What Does Authenticity and Typicity Mean for Fine Wine? In Conversation with Felicity Carter and Pauline Vicard

Authenticity and typicity have become core values for wine drinkers—but what do those words mean? And how have their meanings shifted through time? Felicity Carter, a contributor to ARENI, turns the tables by interviewing Pauline Vicard, CEO of ARENI. This wide-ranging conversation covers history, terroir and how definitions have grown and changed over the past century.

In Conversation with Felicity Carter and Pauline Vicard, recorded December 14th, 2021

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited. To hear the whole conversation, click on the link above

Felicity Carter

We are in the middle of an authenticity revolution, driven in part by natural wine, in part by environmental concerns. And in part by changing aesthetics, as winemakers look at how they can get themselves out of the way, to allow the terroir to more fully express itself. But some of these ways of working are historically new, drawing on a modern understanding of viticulture, fermentation, and hygiene. It could be argued that some of this yearning for authenticity is in fact, a completely modern movement.

But what is authenticity? And is it the same as typicity?

Pauline, tell me about your background and how you first got interested in this topic.

Pauline Vicard

I’m thrilled to take this deep dive into both the notions of authenticity and typicity, because those two words have had a great influence in the French wine world over the last hundred years, but each time with a different context, a different interpretation and, and of course different goals and different results. And one of the things that fascinates us both before we started this conversation is how we can explore the tension between collectivity and individuality within those two.

Back to your question. I was born and raised in Burgundy. When I say this today, I can see people lighting up. Yay, Burgundy! But to me, it wasn’t that magical at the time.

The 1980s were a different time and Burgundy wasn’t a choice for my parents. They wanted to go to Beaujolais, but in the early 1980s, it was too expensive for them. So they had to go to Burgundy. They were outsiders. It was a very humble background at the time and, and a lot of hard work. Sometimes people understand the wine world as being very poetic when in fact, it’s mostly a lot of hard physical work.

Felicity Carter

Let’s, start with some definitions of the French understanding of authenticity and typicity, because I think what might be considered ‘authentic’ might be a very contested idea. What is your understanding of those words?

Pauline Vicard

‘Authenticity’, historically, is the first one that appeared, but I’ll go back to that in a minute. ‘Typicity’ is to me an interesting word, because it’s a real French word. When you look at the dictionary, it’s typically linked to wine and food. Typicity is the fact of being typical, and as an adjective means either distinctive, remarkable or original. You’ve got this tension, because typicity is something original that stands out, but is recognizable enough that it can serve as an example.

It was first used around 1979, 1980, so it’s quite a recent concept. It only entered the French dictionary in 1993.

Felicity Carter

It’s less than 30 years old. So what drove the need for a definition?

Pauline Vicard

The use of ‘typicity’ emerged in the early 1980s and at that time it was described by Jean Salette, who was a quite prominent agronomist, as a way to counter international competition. Because that’s also when the French wine world was suddenly exposed to international competition. So it was articulated as a very positive notion in order to help the consumer recognize a wine from a region, and also make them more loyal and faithful to your own region.

Felicity Carter

Was this a linguistic change alone or was it accompanied by people saying let’s define our styles, let’s find out what typicity is for us?

Pauline Vicard

A bit of both and both ‘authenticity’ and ‘typicity’ have, from the beginning, been linked to the search for quality. So if you go back a bit in time and look at the first regulations around quality, we are at the beginning of the 20th century and it’s the phylloxera crisis and France’s vineyards are ruined. What has been described as ‘copycat’ vineyards around the world have developed, because France is lacking grapes. There is a big economic crisis. And so in 1919, they started this first regulation; suddenly if your wine came from a place, then you would get a premium for it. You would get more money if your wines were coming from one of those delimited zones. But the consequences with that there were no notions of quality. It was just purely place equals higher price.

That first rule actually created more frauds. People would get a premium just for having their grapes coming from that region, so they started planting huge quantities of high-producing grapes. And Joseph Capus was really annoyed with that because for him, the good regulation was to help quality thrive. The laws of 1935, which are now the AOC rules we have, wasn’t to protect wine from fraudulent wine per se. It was to protect fine wine from ordinary wine. It was to exclude people that were not driven by quality. At that moment, they not only put an intellectual property link with the region, but also notions of quality and safeguarding quality. This duality (the AOC system being ruled both by intellectual property laws and being at the same time a quality certification) is unique in the French legal landscape, and explains a lot of the current problems with the AOC system.

