU) No 1308/2013 — Common Organisation of Agricultural Markets — European Union