How to read a cahier des charges

The only document that says what the name requires

Every French appellation has one. It is approved by ministerial order, published and amended from time to time, and no other text says what the name on the bottle really requires. The INAO, the national appellation authority, publishes them, and so does the growers’ federation in Bordeaux. They run 20 to 55 pages, in plain administrative French.

The structure never changes. Learn to read one and you can read all of them.

The 8 things to find

Look for	Why it matters
The geographic area	Which communes, and which parcels inside them
The varieties	Principal, accessory, and any admitted on trial, with their percentage caps
Planting density	Vines a hectare: the higher the figure, the harder each vine works
Yield, and the rendement butoir	The target and the absolute ceiling, in hectoliters a hectare
Sugar in the grapes	Grams a liter of grape juice (must): the real ripeness rule
Minimum natural alcohol	The alcohol that ripeness has to yield
Aging	The date until which the wine must be aged before it is released
Release	The date it may be sold to a drinker

What Grand Cru means, in 4 lines

Put Saint-Émilion (opens in a new tab) beside Saint-Émilion Grand Cru and the whole argument about the words Grand Cru is settled. The yield falls from 53 hectoliters a hectare to 46, and the minimum alcohol rises from 11% to 11.5%. Saint-Émilion ages to March 31 and goes on sale from April 15, both of the year after the harvest. Grand Cru ages to February 1 and goes on sale from May 15, both of the second year.

Same land, same grapes, a different discipline. The name costs the grower about 1 bottle in 8.

The method works anywhere on the map. Sauternes (opens in a new tab) beside the Médoc (opens in a new tab) gives 25 hectoliters a hectare against 55, and a harvest the law requires by hand, in successive passes. Bordeaux beside Bordeaux Supérieur makes the same point closer to home.

Read the section on the place first

Every cahier has a section, near the end of its first chapter, on the link between the place and the wine, and it is the only part written to explain rather than to legislate. It tells you which river makes the mist, which slope faces south, when the vine arrived, and what the growers think they are doing. Then go back to the numbers, and they start to make sense.

Read that section as the appellation’s own account, not as history. Its dates and stories are the growers’ case for their name, and they carry no footnotes.

Every number has a date

Cahiers get amended. The Sauternes text in force was changed by a ministerial order of March 25, 2026, and the Bordeaux text by one of May 13, 2026. A number quoted from an old edition is not wrong so much as out of date, which in this subject is the same thing.