The laws of 1935, which are now the AOC rules we have, wasn’t to protect wine from fraudulent wine per se. It was to protect fine wine from ordinary wine. It was to exclude people that were not driven by quality.

Pauline Vicard, Executive Director, ARENI Global

Felicity Carter

Talk about authenticity, because we didn’t define that. Can you define authenticity?

Pauline Vicard

There is not one definition. The first one is ‘not fake’. Just something which is real and not fake. Then you go to the philosophers and they would tell you that authenticity derives from autonomy and being empowered against the established power. It’s interesting to see that notion emerging in France in the 1920s with the socialist movement. Authenticity being true to oneself more than true to the established power. Going back to the chronology, authenticity was 1935 and then typicity came in the 1980s in order to define quality and being able to compete at the international level.

Then typicity slowly came to signify conformity in the 2000s. That’s when authenticity came back again in our vocabulary, this time meaning having the capacity to listen to your vineyard and not just treat the vineyards as something that would produce great wine. But as something that you are in a real relationship with.

You go to the philosophers and they would tell you that authenticity derives from autonomy and being empowered against the established power. It’s interesting to see that notion emerging in France in the 1920s with the socialist movement. Authenticity being true to oneself more than true to the established power.

Pauline Vicard, Executive Director, Areni global

Felicity Carter

This is a really interesting point because in historic winemaking, people weren’t necessarily listening to their vineyard; they were listening to whoever told them at what time they had to harvest. There’s a really great example of that at Schloss Johannisburg in Germany, where they weren’t allowed to harvest until the abbot told them. One year the abbot wasn’t available – the myth is, he’d been held up by highwaymen – so he never gave the order. The workers just had to watch as the grapes got riper and began to shrivel. When they eventually harvested them, they discovered that they’d got this really fantastic dessert wine. But it wasn’t an innovation, or what the vineyard was telling them. They had to wait for what the abbot was telling them.

So let’s unpack this, about how the modern world sees authenticity and listening to your vineyard. Can you talk about the collectivist impulse that really fired France’s wine scene?

Pauline Vicard

In the 1980s, the decade in which I grew up, there was an argument that you couldn’t have typicity without collectivism, because typicity is the style within the region. You can only get there if the methods of production were aligned. You could have typicity in the 1980s because everyone was doing the same thing. I asked my Mum about this, about how in France the start of the harvest is declared by the local representative of the French government. Every year there’s a date that allows you to start the harvest.

Mum was like, well, we have the starting date, but then mostly we would look at what the neighbors do. Or you would just start when you would have your pickers ready.

It was very much driven by what everybody else was doing. They identified a taste that was typical and everybody sort of walked backwards from there and put in place what was needed  to get that. Authenticity would be the reverse. It would be listening to the vineyard first.

Felicity Carter

When you move towards authenticity, towards listening to your vineyard, towards doing what the terroir is telling you to do, you’re actually moving away from a collective enterprise to an individualistic enterprise, which must be historically fairly new.

Pauline Vicard

That’s why we see at the end of the year 2000, people that were sick of conformity, and winemakers who had success on the international market and had wines that were considered very good, couldn’t get the appellation, because they were different. That’s when you get the movement towards Vin de France.  

I had a conversation with a winemaker, not far from where I was born. He’s a recent addition to the Burgundy wine scene. I went tasting with him and his wines were very interesting, but they were not typical at all. I asked him how did he feel about putting [the appellation] on his label, when they weren’t really typical? And he was like, “I don’t really care about Burgundy and the label, I want to do the best wine that I can do”. And I thought to some extent that was hypocritical, because the only reason he could sell that particular bottle for 40 euros was because it was coming from Burgundy. It was benefiting from all those years of collective work, but not giving credit for what’s been done before.

Felicity Carter

This loss of typicity has very interesting consequences. It’s very difficult for students now, whether they’re going through the WSET, sommelier training or the MW, to identify wines. Wines are definitely much more individual and original, but the typicity is really disappearing. Is that a good thing?

