Farid Aït Ouali takes me on a tour of the vineyards of western Algeria. After studying agronomy and oenology in Algeria, Greece and France, he has worked for twenty-five years in the wine trades. This man is employed by the Société des grands crus de l’Ouest Algérien (SGCO), the country’s leading wine company.
We head towards Mostaganem, then we turn east towards Achaacha, Ouillis and Sidi Lakhdar. Farid is very proud to organize this private tour – there are hardly any tourists in Algeria, let alone wine tourists. We visit vineyards, talk to the operators, enter cellars dating back to colonial times refurbished by the SGCO and, of course, we taste a few vintages. In the space of a day, a largely unknown world unfolds before my eyes.
In this country where 85% of the population is Muslim, the wine sector was once a colossus that produced nearly 23 million hectoliters a year. Until 1970, it was the fourth producer and the first world exporter of wine.
A colonial agriculture
It was nevertheless a colonial industry. After the conquest of Algeria, which began in 1830, France set up a system of “complementarity”, so that the colonial lands provide a complement to French agriculture without competing with it, by cultivating products that did not exist on metropolitan territory. Experiments were carried out on tobacco, cotton, sugar beets and tropical fruits, but none of these crops took enough on Algerian soil to allow commercial exploitation. The vine, on the other hand, has acclimatized very well, has established itself in the country and has taken deep root there, anchoring itself to the earth – a little like the European settlers.
In 1879, phylloxera, a parasite attacking the roots of vines, descended on France, ravaging its vineyards. For the first time, national wine production could no longer meet demand, and this new reality prompted the government to officially abandon the principle of complementarity to develop a fully fledged wine industry in Algeria. Plots of land and loans were granted to winegrowers, who were able to take full advantage of them: in 1880, Algeria produced 1.15 million hectoliters; by 1900, this figure had quadrupled, approaching 4.5 million hectolitres.
Endless rows of grape varieties native to the northern shore of the Mediterranean and adapted to hot, dry climates were planted: Grenache, Cinsault, Carignan, Ugni Blanc and Clairette. European settlers, mostly farm laborers from the same regions as these wine grape varieties, also moved south to work the vines.
Wine has become the living force of the colony. Viticulture even supported middle-class settlers who did not own land: the father, uncle and older brother of the Algerian-born French philosopher Albert Camus all worked for the sector, making barrels for transport wines.
The vineyard also employed many native Algerians: forced to toil on land that once belonged to them, they received meager wages, which were barely enough to buy basic necessities such as couscous. Moreover, their working conditions were not the most enviable.
Arab-Muslim identity not soluble in wine
At the end of World War II