Going Guerrilla...Over Wine?

French wine vintners are growing desperate.

A recent dispatch from the BBC chronicles a shadowy guerrilla group called the Crav, purportedly made up of wine growers that have given an ultimatum to the French government, saying it better raise wine prices or they're going to spill some blood.

This could get interesting.

Nicolas Sarkozy, France's new president, hasn't commented publicly on the matter, but come Monday, France could become the equivalent of Monty Python's Hell's Grannies; hordes of 80 year-old, red-nosed and angry wine vintners blowing up stocks of Beringer White Zinfindel, crying, "Vive, la France!"

The problems with French wine and winemakers are voluminous. First, the wine bureucracy in France makes the world created in the movie Brazil look positively orderly. Second, as popularity and globalization hit the worldwide wine industry about ten years ago, France stubbornly stuck to old pricing structures and outmoded marketing in the face of such challenges. Really. Try to find a really good red wine from France in the $15-25 price range.

Also - and this is quality as well as a growing hinderance - French winemakers strictly adhere to the ideal of terrior, a concept simply defined as whatever the earth, wind and sky allows them in a given year. No irrigation. No manipulation. It's what the ideal of wine has been for centuries, a product of the life we live.

But heavy rains, droughts, early frosts or just a moderately damp season can make for extremely uneven reaps, and make wines with a distinctly different character from the year before, upsetting the growing hordes of novice wine drinkers, including me. With French wine, you never know what you're going to get from year to year. And with French wine, it takes upwards of $100 to find the character for which France has become famous. I've always wanted to understand French wine, but there's that whole 'paying my bills' thing. Other wine regions have found a way to adhere to idea of terrior and bring it to market in a reasonable price range.

The Crav has an uphill battle and the French government has a decision to make when it comes to what is uniquely French, thus deserving more subsidization. Check out the documentary, Mondovino to see just how dire things are getting. So dire in fact, French winemakers, as well as the greater European wine community, have such a surplus of unsold wine, they are considering selling tonnages equivalent to lakes-full of wine as biofuel.

So keep an eye out next week for Hell's Vintners. And go to How the World Works for the impetus to this post.