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Up to a third of wines sold under France's regional appellation system might be from an entirely different region, according to a French consumers' group. The Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, or AOC, once a gold stamp of origin and quality, is fast turning into a national joke, UFC-Que Choisir said. It claimed this was due in large part to AOC award panels made up of local wine professionals with vested interests. Unscrupulous "judges" on local panels were accused of giving lesser wines the prestigious AOC label in the face of increasing competition from New World wines, whose world market share has...

Britain faces a champagne shortage because vineyard owners in eastern France are refusing to sell tens of millions of bottles stocked in their cellars. Their unwillingness to give up what they see as their retirement nest eggs has left the country’s most prestigious champagne houses struggling to keep pace with a rise in demand in the US and developing countries. Champagne experts say that producers will soon be unable to supply emerging markets in Russia, China and India as well traditional customers in countries such as Britain. Patrick Le Brun, head of the union of champagne vineyard owners, said that...

French wine growers in crisis By Henry Samuel in Olonzac Last Updated: 2:25am BST 05/07/2007 As Richard Bourchet gazed across a dusty mass of gnarled, upturned vines in Olonzac, in the Corbières, south-western France, the European wine reform announced yesterday was far from his mind. Unable to pay his bills, 'vigneron' Richard Bourchet has been forced to destroy his vines in Olonzac, south-west France Only a few hours before these vines were neatly aligned and bearing the local carignan grapes but, unable to pay his bills, Mr Bourchet has uprooted several hectares that he has carefully tended for 25 years....

Thousands of militant winemakers are expected to descend on southern French towns tomorrow in a bid gain more government support. Demonstrations are planned in Narbonne, Béziers, Nîmes, Avignon and Bordeaux. Organisers are expecting a total of around 15,000 people on the streets. The groups behind the demonstrators include regional winemaking unions, and cooperatives. The independent winemakers' union of the Hérault region, however, has asked for the demonstrations to be called off, citing bad timing – a major wine fair, Vinisud, starts on Monday (20 February). 'There is no reason for the southern winemakers to demonstrate on their own when the...

Eliette Montosson surveyed the rolling vineyard where her family has produced its Pays d'Oc wine for as far back as anyone can remember. "It's bad, very very bad. The situation is desperate," said the silver-haired 68-year-old, who tends the rows of gnarled vines for 10 hours each day. "We've had some of these vines for 20 years but now they've got to go." On Wednesday Mrs Montosson and thousands of other winemakers will take to the streets of southern France to highlight a crisis they claim is driving them into crippling debt - and, in some tragic cases, suicide. In...

<snip> As France was busy blocking America at the U.N. Security Council, Americans were busy launching a boycott of French wine. It worked. Larry Chavis and Phillip Leslie estimate that American sales of French wine, calculated by volume, sank by an average of 13% during the first six months of the Iraq war. At the peak of the boycott, weekly French wine sales were 26% short of the normal level. The researchers estimate that this translated to a $112 million reduction in sales during the period they studied. Messrs. Chavis and Leslie focused on four cities in particular - Boston,...

On the heels of a record 2005 California wine grape harvest, an Australian wine glut, high inventories of unsold French wine and big harvests in Chile and Argentina, the nail-biting has just begun for the Golden State's growers and vintners. For U.S. wine drinkers, whose livelihoods don't depend on the profit margins of a bottle of wine, the future is plentiful, tasty and inexpensive. With beer consumption still nine times higher in the United States than wine - and even hard liquor still having an edge - U.S. wine consumption of 2.4 gallons per capita has huge potential for growth....

You don't have to dislike the French to enjoy this book, but it doesn't hurt. "Judgment of Paris" recalls how, in 1976, American underdogs bit the big poodle where it really hurt — in the wine culture, where France had been top dog since the Middle Ages. With the bicentennial of American independence approaching, Steven Spurrier, a Brit wine merchant in Paris, decided it might be interesting to expose French critics to the new wines of California in a blind tasting against the greatest wines of their homeland. Spurrier wasn't setting a trap. He fully expected the French to win,...

NEW ORLEANS - Searing heat and lack of electricity throughout New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina ruined hundreds of thousands of bottles of rare wines by degrading corks and cooking the contents. Owners fear that even those bottles that appear to have survived the hurricane may hold spoiled wine. This city's once-vibrant culinary industry, already beaten back by disaster, has been further injured by damage to its wines. Losses are estimated to be as much as tens of millions of dollars. Private collectors, restaurants and distributors are preparing to destroy much of their stock. Insurance companies are just...

VAUVERT, France Olivier Gibelin tilts a glass of deep red wine, sniffs and sips at a table set between tall concrete vats of fermenting grape juice in his rustic stone winery here. The air is heavy with an odor of yeast. "Do you want to try what will be going into your tank?" he asks ruefully, pouring a visitor a glass. "If my grandfather could taste what I'm turning into alcohol, he'd turn over in his grave."

