http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36978516
I know some women who would be weeping at that photo or lying down drinking the stuff as it flowed past them 😆
Cant beat a bit protectionism when your product is crap 🙂
Lots of huge co-operative wine producers in Languedoc banging out oceans of sub-mediocre, non-AOC, wine. The Spanish wine is no better, but neither deserve protecting. Many of the cooperatives are still bound to the idea of paying x cents per litre of juice, regardless of the quality, and so encouraging the farmers (they are not Wine makers/vignerons) to produce as much as possible. Yield is almost invariably inversely proportional to quality in wine.
Some of the more enlightened cooperatives (thinking Mont Tauch here) have tasting colleges that rank member's wines by quality. Competition winners receive substantial bounty rates per litre that more than compensate for the lower yields necessary to produce it. It also emphasises the use of the right land/terroir for the production. Ultimately this has raised the overall quality and therefore total revenue that the cooperative achieve for their members.
Acres of poor quality vineyards need to be grubbed up in SW France (and other areas too) and returned to other forms of agriculture. French wine consumption isnt what it once was and the old EU wine lake approach to funding over-production is long gone too thank goodness.
Is this the start of the war on Terroir?
oh bravo. Chapeau even.
Couldn't they sell it as tattoo ink, that seems to a boom market?
There must be a massive surplus worldwide; I think the French wine producers shot themselves in the foot decades ago with their overpriced, pretentious and mediocre product.
hat @ Clover
I remember the good old days of getting wine dispensed into big plastics jugs with petrol pump style nozzles at 1€ a litre.
Was very drinkable too if you knew where to go.
And today's winner of the Internet is...
Clover - Member
Is this the start of the war on Terroir?
Congratulations, sir, and very well done!
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Vraiment orsum, Clover!
Clover - Member
Is this the start of the war on Terroir?
That is magnificent. Take a bow.
can we sticky that joke please
Acres of poor quality vineyards need to be grubbed up in SW France (and other areas too)
Funnily enough I went for a drive along a wine route on the way back home not long ago and there were absolutely no vines to be seen. It had all been given back to normal crops in some sort of effort to keep the quality of the regional output high when the local growers had had many years of poor wine.
Clover - Member
Is this the start of the war on Terroir?
I ho-pi-not
Clover, that's the funniest thing that's been on STW in a long time. I'm still chuckling away.