Pauline Vicard

As an MW student, I can certainly agree with you that it makes our job more difficult. Fifteen years ago, I would definitely be able to recognize Burgundy every time. I wouldn’t put my hand in that fire so easily now. But what I found on a personal level is that when you are really drinking top quality wines, recognizing the origin is easier.

Felicity Carter

What’s really interesting is that where it’s very easy to spot origin is actually in lower quality wines because they’re made in a consistent style. The one that always makes me laugh is Riverland Chardonnay. Talk to anybody who’s not from Australia and they’ll tell you these are wines of anywhere, and you can’t tell where they come from. Which I always think is because they didn’t drink enough of them as students. Once you’ve drunk enough, you can tell, regardless of whether they’re oaked, unoaked or whatever, is that they don’t speak of a place so much as scream of it.

Pauline Vicard

You also have the palate of the drinker and maybe why we can’t recognize so much today is that we don’t drink enough of each of those wines.

Felicity Carter

But the consequence of all of this is that quality has definitely gone up, across the entire world of wine. It used to be that if you could make a good quality wine you could stand out, but now good quality is the price of entry.

Pauline Vicard

The rise of authenticity is something you’ve seen in music, right?

Felicity Carter

I have lived through an authenticity movement before. It’s largely driven by a look for a link with the past. You’ll often hear people talking about this wine is the way my grandfather made it, or this is the way wine was made historically, and now we’re abandoning the bad technology and bad chemicals of the present to go back to a sort of better past, when they didn’t have all of that. Well, I saw that happen in music. I was a music student in the 90s and I trained as a classical singer.

Music in the late 19th century hit a crisis, for two reasons, one of which is less important here. But one reason was new technology. People used to use catgut and things like that to make strings. There’s only so much you can get out of a catgut. And then somebody came up with the idea of the metal strings, which vibrate much better. They’re more sonorous and give you deeper and richer tones. Music got Parkerised. Orchestras were bigger, and then they had all these amazing strings. But the physics of that much sound slows everything down and makes it more magnificent and more melodramatic. Eventually it became a parody of itself. It became kitschy. So in the 1960s, a group of people said, you know what? We’re going back to original music. It was called Early Music. Let’s go back to the way music was done before all these technological developments.

It produced amazing results. People uncovered extraordinary historical things and they stripped away all the over-the-top melodrama. But in the process of doing that, they discovered that the whole project of authenticity is actually bogus because you can’t go back to the past. One of the reasons you can’t go back to the past is you can’t unlearn what you already know. In wine, for example. I was really surprised to find that the understanding of fermentation, which comes from Louis Pasteur, is relatively late. But a modern person cannot pretend they don’t understand fermentation. It’s like people can’t unlearn what they know about viticulture and trellising. We can’t go back to the past, because we’re different people.

I have lived through an authenticity movement before. It’s largely driven by a look for a link with the past […]. But the whole project of authenticity is actually bogus because you can’t go back to the past. One of the reasons you can’t go back to the past is you can’t unlearn what you already know. […] People can’t unlearn what they know about viticulture and trellising. We can’t go back to the past, because we’re different people.

Felicity Carter, International Journalist and ARENI Global contributor

And the past isn’t a single place. It’s multiple places. What past are we talking about?

The other thing was realizing that people change within their lifetime. People love experimenting. So if you look at Mozart or Beethoven, within their own lifetimes they became different composers. Take this idea that grandpa was making wine the same way from when he started to when he died aged 70. He would have done things differently in his own lifetime, and done experiments.

Pauline Vicard

My grandma’s way of looking at agriculture has changed so much in a lifetime, that’s for sure. We keep evolving as people, as a society.

One thing is that when authenticity is the past, you kind of have to be poor to be authentic. Authenticity is poor people’s stuff. I’ll give you an example. I had a panel with some senior people, and we were exploring notions of luxury. And some people on the panel were saying, luxury is sheets washed in a river, or going camping and eating beans out of a can. And I was like, that’s only luxury if you are very wealthy and if those are a choice. Being outside all the time is not luxury or authenticity, it’s being poor.

You kind of have to be poor to be authentic. Authenticity is poor people’s stuff. I’ll give you an example. I moderated a panel with some senior people, and we were exploring notions of luxury. And some people on the panel were saying, luxury is sheets washed in a river, or going camping and eating beans out of a can. And I was like, that’s only luxury if you are very wealthy and if those are a choice. Otherwise it is neither luxury nor authenticity, it’s just being poor.

