Thursday, September 07, 2006

wine and vinegar

Drinking wine in France is immensely satisfying. The selection is incredibly wide, the quality excellent once you know your way around, and prices are enticing. I always buy more than I can drink. My bikes have to share the basement with increasingly many bottles.

At the same time, bitter complaints can be heard about the hardships producers face because of rude weather, feeble consumers, low prices due to the bargaining power of gigantic grocery stores, and markets being eroded by imports from Argentina, Australia and South Africa. Not that I've ever seen foreign wines in a store, but that's a different question.

The situation is indeed dire for some. Bad wine does not sell. If you produce lousy quality, you're left with hectoliters of red piss in your cellars that you can't get rid of. Instead of letting the market reward the good and weed out the bad, the French ministry of agriculture pays winemakers handsomely to have excess wine distilled into ethanol.

This policy has come under strong fire from the European Union recently as they rightly see it as misguided. Ripping out poor vines to moderate supply is the advised solution instead. However, this policy does not find eager followers here. I wouldn't even be surprised to read about road blocks and strikes in protest.

I was VERY suprised, on the other hand, to read an article in L'Express detailing the problem as it is, presenting French wines as world class and in an enviable position, and denouncing mediocre producers for their failures. If your French won't let you understand the article you can at least go through the list of recommended wines, exquisite in their quality, mostly moderate in price, and almost entirely unknown to the grand public. A treasure trove for you to discover.

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