Wondering how good the most popular French wines are? Thankfully, Vivino’s 23 million users drink a lot a lot of it, so we can tell which ones are the most popular and if they're any good. We dug into Vivino’s data to find out. Italy is the biggest wine-producing country in the world in terms of volume, but at over 25% of the global total of exports, France is the leader in value. Given that France also produces the 10 most expensive wines in the world, it’s no surprise. (Wondering how good the other popular wines are? Find out here: Top 25 Most Popular Italian Wines and the Most Popular Wines in the US.) France also makes a lot of reasonably priced wine, so we analyzed the top 50 most popular French wines to help you choose which are worth buying next.70 percent of the most popular French wines on Vivino are high-end Bordeaux wines, mostly Grand Cru Classés from the Left Bank Médoc area. To learn more about these wines and what are Cru Classés, wines check out my Guide to Bordeaux Wine Classifications.

The eight first growths from Bordeaux are some of the best and most popular reds in the world, and they also receive high ratings from the Vivino community, all averaging 4.5 or 4.6 stars! Other top wines here are from the famous and fine villages along the Left Bank of the Gironde estuary: Margaux, Pauillac, Saint-Julien, and Saint-Estèphe. If you are wondering why wines from the Right Bank, which consists of famous appellations like Saint-Emilion and Pomerol, are so little represented here, it is probably because Right Bank estates are smaller, and their wines are therefore less widely available worldwide. The same applies to the best Burgundy wines, absent from the most popular list because they are much scarcer in the international market. If you're feeling inspired to bring home a bottle? French reds with at least 4 stars under $50 is a spectacular place to start. While many of Vivino’s most popular French wines are expensive, we also see that superior French wines are not only the privilege of the elite that can afford the world’s best.

Several of our most popular and affordable red wines can broadly be found on many wine merchants’ shelves. buy red wine india onlineThese include the number one most popular French wine, Mouton-Cadet Bordeaux. best white wine for gift givingThere are also tasty examples from the South of France, Languedoc and Rhône, such as:best red wine flavor The average rating of these wines ranges from 3.3 to 3.5 stars, making them solid value options. top france wine regionsAt a slightly higher price tag, the Saint-Émilion Grand Cru by the village’s cooperative winery called Union de Producteurs de Saint-Émilion is also broadly appreciated within the Vivino community.best way to store red wine once opened

We all know that fine French Champagne is adored by wine lovers around the globe. But did you know that the French drink 53% of their Champagne themselves, domestically?best wine and beer blogs In 2014, the French drank over 162 million bottles of Champagne, nearly three bottles per person. The rest of the seven billion people on Earth had to share the remaining 145 million bottles that were exported! That said, there is enough Champagne available globally for Vivino users to taste and generously share ratings for. Seven of the Top 50 most popular French wines are Champagne, non-vintage cuvées from famous houses such as: Dom Pérignon is the only Prestige Cuvée here, but it’s the third most popular French wine overall, and with an outstanding 4.5 star average rating! Did you notice that I haven’t mentioned many still white wines so far? Of the 50 most popular French wines, only two still white wines made the cut.

One mentioned earlier is the famous sweet Botrytis wine Château d'Yquem Sauternes. The other is a very well made, crisp and fruity white from the Rhone Valley: E. Guigal Côtes Du Rhône Blanc. Many ultra-famous French wines from popular regions such as the Loire, Burgundy, Alsace, Languedoc-Roussillon, or Beaujolais are overshadowed by Bordeaux and Champagne in this list. There is however a Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine from the largest producer in the appellation that made the cut: Château Mont-Redon Châteauneuf-du-Pape. And voilà, there you have it, now go out and get yourself a bottle of French wine. Rank - Wine Name - Average Star RatingJulien is the founder of Social Vignerons winner of the 2015 Best New Wine Blog from the Wine Blog Awards. Follow him on Vivino and on Twitter.We regret the duplication of material. On May 24, 1976, the British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organized a blind tasting of French and Californian wines. Spurrier was a Francophile and, like most wine experts, didn’t expect the New World upstarts to compete with the premiers crus from Bordeaux.

He assembled a panel of eleven wine experts and had them taste a variety of Cabernets and Chardonnays1 blind, rating each bottle on a twenty-point scale. The results shocked the wine world. According to the judges, the best Cabernet at the tasting was a 1973 bottle from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley. When the tasting was repeated a few years later—some judges insisted that the French wines had been drunk too young—Stag’s Leap was once again declared the winner, followed by three other California Cabernets. These blind tastings (now widely known as the Judgment of Paris) helped to legitimate Napa vineyards. But now, in an even more surprising turn of events, another American wine region has performed far better than expected in a blind tasting against the finest French châteaus. Ready for the punch line? The wines were from New Jersey. The tasting was closely modelled on the 1976 event, featuring the same fancy Bordeaux vineyards, such as Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Haut-Brion.