Pauline Vicard, Executive Director, ARENI Global

Felicity Carter

There’s also a new definition of what the outside world sees as authentic about wine. The authenticity story goes like this: it’s family owned and it’s small. I find that really interesting because first of all, it delegitimizes other forms of winemaking.

Pauline Vicard

Eighty percent of French agriculture is outside of the family business now. When I was growing up, being a family winery meant it was a family project. It was a lifestyle and you were not business-like or educated. The dad was working full time, the mum was helping out four or five hours a day, but she wasn’t even declared. My Mum had half of her life not counting for anything. And then suddenly now 80% are outside of that model. So the dad or the man can still be full-time, but the mum will be working and have a side job. It means that now you’ve got to employ people. You need to know how to manage people. And you have to find those people to work for you. So suddenly you go from being family operated to being a manager. And it’s a totally different business model.

Suddenly now 80% (of French agriculture) are outside of that (family) model. It means that now you’ve got to employ people. You need to know how to manage people. And you have to find those people to work for you. So suddenly you go from being family operated to being a manager. And it’s a totally different business model.

Pauline Vicard, Executive Director, ARENI Global

I wouldn’t want my Mum to go back to not existing for the French government and not having retirement money. My Mum literally had no status until her midlife.

Felicity Carter

Let’s talk about cooperatives. Define what a cooperative is and how they came about.

Pauline Vicard

Everyone owns their own land, but they will bring the grapes to be processed together. Every winemaker gets a vote. And so it’s all decided collectively. It started in the 19th, early 20th century in Europe. It was mainly to keep people on the land and maintain rural activity. In France it was also seen as a way to bring research and education to the rural part of the country.

It was also a political tool. In the beginning of the 20th century, France was using cooperatives as a way to develop socialism as well, bringing the working class of the countryside together against the big private producer.

Felicity Carter

Let’s talk about where the cooperative sits on the authenticity scale because one of the things about cooperatives is that – with some shining exceptions – most cooperatives don’t produce fine wine, and they can’t. They have to take everybody’s grapes. They have tank farms and all the things that go along with processing very high volumes of wine, yet they are important social enterprises.

Pauline Vicard

If typicity means conformity, I think we can say they’re very typical. The second shift in the history of the cooperative is when they started to export. And when you start to export, you have to comply with all the requirements and all the hygiene, and so they had to make a lot of change to comply with that, and we’ve seen the overall rise of quality across France and Europe. 

And now, when you talk about social sustainability, cooperatives can be a beautiful tool, right? It’s keeping people on the land and empowering small owners.

When you look at typicity and authenticity, it’s trying to understand your identity. Your identity as a person, as a wine maker, but also your identity as a group, as a region, and some cooperatives have done great work in that field.

Felicity Carter

I’ve got a final question for you. I read something in The Drinks Business which really intrigued me, about a purchase in the Barossa Valley by Alejandro Bulgheroni, who is an oil billionaire from South America. He’s getting some of the world’s top consultants to go and look at the geology, the viticulture, to make the wine. He’s looking to make wine that is organic and based on terroir, but which will have a different profile from most of the wines in the Barossa. The terroir may speak more strongly, but where does this fit into authenticity? If you’re not a local and you’re not part of the local community, not part of that 170 years of history, what’s authentic, what’s not authentic? In the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, I would argue that taking away the history of the place makes it less authentic, but if I am correctly understanding the French sense of the word, this is a highly authentic project.

Pauline Vicard

Part of the French definition would consider this to be authentic in the way that you’re really listening to the vineyard, but if we look at the AOC system, we never really think about what could be, we always start from what is, and what’s historically been determined. Our system is based on ” les usages locaux, loyaux et constants” – local, loyal and constant. You can understand authenticity as loyal and sincere. The last constant is relations through time. So it’s only time that can give you quality.

Felicity Carter

To sum up: this hurtling towards evermore authenticity, what does this mean for the collective? Are we going to need new collective models?

Pauline Vicard

Yeah. Authenticity 2.0.


Correction: In the podcast, Felicity Carter tells the story of late-harvest Riesling but refers to Schloss Vollrads. The correct winery is Schloss Johannisberg. This has been corrected in the text.


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