They used to uncork their best bottles for festivals on July 14, but French wine growers such as Bernard Farges have little to celebrate next week. Far from evoking the triumphant storming of the Bastille, the date makes him and other bordeaux vignerons queasy. “I feel sick to the heart,” said Farges, from Mauriac. The source of his melancholy is a European Union-funded process in which some of the quality red wine he produces will be distilled into undrinkable ethanol for use as factory fuel. The deadline for participating in the scheme is Bastille Day, a cruel irony. Farges has...

Paris – French winemakers got some long-awaited good news this week: their wines are selling well in the United States. Or at least some of them are. Fat Bastard, for instance, is highly popular, and so too are Wild Pig, Red Bicyclette and Pont d’Avignon. Those four were among the labels on display at Vinexpo, a wine fair in Bordeaux, and they set the tone for the debate about how French vineyards confront a crisis that has resulted in a lake of unsold Gallic wine of 2.5 million hectolitres (66 million gallons). It has two causes. At home, the French...

France's top wine-growing regions are to rip up some 18,000 hectares of prestige vines in the biggest purge of the country's wine industry since the Phylloxera epidemic a century ago. Faced with over-production and crumbling export sales, Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Loire valley are to slash output by paying farmers a lump sum to abandon their vineyards. Global wine output of 270m hectolitres has surged ahead of consumption at 230m hl, creating a glut of red wine that has forced even Australia's market-savvy vineyards to leave grapes unpicked on the vine. But France's wine industry has borne the brunt of...

Paris – French wine exports sank again in the first quarter of 2005 confirming a downward spiral which has plunged the sector into crisis and brought thousands of wine-growers out onto the streets in protest. "Global over-production in 2004, which is put at between 10 to 20 million hectolitres, is pulling prices down and adding to the problems of French wines which are being asked to become simpler in taste to meet growing world consumption," said Louis-Regis Affre, an official from the French Federation of Exporters of Wines and Spirits (FEVS). Apart from champagnes and sparkling wines, exports of French...

The Lurton brothers are breaking into the U.S. market by abandoning French tradition. Uruguayan tannat, anyone? Pity the French wine industry. Since entering the new century on a high with one of the most hyped Bordeaux vintages in two decades, nothing has gone its way. French wine consumption, while tops in the world, has slipped 10% since 1999, according to Vinexpo/ISWR. By 2008 look for it to fall another 7% as younger French drinkers switch to beer and spirits for their joie de vivre. The export picture is ugly, too. There has been a three-year decline in sales in the...

Southern French wine growers turn violent Big News Network Thursday 21st April, 2005 (UPI) Wine growers in southern France, hit by falling consumption, competition from other nations and lots of production from northern France, are turning violent. A demonstration which began peacefully in Narbonne by some 10,000 growers seeking more help from Paris and Brussels erupted into a clash with police, the Independent reported Thursday. Some 50 young wine growers plus a handful of anarchists threw Molotov cocktails, stones and flares at riot police Wednesday. The demonstrators were angry that, having cut their production, growers in northern regions boosted theirs,...

Not since Agincourt has there been such a threat to French culture from across La Manche. A British institution will this week rubbish France's perennial claim that its unique soil and climatic conditions are responsible for producing some of the world's finest wines. In a move that is likely to send tremors from Burgundy to Bordeaux, two economists conclude that environmental conditions — or what France's oenophiles lovingly refer to as 'terroir' — is not important when it comes to producing memorable wine. Olivier Gergaud, of Université de Reims Champagne, and Victor Ginsburgh of the European Centre for Advanced Research...

Paris – A documentary made by an American former wine waiter is stirring up passions in the vineyards of Bordeaux of an intensity usually reserved for France-England rugby matches. Some are likening the ambience to the second world war: on one side are the collabos, or collaborators, and on the other the resistance. The enemy this time is not the Nazi invader, but globalisation and efforts to make French wine more appealing to an international palate. Mondovino, the film by Jonathan Nossiter, has provoked outrage and delight since opening at the end of last year. It has also intensified long-simmering...

The French have lost the initiative when it comes to selling and making their most famous product One of the most poignant moments in Sideways, Alexander Payne's Oscar-nominated film about a wine geek's mid-life crisis, takes places in a burger bar. Miles, the movie's balding, fortysomething anti-hero has fled his best friend's wedding after bumping into his ex-wife. Alone and miserable, he finds solace in a bottle of 1961 Chateau Cheval Blanc, sipped surreptitiously from a plastic cup. The choice of bottle is significant. The 1961Cheval Blanc is a remarkable Saint Emilion, and for Miles it represents something very special....

Paris – In A gesture likely to bring an apoplectic flush to the face of any dedicated claret drinker, French wine growers have proposed a desperate plan to prop up their slumping industry against New World competition by handing thousands of barrels to industrial distillers. It is the first time that grand wines protected by the Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) label have been treated in such a way. And as is usually the case with French agriculture, the vignerons are counting on their Government and Brussels to foot much of the bill for mopping up a wine lake of eminently...