The curious rise and fall of Algeria’s once-massive wine industry
The curious rise and fall of Algeria’s once-massive wine industry
Feb 26, 2013 6
Here’s a dinner-party brainteaser: Name the world’s largest wine exporter in the 1950s. France? Italy? Argentina? Australia? How about none of the above? You’d be on the wrong continent with any of those responses. It was Algeria.
For much of the past century, the north African country was a juggernaut, shipping more wine outside its borders than France, Italy and Spain combined.
Try to find an Algerian carignan or alicante today in your local liquor store, though, and you will almost certainly be out of luck. The country’s output has dried up like a raisin. It’s a boom-bust story chronicled in fascinating detail in a recent study by two Belgium-based economists, who say there’s more to the tale than previously thought. Though a trivial player today, the Algerian industry left a potent legacy on global wine trade in the form of France’s widely copied appellation laws, which were rooted in a movement that was designed to debase cheap African imports on the French market, the authors write.
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