At your next dinner party there is a question about wine that you can ask your guests, which I can almost guarantee everyone will get wrong. Which country was the world’s leading wine exporter in the 1950’s? France? Italy? Spain or perhaps even Germany? All wrong…… it was Algeria! Now, where it all went, and how it was consumed is another story.

The story of the Algerian wine industry is quite interesting, and also more significantly, precipitated the creation of the French laws of appellation. After the disaster of phylloxera in the 1860’s the French were initially left scrambling about in Spain and Italy in an attempt to satisfy the demand for wine in their domestic market. In the late 19th century the French turned to their relatively new Colony of Algeria to try to fill the gap. With the aid of French wine growers who had settled there, they produced enormous volumes of cheap, high alcohol wine which arrived in France tax-free (as the country was treated as a part of France). At this time the total volume of wine exports accounted for around one third of Algeria’s gross domestic product and half of its total export revenues!

Originally this was advertised as French wine, which, as the French vineyards themselves started to recover from disease, was not well received by the growers still residing in France. In response to protests (made most vigorously by the producers of Champagne, Bordeaux and Burgundy), the French government created some rather flimsy laws in an attempt to protect their home-grown wines. These were eventually formalised into the French rules of Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, thus authenticating the origin of wines. Although these new rules protected the French quality wines, the table wine producers of the Languedoc still faced still competition from Algeria, and so instead of taxing the wines themselves, which would have been somewhat unpalatable (pardon the pun), the French government decided to tax the over productive vineyards. This in itself however, did not cause the demise of the industry, as recently as 1961 Algeria was still the world’s 4th largest wine producer – it was really when the French withdrew altogether from the country, and the industry was Nationalised and consequently badly mismanaged, that the wheels well and truly fell off and production volumes tumbled back to the original 19th century levels.

Historically therefore, Algeria has inadvertently played an important part in the history of world wine production, not only for its sheer size, but also for being instrumental in the creation of the original AOC laws. 

And who or what  is Sidi Brahim? Well, it’s actually a famous Algerian wine brand named after the Battle of Sidi-Brahim, which to this day is still sold quite widely in France. Indeed, as recently as the 1960’s people in France used to joke about one or two of the more feeble Burgundy or Bordeaux wines being ‘boosted’ by adding a bit of the heavier, more alcoholic Sidi Brahim!!

At your next dinner party there is a question about wine that you can ask your guests, which I can almost guarantee everyone will get wrong. Which country was the world’s leading wine exporter in the 1950’s? France? Italy? Spain or perhaps even Germany? All wrong…… it was Algeria! Now, where it all went, and how it was consumed is another story.

The story of the Algerian wine industry is quite interesting, and also more significantly, precipitated the creation of the French laws of appellation. After the disaster of phylloxera in the 1860’s the French were initially left scrambling about in Spain and Italy in an attempt to satisfy the demand for wine in their domestic market. In the late 19th century the French turned to their relatively new Colony of Algeria to try to fill the gap. With the aid of French wine growers who had settled there, they produced enormous volumes of cheap, high alcohol wine which arrived in France tax-free (as the country was treated as a part of France). At this time the total volume of wine exports accounted for around one third of Algeria’s gross domestic product and half of its total export revenues!

Originally this was advertised as French wine, which, as the French vineyards themselves started to recover from disease, was not well received by the growers still residing in France. In response to protests (made most vigorously by the producers of Champagne, Bordeaux and Burgundy), the French government created some rather flimsy laws in an attempt to protect their home-grown wines. These were eventually formalised into the French rules of Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, thus authenticating the origin of wines. Although these new rules protected the French quality wines, the table wine producers of the Languedoc still faced still competition from Algeria, and so instead of taxing the wines themselves, which would have been somewhat unpalatable (pardon the pun), the French government decided to tax the over productive vineyards. This in itself however, did not cause the demise of the industry, as recently as 1961 Algeria was still the world’s 4th largest wine producer – it was really when the French withdrew altogether from the country, and the industry was Nationalised and consequently badly mismanaged, that the wheels well and truly fell off and production volumes tumbled back to the original 19th century levels.

Historically therefore, Algeria has inadvertently played an important part in the history of world wine production, not only for its sheer size, but also for being instrumental in the creation of the original AOC laws. 

And who or what  is Sidi Brahim? Well, it’s actually a famous Algerian wine brand named after the Battle of Sidi-Brahim, which to this day is still sold quite widely in France. Indeed, as recently as the 1960’s people in France used to joke about one or two of the more feeble Burgundy or Bordeaux wines being ‘boosted’ by adding a bit of the heavier, more alcoholic Sidi Brahim!!