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Angry winegrowers in the southern French department of Gard in the Languedoc have protested with drastic means against the fact that cheap wines of foreign origin are hardly distinguishable from French wines in the food trade.
According to various international media reports, on 30 March several dozen Gard winemakers cleared Spanish wines from the shelves of several supermarkets in Nîmes and destroyed the bottles and bag-in-box packaging (BiB). The French producers accuse foreign producers and supermarkets of customer deception by offering wines from Spain and other European countries with French names and motifs. They claim that these wines are cheaper than wines from the region and that only on closer inspection can it be seen on the packaging that these are not wines from France. According to The Star magazine, sales of BiB wines from Languedoc-Roussillon have fallen by a quarter in the last two years.
"We have been doing what we have been asking retail chains to do for three weeks now: to remove foreign wines that are not clearly identifiable as such or that are on shelves clearly assigned to regional products," the magazine Les Echos quotes Xavier Fabre, spokesman for the Association of Guard Winemakers (SVG). According to Les Echos, the Intermarché group has now taken questionable wines off the shelves.
The protests by the regional "Wine Action Committee" had previously been even more radical: In January, according to a newspaper report in the Figaro, the contents of two tankers carrying Spanish wine had already been emptied, and at the end of March there were arson attacks on supermarkets and the offices of wine wholesalers and wine brokers.
Tomorrow, Saturday, the SVG, together with agricultural associations, is planning an educational campaign to make consumers aware of the misleading labelling of foreign wines.