FRANCE: Globalisation has struck one of the last bastions of French national character, the wine industry, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris
Following a day of consultations with the main wine producers' association, AGPV, the French minister of agriculture, Mr Hervé Gaymard, yesterday announced a profound reform in French wine-making.
Henceforward, Mr Gaymard said, France would respond to market demand, adapting to consumer tastes around the world.
This means France will produce more vins de pays, identified by the type of grape rather than the place of origin, which may be doped with sugar or aged with wood shavings like the "new world wines" from Australia, the US, South America and South Africa.
The "new world" now accounts for 23 per cent of international wine trade. France exports 20 per cent of the wine on world markets.
"Until this year it would have been heresy," Mr Patrick Dhuisme, the director of the confederation of wine co-operatives, CCVF, said of France's new wine policy.
"We've stopped being ideological about it. If consumers want sugary wine, we'll give them sugary wine. We're into marketing."
This year's harvest is expected to surpass last year's grape crop by 19 per cent, yet the French wine industry has never been so desperate.
Consumption in France has dropped 20 per cent since 1980. In the early 1960s, every Frenchman over the age of 15 consumed 100 litres of wine each year. The average consumption now is 58 litres.
Competition from the "new world", combined with a 21 per cent decline in US sales because Americans boycotted French wine during the Iraq crisis, have completed the French wine disaster.
Yesterday's policy decision was the culmination of three years of negotiation, based on the realisation that French wines are viewed abroad as expensive, complicated and of uneven quality. The prestigious appellations d'origine contrôlée (AOC), which denote the region where the wine is produced, will remain one pillar of the French wine industry.
The revolution consists of producing cheaper vins de pays (which have long existed in the Val de Loire, Midi-Pyrénées and other departments) in hitherto sacrosanct AOC wine regions like Burgundy and Bordeaux.
But the most sensitive demand of the wine lobby - that wine be classified as food, exempting it from advertising restrictions under the 1991 Evin Law - will not be resolved until autumn.
French humorists enjoy the question. "Of course wine is food," the writer, Patrick Besson says. "I know people who eat little else."
Today a medical doctor named Paul-Henri Cugnenc, who is also a wine grower and a deputy in the National Assembly, will deliver his report on the relation between wine and health to Mr Gaymard.
The report will be forwarded to the prime minister on July 28th. About 100 parliamentarians will lobby to have wine declared food in the autumn.
But the wine lobby is being fought by a fierce anti-drinking lobby, whose members note that 30,000 French people die of alcohol-related diseases every year. An association which fights alcoholism and addiction, the ANPAA, recently had an advertising campaign for Burgundy wine banned. It showed a pretty woman murmuring: "Drink less, drink better."