I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, As more wine regions adopt AOC-like systems that control which varieties may be produced in a place.

Oftentimes, grape varieties become so mentally attached to certain regions

that it's difficult to think of any other grape variety existing there.

Rules tend to narrow rather than expand allowable grape varieties,

and this further focuses the association of certain areas with certain grapes.

This is of course great for the varieties that are written into law and great for marketing,

but it's not so great for the varieties that are forgotten or the ones that are billed by the press as less serious wines

Pino Blanch for instance becomes rarer and rarer in Champagne

Cesar is a footnote in Burgundy,

and each year there seems to be less and less

allegote in the market.

In older wine regions, there's a sort of zeitgeist that this is the way things have always been.

But if you look back over the last few centuries, two main events,

Veloxera and the 1956 frost, these two events killed wide swaths of vineyards.

And that kind of mass replanting forces people to focus their vineyards

based on available replanting material.

And many replanted with higher percentages of the grapes that were likely to bring a faster, larger crop so that they'd have less loss.

The focusing in on certain grape varieties, you'll find a similar trend in newer

wine regions that in attempts to cast their identity, they'll choose a few grapes to become

ambassadors of the wine region.

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