French To Rip Up Vineyards After Sales of Top Wines Plummet

It could not happen to a worse lot of euroTrash and I so love Schaedenfraude.
First they vote no to the Constitution and now they are having to pull their beloved grape vines. I predict their aircraft carrier,the DeGaulle, will sink at harbor.

BWAhahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!


French To Rip Up Vineyards After Sales of Top Wines Plummet
The Telegraph ^ | June 11, 2005 | Ambrose Evans-Pritchard


France´s top wine-growing regions are to rip up some 18,000 hectares of prestige vines in the biggest purge of the country´s wine industry since the Phylloxera epidemic a century ago.

Faced with over-production and crumbling export sales, Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Loire valley are to slash output by paying farmers a lump sum to abandon their vineyards.

Global wine output of 270m hectolitres has surged ahead of consumption at 230m hl, creating a glut of red wine that has forced even Australia´s market-savvy vineyards to leave grapes unpicked on the vine.

But France´s wine industry has borne the brunt of the crisis as tastes change and new technology favours hotter, drier climates able to produce full-bodied and more reliable red wines at far lower cost, stripping mid-European latitudes of the competitive advantage they held for centuries.

The great French whites of Champagne, Chablis and Pouilly-Fuissé, among others, are holding up much better. There have been sharp cuts in output of French plonk, or "vin de table", prompting a spate of attacks on foreign wine imports by shadowy peasant "commando" units. The vino-terrorists have set fire to railway wagons, torched a station, and tipped 10,000 hl of Chilean wine on to the streets.

But this is the first time the elite brands have faced the shovel. Claret sales in Britain have plunged by 25pc over the last year alone, as consumers switch to New World wines across the price range. Global sales of Bordeaux are down 12pc by volume, and 22pc by value.

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(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...