" IN May this year, a new acronym entered the lexicon of terror: CRAV. It stands for Comité Régional d’Action Viticole (the “regional committee of viticultural action,” approximately). Suppress your smiles — although it may sound like an offshoot of the French government’s agriculture department, it is in fact a new militant group, centered in the Languedoc-Roussillon area of southern France, that has threatened violent consequences if there is not immediate state support for the area’s beleaguered winemakers. They are not empty words: public buildings have been hit with makeshift bombs; some wine tanks of importers from Spain have been destroyed.
As the proprietor of a small vineyard in southwestern France, I was able, when I heard about CRAV, to understand something of the source of the anger while not remotely condoning the means by which they sought to vent it. Winemaking in France is entering a crucial period, some might say an end-game. The old French hegemony (apart from the haut-prestige end of the market in Bordeaux and Burgundy) is moribund: earning even the most modest living from making wine in France is harder than ever.
Under the government’s geographical classification system, our own wine — Château Pécachard — carries the appellation of Bergerac. We own two small vineyards that total about eight acres. One is planted with cabernet sauvignon and the other contains merlot, cabernet franc and malbec grapes. We are situated south of the Dordogne River; the much-respected appellation of St. Émilion is about 45 minutes distant, and the other legendary chateaux of the Médoc are not much farther away."
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And here perhaps lies the lesson for the French wine industry and the militants of CRAV. The problem with French winemaking is that there is far too much wine made, and far too much of it is mediocre or worse. The European Union spends $500 million a year buying up wine from its ever-deepening wine lake and turning it into ethanol and disinfectant. More ominously, sales of New World wines in the European Union have risen 10 percent a year since 1996. In the Bergerac appellation alone there are more than 2,000 winemakers — small, medium and large — all competing for a diminishing market against non-European wines of superior quality.
The only brutal answer for the French wine industry is the Thierry Bernard solution: simply to make less wine and make it taste better. (And to adapt, as Thierry did.) This may be harder than throwing homemade bombs — it requires skill, energy, talent and, obviously, a certain amount of luck — though I would not wish hailstorms on anyone as a motivating force. Wine drinkers’ tastes have changed, as the irresistible rise of the New World wines has proved.
For the winemakers of Bergerac, and the other regions of France, the benchmark standard for their wine is not found among the elite chateaus down the road in the Médoc or in Burgundy but across distant oceans — in New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa and California. Though the luck factor still applies. I read this week of freak late-harvest frosts in Australia after a year of drought — yield is down 40 percent. Perhaps some portion of that ever-deepening French wine lake will suddenly seem more desirable.
William Boyd is the author, most recently, of the essay collection “Bamboo.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/opinion/26boyd.html
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