Baud Germaine

The wines of the Jura are mentioned by Pliny in the year 80A.D., then feature in 10th century documents coming from Arbois as well as those from Chateau-Chalon and Salins-les-Bains from the 16th century. If the beginnings of the cultivation of the vine in the region are lost, there are several trustworthy, historic witnesses to prove an ancient heritage. “La Séquanie”, the region that will become Franche-Comté, and its wines, was mentioned by Pliny in his natural history work as follows:- “[...]there has been discovered a vine which produces a fruit that imparts to its wine a strong flavour of pitch: it is the famous grape that confers such celebrity on the territory of Vienne and of which several varieties have recently enriched the territories of the Sequani [...]”. Is this is a thinly veiled allusion to the celebrated Savagnin grape that we know today? In 1732 a decree limited the list of “authorised” grape varieties thus starting the quality regulations that continue today. In addition a lot of the vines planted with these varieties disappeared. In 1774 a list of 14 “good plants for wine” was published. Henceforth this selection guaranteed the quality and added to the fame of the wines of the Jura. From the Revolution to the end of the 19th century the region continued to develop; the owners, noble and ecclesiastic, worked the majority of the most famous sites thus enabling them to develop. At the start of the 20th century, in a world of wine where the best mixed with the worst, the means to fight against fraud were derisory. In 1902 Alexis Arpin, the secretary of the “Société de viticulture d’Arbois”, joined the “Syndicat national de défense de la viticulture”. It was this that, in 1906, allowed the wine makers of Arbois to obtain a certificate of origin which guaranteed the provenance of their wines and, in addition, protected the name “vin d’Arbois” from imitators. On the 23rd February 1906, in the face of a law which ended the right of free circulation of spirits and threatened the rights of the distillers, the winemakers of Arbois, went on a tax strike. After taking some revenue men hostage, a story which made the front page of the national press, the government backed down. Still in 1906 the first wine co-operative in France was formed in Arbois. Its creators used the same model that had been used since the 19th century by the makers of the Comté cheese. Phylloxera hit the Jura first in 1879 at Beaufort then Arbois in 1886. It spread in waves until 1895 infecting vine after vine. In a few years the world of French wine went from euphoria, to concern and then to desolation. Finally it was a Jurassian, Alexis Millardet (1838 – 1902) who first proposed the principle of grafting plants onto American root stocks: a fundamental discovery for the whole of the wine industry world wide. – Description from AlexJelena    (hide)