Winegrowers see red over drinking laws

Wine-tasting is vital for producers but a law change could end the ritual. Photo / AP

PARIS - One of the many pleasures of France is to drive through the chalky lanes of wine country and stop off at a chateau to taste the local offering to Bacchus.

There, in a stone-walled, cobwebbed cellar, you will be greeted with a smile by the wine maker. A cork will be unbottled, a glass will be washed, and you can sip the seductive combination of grape, the aroma of local soils and two millennia of wine-growing experience.

Free tasting - degustation - as a sales pitch for wine is as durably French as the Deux-Chevaux, Roquefort cheese, huffy politicians and, dare one say it, World Cup wins against the All Blacks.

Tasters' tales animate French dinner parties. Hosts love to regale guests with how they stumbled across a chateau that grew some succulent red or how they secured a particularly favoured vintage thanks to their "piston" (connections) with the family that produces it.

These finds can be traced back to that cellar moment. "Degustation" is a mixture of pleasure and business and folklore, and a purchase there makes even the dullest wine more interesting than an anonymous bottle bought at a hypermarket.

But winegrowers say the delightful ritual could be heading for extinction if a planned law to curb binge drinking goes ahead.

Parliament this week is to debate a bill that, among other things, will outlaw "open bars" - gatherings where, for an all-inclusive fee, people can drink as much as they like.

Open bars have been blamed for reckless boozing, followed by bloody accidents, among French youth, by far the biggest age category for road deaths.

But the wine industry says the bill could deal a crippling blow to tasting in chateaux, and at wine fairs and farm shows. It threatens a part of French life that has caused few drink-driving accidents and imperils a vital revenue stream, it argues.

"Wine-tasting is vital for producers," complained Bordeaux grower Didier Cousiney.

"Wine has to be tasted, it's not like leeks or carrots. All new customers want to taste the wine first, and almost all those who taste it buy some."

"In the Jura [in eastern France], 41 per cent of wine sales come from direct contact with the consumer, and very often this depends on wine-tasting," says Marie-Christine Tarby-Maire, who heads a wine pressure group called Vin et Societe.

Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot insists that wine-tasting is not included in the ban but Tarby-Maire's group and others in France's powerful wine lobby say the draft text contains a dangerous catch-all.

Article 24 says: "It is forbidden to offer free alcoholic drinks for a promotional end or to sell it for an all-inclusive price."

It also restricts use of the internet for selling alcoholic drinks, something that wine makers say will cripple the flourishing online business.

"It's prohibitionist logic. They'll kill off the whole business, there's no other way to describe it," says Laurent Gapenne, president of the Federation des Grands Vins de Bordeaux, the fine claret-growing region of the French southwest.

Already hard-pressed to maintain their share of foreign markets, French growers will lose one of their last key advantages at home over American and Southern Hemisphere wines, the industry says.

Many growers are still incensed by a 1991 law that they believe turned perception of wine from a pleasure into a poison and helped drive a slump in wine consumption, especially among young people.

The so-called Evin law requires wine advertisements to include a warning, "alcohol abuse is bad for health". In 2005, a rider was added requiring ads to also warn pregnant women against drinking alcohol.

Yet there is also a potent anti-booze lobby in France, which includes Prime Minister Francois Fillon.

It argues that only by cracking down on abusive drinking and carrying out snap drink-driving tests can the country reduce the annual toll of 45,000 deaths attributed to alcohol.

Defenders of French culture are building up a head of steam about the so-called Bachelot Law.

They are lobbying MPs in the wine-growing areas to vote out or amend the contested text and appeal to the public to rise en masse to defend a beloved tradition.

Bachelot's law "is a crime against culture. This is the only country which is smashing its wine industry to pieces," says Denis Saverot, author of a book about the "demonisation" of wine, In Vino Satanas.