Winemaker Maxime Chapoutier could be arrested if he tried to promote two of his latest wines in his native France.

“There would doubtless be outrage about these wines in France, and that may be an excellent factor,” he says. “Generally you could be provocative to drive change.”

The 2 bottles in query, one white and one crimson, could be unlawful in France as a result of they’re created from a mix of French and Australian base wines.

Beneath each French and European Union legislation it’s forbidden to make a wine that mixes EU and non-EU fruit. In France specifically, authorities take such issues very significantly.

The French wine business has a celebrated phrase known as “terroir”, which applies to all of the environmental elements that have an effect on vines rising in a winery, such the soil, the local weather, and the elevation. Consequently, wines from a selected place are held within the highest esteem.

Add a strict appellation or classification system for France’s wine areas, and the considered mixing French and Australian wine to create a worldwide hybrid would horrify many French wine lovers.

But Maxime has executed simply this, and it’s all thanks to at least one phrase – Brexit.

For whereas he can not promote the 2 wines within the EU, he can accomplish that within the UK now that London not has to comply with food and drinks guidelines set by Brussels.

Maxime has created the wines in partnership with UK on-line retailer The Wine Society, the place they’re known as Hemispheres Crimson and Hemispheres White. The crimson is created from syrah grapes, or shiraz as they’re known as in Australia, whereas the white is a mix of marsanne and viognier varieties.

The Australian crimson and white wine elements are shipped in bulk to the UK, the place they’re blended with wine from France’s northern Rhone and Roussillon areas earlier than bottling.

Maxime who works for his household’s celebrated Rhone-based wine firm Chapoutier, say that whereas he respects France’s give attention to terroir, there ought to be room for world blends to even be offered.

“Chapoutier has been making wine for greater than 200 years, very terroir pushed, and biodynamic,” he says. “However increasingly individuals are turning their again on French wines as a result of they do not perceive the difficult appellation guidelines.

“We have to adapt for customers and make wines extra accessible, which worldwide blends may help to do. Perhaps the EU legislation will change. It is usually extra ecological to ship wine from Australia to Europe in bulk, as you do not have the burden of all of the glass bottles.”

One other wine firm now making wines by combining grapes from two continents is Australian agency Penfolds. It sells reds created from each Australian and Californian grapes, and others that blend Australian and French. Once more they can’t be offered within the EU, however they will within the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere.

Penfolds refers to those blends as “wine of the world”, and says that they “possess an otherness that may finest be described as worldly”. No matter that’s purported to imply.

Unsurprisingly, some extra conventional winemakers should not in favour of this growth. One such individual is Jas Swan, an unbiased winemaker primarily based in Germany.

Whereas the two-continent blends from Chapoutier and Penfolds are made with care from high quality grapes, and priced accordingly, she is fearful that if the development grows it would imply much more low cost, low-grade wine occurring sale.

“I consider that these sorts of wine would don’t have anything left of any terroir, even earlier than they left their continent,” she says. “These wines would have seen solely machine work, heavy additions to maintain them clear, and are manufactured to be simple to drink for the plenty.

“Why can customers not be extra demanding? The consumerism is insane.”

Peter Richards, who holds the highest world wine business qualification, the grasp of wine (MW), can also be sniffy. “The notion of cross-country mixing for wine is not one thing I discover outrageous in itself,” he says. “My concern is extra that that is about creating novelty for novelty’s sake.”

His spouse, Susie Barrie, who can also be an MW, provides: “I stay to be satisfied {that a} wine made by mixing grapes from completely different international locations could be nice when it comes to style.”

In contrast, wine author Jamie Goode says that growth of two-continent wine “is definitely fairly a enjoyable thought”.

“If the wines are good, and made nicely from good winery websites – and never merely a gimmick mixing collectively low cost bulk wines after which slapping an enormous margin on the wine – then that is fairly attention-grabbing.

“The elemental foundation for nice wine is the notion of terroir – that wines come from a spot, and their flavour expresses this place in distinctive methods. However not all wines should be terroir wines, and there is room for wines like this.

“In some methods, there’s a whole lot of talent required to mix the appropriate wines collectively to create one thing attention-grabbing coming from such completely different locations.”

Pierre Mansour, head of shopping for for The Wine Society, says he and his colleagues got here up with the concept of making two wines created from grapes from completely different continents as a part of the corporate’s one hundred and fiftieth birthday celebrations.

“We have been interested by the way forward for wine, and we wished to do one thing revolutionary. In the long run we thought that one space of innovation is mixing, of making a wine that may mitigate for the affect of local weather change on a selected nation.

“And from a carbon footprint out of view, it’s extra environmentally pleasant to ship wine in bulk from Australia to the UK. However on the similar time we did count on ‘terroirists’ to say ‘maintain on that is basically towards the French principal of wine’.

“So we approached Chapoutier, pondering that they may say ‘are you mad, how dare you insult us’, however they have been nice. They have been actually enthusiastic.”