FRANCE: Competition is forcing changes in French viticulture, writes Lara Marlowe
One Parisian café owner likened it to "making wine the way they make food at McDonalds". But French wine producers reacted with surprising equanimity to the news that it will soon be legal to put wood shavings in steel wine vats.
"It's legal everywhere else in the world, so why not here?" said Liliane Sartorius Barton, the Irish co-owner of Châteaux Langoa & Léoville Barton vineyards. She stressed that there is no question of putting wood chips in her family's fine bordeaux, which is in any case aged in oak casks.
Rest assured, France's grands crus, premiers crus and even the crus bourgeois will not be "polluted". The measure is part of a €90 millon plan to enable French plonk to compete with the "new world wines" of Australia and the Americas.
Though France remains the world's leading wine producer, the industry has been hit by over-production and plummeting domestic consumption, as well as foreign competition. There is little hope of development in the French market; changes are geared to please European and north American palates.
On March 6th, winegrowers in the Herault department burned gendarmerie vehicles and drained tanks of Italian and Spanish wine in protest at what they described as government indifference to their plight.
"It's practically miraculous," Roland Feredj, the director of the Bordeaux wine council CIVB said of the legalisation of wood shavings. "In general, France always wants to give lessons to the rest of the world, and in winemaking we are realising that the Australians and Americans also have things to teach us about wine regulations."
The use of wood chips to create the flavour of wine aged in barrels was the most shocking of many recommendations in a report to the agriculture minister drafted by Bernard Pomel, a high-ranking civil servant. Pomel concluded: "We must adapt to globalisation. We must make the wine consumers want, and not the wine the producer dreams of."
Pomel said the changes constitute "a revolution" in French wine-making, which will be organised in 10 "basins", including Bordeaux-Aquitaine, Languedoc-Roussillon, Bourgogne-Beaujolais, and Rhône-Provence.
The new national wine committee that implements the strategy will try to simplify the labelling system, which confuses even the French, with 450 "appellation contrôlée" areas and another 150 "vin de pays" regions. Under the new system, there will be only three classifications (AOC, vin de pays and vin de table) and all French wine will carry a "Vins de France" logo.