Why do some French wines list alcohol content in a range rather than a specific ABV percentage?

Why do your French wines list alcohol content in a range, rather than a set ABV per bottle?

This something you might see on some of our French wines because it is legal in the EU to state an alcohol by volume (ABV) range instead of providing specificity the way we do in the USA. The US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) permits an ABV range for imports as long as both the lower and higher number fall in the same taxation category. Typically, when you see a stated ABV range, the low number is the mandatory minimum for that wine’s appellation and the max number is EITHER the max for an export tax bracket for the destination country for that label or sometimes just the highest possible level that particular wine would ever clock even in an outlier vintage.

As to WHY this is done, it’s an efficiency measure that helps wineries avoid the expense of small label print runs in instances where you have variations. Each individual cuvée of something popular like a Bourgogne Blanc typically needs to have a different front and back label printed for every export destination, which can easily add up to 50+ versions of the same label to create, print and keep track of - sometimes more. In Canada, for instance, a winery would need at least 3 versions of their label if they want one of their wines to be available in all 10 provinces, due to differences in things like French/English language requirements, required recycling symbols and bottle return/deposit text at the provincial level. It is just simpler for a winery's graphic designers to have one fewer variable to update on every label print order, which explains why you see ABV ranges most often in France and Italy, and most frequently from wineries that produce dozens of different wines per year.

In practice though, modern companies now have an incentive to print a specific ABV on their label rather than a ballpark ABV range because customers now care more about a wine's alcohol content than they used to and may factor it into their purchasing decisions. However, there are still many more traditional European wine companies who have not yet adapted their labels to this trend among consumers.