The Transformation of Algeria’s Vineyards

Here is one of the strangest facts in all of wine history: for much of the twentieth century, the single largest exporter of wine on Earth was not France, Italy or Spain, but Algeria — a territory where most people, for religious reasons, never drank a drop. It is a story of empire, of a plague of insects, and of an industry that rose to dominate the world and then all but vanished in a single generation¹.

An empire plants a vineyard

When France seized Algeria in 1830, the territory produced virtually no wine. What changed everything was a disaster back home: from the 1860s the phylloxera aphid devastated the vineyards of southern France². Desperate winegrowers from the Midi crossed the Mediterranean and found in Algeria’s warm plains the perfect place to replant on a colossal scale⁵.

The growth was staggering. By the early twentieth century Algerian vineyards covered close to half a million hectares, and rivers of deep, strong red wine flowed north to France — much of it blended into weaker French wine to give it colour and body³.

By the 1930s, Algeria was the world’s largest wine exporter.— on colonial Algeria¹

The giant that fed France

This flood of cheap, powerful Algerian wine reshaped the whole Mediterranean trade. It was so abundant, and so cheap, that it helped crash prices for French growers — one of the grievances behind the great Languedoc winegrowers’ revolt of 1907. Algeria had become, improbably, the beating heart of the world’s wine export business³.

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Then it ended almost overnight. When Algeria won independence in 1962, the European settlers — the pieds-noirs who owned and ran the vineyards — largely left, taking their expertise with them⁴. The new, mostly Muslim nation had little domestic demand for wine, and France began shutting its market to Algerian imports. Over the following decades, vast vineyards were abandoned or uprooted, and one of the great wine industries in history quietly disappeared. Only in recent years have small producers begun to revive it.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• How colonialism spread the vine across Africa
• The Languedoc wine revolt of 1907
• The phylloxera plague that started it all

References

1. VinePair — Tipsy History: The Great Boom & Epic Bust of the Algerian Wine Industry. ↑
2. Wine-Searcher — Algeria’s Forgotten Wine Trade. ↑
3. Jadaliyya — Vineyards of Colonial Algeria: A History of French or Algerian Wine? ↑
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Algeria (independence, 1962). ↑
5. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Phylloxera. ↑

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine

Hugh Johnson

Places the astonishing rise of colonial vineyards in the sweep of wine history.

A Short History of Wine

Rod Phillips

Strong on wine, empire and how politics can build — and destroy — an industry.

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