Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Geneva AOC wines can now move back, in 2010, to what many of them traditionally were: wines that resulted from the marriage of grapes from Geneva, Switzerland and the part of France that sits just over the border.
The “mixed committee” charged, under the European Union and Switzerland agricultural agreement of 1999, with settling niggling agricultural details such as this, ruled 19 November that Geneva AOC wines could be made in part with grapes from clearly defined border areas. The judicial authority of the EU 9 December approved the decision.
Geneva’s winemakers have, for centuries, made wines from grapes that grow in an area which shares a common micro-climate or, in winemaking terms, grapes from a single region. Politics intervened, national boundaries were drawn, but winemakers continued to ignore the lines in order to make wine that made geographical sense: same soil, slopes, weather.
This changed in 1999 when the current bilateral agricultural agreement between the EU and Switzerland went into effect, with an understanding that both sides could review the impact of such an agreement on trade before relaxing the rules.
The November approval of a return to the old ways takes into account an improvement in trade in the past 10 years. The overall volume of trade between the two countries has grown 55 percent since 1999. Swiss agricultural exports to the EU have doubled in 10 years and EU exports to Switzerland have increased by 40 percent.