French Red Wines

French Wine dates back around 2600 years, back to the 6th century BC. This is when Massalia, the second largest city in france, next to Paris, was founded. Since that year, wine has been produced and manufactured within France and it has always been welcomed as a very high quality beverage. The Romans tried very hard to push viticulture across the French lands. But to them, the land was known as Gaul. They encouraged the planting of vines in the areas that would become the well known wine regions of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Alsace, Champagne, Languedoc, Loire Valley and of course, Rhone.

Over the course of its history, the wine industry within France would be completely influenced and driven the commercial interests. The main commercial interests were created by the English and the Dutch traders. Before the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was France's largest vineyard of the time. The owners had a huge amount of influence in regions such as Champagne and Burgundy.

The Rhone region within France has gathered its own nickname across the years. Due to it's high wine production, it is known across various websites as The Rhone wine region on Southern France. It has been one of the most popular and busiest places for wine production in France since the Romans first started pushing the development of wine through the different areas of France, mentioned above.

The Rhone is divided into two sub-regions, with various distinct vinicultural traditions. There is the Northern Rhone and the Southern Rhone. In French the Northern Rhone is called the Rhone septentrional and the Southern Rhone is called the Rhone meridional.

Each region produces its own style of wine, due to the different vineyards that are spread across the different areas. The Northern region produces red wines, from the Syrah grapes that grow throughout the region. These grapes are sometimes blended with white wine grapes and white wines from the Viognier grapes, resulting in new flavours and types of wine that can then be shipped. The Southern region of Rhone produce a range of red, white and rose wines. Sometimes they even produce wines with blends of several different grapes. For example, one of the these wines is the Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

There are various AOC wines that are produced within the Rhone Valley. The Valley region are produced by over 6000 wine growing properties which includes 1837 private wineries and 103 cooperatives. There are also many vineyard owners that do not vinify their wines themselves. They simply grow their grapes, pick them and sell them in batch to one of the cooperatives or to one of 51 negociants, which includes both wine producers and merchants. These negociants then either blend, distribute or export on a huge scale, pushing the wine producing industry even more.

Bonfils is a family run business who specialise in wines. The business owns 15 estates stretching across the land from Perpignan to Montpellier. This even includes Chateaux in Bordeaux. The business is run by the sons of Jean Michel. These sons are the 6th generation of the family to take control of the business and continue to strive forward in the wine making industry. The business just over 1000 hectares of vineyards. Which makes them big enough to benefit from savings made from economies of scale, which they have been known to subsequently pass on. They just make sure that their wine is produced and is great value for the money to receive.

The interesting thing about this business, is that they don't just use their own vineyards to produce their wines. They are also negociants and they work along side other vineyards and wine producing businesses in the region. They currently have a very high quality and well respected art winery on one of their Domaines, this is known as de la Motte. This is located in the centre of their vineyards near Narbonne, with the overall capacity to produce around 10 million bottles of wine per year!

Bordeaux is known as the world's major wine industry capital. Wine is so popular there they even host their own community fair known as Vinexpo. This invites thousands of wine drinkers from around the world to share the time with all other expertise and fans. The actual wine economy in the area moves around 14.5 billion Euros every year. Bordeaux wine has been grown and produced within this French region since the eighth century and will continue to as the name only grows stronger!

The region of Bordeaux actually has around 116,160 hectares of vineyards, 57 appellations, 10000 wine producing chateaux and 13000 grape growers. Annually, the region is supposedly producing around 960 million bottles of wine. Bordeaux not only produces every day wine for any occasion, but they also produce and sell some of the most expensive bottles of wine in the world. They also continue producing some of the original bottles of wine, known as the first growth red wines. These first growths are the Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, the Chateau Margaux, the Chateau Latour, the Chateau Haut-Brion and the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild.

South West France or Sud-Ouest as it's known in French, is a large wine region covering many wine producing areas. These wine producing areas have vineyards making up a total of around 16,000 hectares.

South West France covers both the upstream areas around the rivers Dordogne and Garonne and their tributaries, as well as wine producing areas like Gascony and the Northen Basque Country.

The south west region is diverse in terms of its wine and how they are marketed, not following the common practice in the larger Bordeaux region of France.

The south west region was originally developed by the Romans, long before the Bordeaux region was planted. The south west region had a flourishing wine trade right away, with the climate being warmer and more favourable.

There are various websites all over the internet that sell high quality wines, but one of the best websites we recommend would be Good Wine Online.

Good wine online is an online store that only believes in dealing high quality wines, so everything bought off that website has passed the owners personal standards and he believes they are at a good enough quality to sell to anyone who wants to buy them. All of the wines bought and sold by the website have been researched into, and the majority of the wines are actually produced by small family run vineyards that take time to produce their wines and make sure that they are each perfect in their own way.