Posted on 06/29/2003 10:52:53 PM PDT by pcx99
BORDEAUX Something was missing from the country's largest wine fair here last week, and it was not just the air conditioning in one of the exhibition halls (where temperatures rose so high, corks popped). The usual contingent of American wine merchants were mostly absent, confirming to many in the trade fair's bottle-filled booths that American ill will over France's opposition to the war in Iraq has bruised more than egos.
French wine exports to the United States, which was once French winemakers' most promising market and is now one of their greatest competitors, are going down the drain.
"It's clear from our American distributors that there is a hesitation to promote French wines for the time being," said Bruno Finance, sales manager for Yvon Mau, one of Bordeaux's largest wine merchants. He said French wine was losing ground in some other markets, "but as of today the only place there is such a big loss is in the U.S."
The politically tinged backlash comes as French exports to the United States are already suffering from a weak U.S. economy and the dollar's diminished value against the euro, which makes French products more expensive for Americans. Overall French exports to the U.S. dropped by 21 percent in the first four months of the year.
There is no doubt the trans-Atlantic dispute over Iraq has made things worse. American aviation executives were absent from the biannual Paris Air Show this month, and the Pentagon sent fewer of its fancy planes.
France is trying to repair the damage with a maladroit public relations campaign whose tagline is "Let's Fall In Love Again" and features a video in which the aging comedian Woody Allen talks about French kissing his young wife. The Paris Tourism Office said it would decorate the Champs Elysées with stars and stripes on July 4 and that many hotels in the capital would celebrate the American holiday.
But some people worry that the damage might not be so easily repaired. French wines never fully recovered their position in the Scandinavian market after a 1995 boycott there to protest France's nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific that year.
"It gave people the opportunity to try other wines and they never switched back," said Finance amid a clutter of half-filled wine glasses in his company's booth at the fair.
He worries that the political pall over French wines has come at a time when competition is growing and the market is in flux. By the time the pall passes, he said, it may be too late for France to recapture its former cache.
France's heavy winemaking regulations make it difficult for French wines to compete with many American and Australian brands - particularly in the United States, where consumers value the reliability of a standardized product.
American and Australian winemakers can irrigate their vineyards to control the quality of their grapes, for example, or even mellow their wine by adding oak chips to the stainless steel tanks in which the wine is aged. But that is all illegal in France.
French vintners are at the mercy of the weather and if they want to make a mellower wine, they have to invest in expensive, new oak casks. The result is wine that varies in quality from year to year, an unpredictability that is prized by connoisseurs but is lost on the average consumer.
Because of the competition amid a global wine glut, France turned 2.5 million gallons of Beaujolais wine into industrial alcohol last year.
Bordeaux, France's largest wine-producing region, is protected from the American slump somewhat because it can count on loyal imbibers at home. About two-thirds of the wine consumed in France comes from the southwestern winegrowing region.
But the U.S. market is far more important to other French wine regions. The country's American-bound wine exports, which totaled nearly $1 billion in 2002, account for about 16 percent of all the wine France ships abroad.
The volume of those exports fell by 9 percent in the first four months of this year, but the numbers are skewed because they reflect the shipment of Bordeaux wine that was sold before it was bottled two years ago. Bordeaux is one of the few regions in France where wine is pre-sold.
More typical is Bernard Hervet, the director of a large vineyard in eastern France's Burgundy region, who says over a glass of chilled Chablis that his exports to the United States had fallen by nearly a third this year.
Louis Regis Affre, general manager of the France's Federation of Wine and Spirit Exporters, says retail sales of French wine continued to fall sharply in May while overall wine sales in the United States were growing.
"Most French wine promotions in the U.S. have stopped because of the brittleness over Iraq," he said.
Florence Chartrier, who with her husband owns Smith Haut Lafitte, one of Bordeaux's premier vineyards, said that the American market has been receding for years, making it harder for the big properties to sell their wine.
Last year, she said, the vineyard had to cut its prices by 15 percent and it took three hours to sell out its production. But this year, with prices reduced even further, it took two weeks to sell everything - and about 15 percent of those orders are still not confirmed.
"People who normally take five cases are taking one this year," she said from the lawn of her stone chateau overlooking rows of green vines heavy with ripening grapes. "There's a coolness to the market."
Part of the problem in Bordeaux is that the American wine guru Robert Parker canceled his trip to taste the 2002 wine this year, ostensibly because of concern about traveling during the war.
Parker, a Maryland attorney and publisher of The Wine Advocate, normally rates Bordeaux's top wines in the spring after the grapes are harvested. His ratings are so influential that they determine both price and demand for the region's best wines.
"His absence has had such a huge impact that's there's not much consumer demand for the 2002," said Todd Hess, Chicago-based wine director for Sam's Wines Spirits, one of largest wine retailers in the United States.
Hess, one of the Americans who came to the wine fair this year, said the change in the exchange rate is adding to French winemakers' woes. "It's hard to explain to a consumer why a product they've been buying for $6.99 is now $8.99," he said.
Maybe we wine drinking/buying FREEPERs should make a thread and list our nonFrench favs; waddya think ?
For my own part, if I want any lip from that moron, I'll rattle my zipper just remind him that the boycott is still going strong!
-Jay
French vintners are at the mercy of the weather and if they want to make a mellower wine, they have to invest in expensive, new oak casks. The result is wine that varies in quality from year to year, an unpredictability that is prized by connoisseurs but is lost on the average consumer.
No wonder California wine tastes better year in and year out, and is cheaper to boot. Socialism at work.
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