The Jersey entries included bottles from the Heritage Vineyards in Mullica Hill and Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes. The nine judges were French, Belgian, and American wine experts.2 The Judgment of Princeton didn’t quite end with a Jersey victory—a French wine was on top in both the red and white categories—but, in terms of the reassurance for those with valuable wine collections, it might as well have. Clos des Mouches only narrowly beat out Unionville Single Vineyard and two other Jersey whites, while Château Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion topped Heritage’s BDX. The wines from New Jersey cost, on average, about five per cent as much as their French counterparts. And then there’s the inconsistency of the judges: the scores for that Mouton Rothschild, for instance, ranged from 11 to 19.5. On the excellent blog Marginal Revolution, the economist Tyler Cowen highlights the analysis of the Princeton professor Richard Quandt3, who found that almost of all the wines were “statistically undistinguishable” from each other.

This suggests that, if the blind tasting were held again, a Jersey wine might very well win. What can we learn from these tests? First, that tasting wine is really hard, even for experts. Because the sensory differences between different bottles of rotten grape juice are so slight—and the differences get even more muddled after a few sips—there is often wide disagreement about which wines are best. For instance, both the winning red and white wines in the Princeton tasting were ranked by at least one of the judges as the worst. The perceptual ambiguity of wine helps explain why contextual influences—say, the look of a label, or the price tag on the bottle—can profoundly influence expert judgment. This was nicely demonstrated in a mischievous 2001 experiment led by Frédéric Brochet at the University of Bordeaux. In one test, Brochet included fifty-four4 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring.

But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert said that it was “jammy,”5 while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Another test that Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle bore the label of a fancy grand cru, the other of an ordinary vin de table. Although they were being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the bottles nearly opposite descriptions. The grand cru was summarized as being “agreeable,” “woody,” “complex,” “balanced,” and “rounded,” while the most popular adjectives for the vin de table included “weak,” “short,” “light,” “flat,” and “faulty.” The results are even more distressing for non-experts. In recent decades, the wine world has become an increasingly quantitative place, as dependent on scores and statistics as Billy Beane. But these ratings suggest a false sense of precision, as if it were possible to reliably identify the difference between an eighty-nine-point Merlot from Jersey and a ninety-one-point blend from Bordeaux—or even a greater spread.

And so we linger amid the wine racks, paralyzed by the alcoholic arithmetic. How much are we willing to pay for a few extra points? These calculations are almost certainly a waste of time. Last year, the psychologist Richard Wiseman bought a wide variety of bottles at the local supermarket, from a five-dollar Bordeaux to a fifty-dollar champagne, and asked people to say which wine was more expensive. (All of the taste tests were conducted double-blind, with neither the experimenter nor subject aware of the actual price.) According to Wiseman’s data, the five hundred and seventy-eight participants could only pick the more expensive wine fifty-three per cent of the time, which is basically random chance. They actually performed below chance when it came to picking red wines. Bordeaux fared the worst, with a significant majority—sixty-one per cent—picking the cheap plonk as the more expensive selection. A similar conclusion was reached by a 2008 survey of amateur wine drinkers, which found a slight negative correlation between price and happiness, “suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.”

These results raise an obvious question: if most people can’t tell the difference between Château Mouton Rothschild (retail: seven hundred and twenty-five dollars) and Heritage BDX (seventy dollars6), then why do we splurge on premiers crus? Why not drink Jersey grapes instead? It seems like a clear waste of money. The answer returns us to the sensory limitations of the mind. If these blind testings teach us anything, it’s that for the vast majority of experts and amateurs fine-grained perceptual judgments are impossible. Instead, as Brochet points out, our expectations of the wine are often more important than what’s actually in the glass. When we take a sip of wine, we don’t taste the wine first, and the cheapness or expensiveness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisMoutonRothschild, or thiswineisfromSouthJersey. As a result, if we think a wine is cheap, then it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a premier cru, then we will taste a premier cru.

Our senses are vague in their instructions, and we parse their inputs based upon whatever other knowledge we can summon to the surface. It’s not that those new French oak barrels or carefully pruned vines don’t matter—it’s that the logo on the bottle and price tag often matter more. So go ahead and buy some wine from New Jersey. But if you really want to maximize the pleasure of your guests, put a fancy French label on it. Those grapes will taste even better. Editors’ note: This post was amended to correct factual errors. 1Spurrier’s initial study involved both Cabernets and Chardonnays, not just Cabernets. 2There were also Belgian judges, not only French and American. 3Richard Quandt’s name was originally misspelled. 4Brochet included fifty-four experts in the test, not fifty-seven, as originally reported. 5The expert did not praise the wine for its “jamminess,” as originally reported, but, rather, said that it was “jammy.” 6Heritage BDX costs seventy dollars, not thirty-five, as originally reported.