You know your bandwagon's got steam when even the French hop on

[ShortWiner]

This article was printed in yesterday's NY Times:

A 'Heretic' Ruffles Feathers in France
By JACQUELINE FRIEDRICH

PARIS
TO many French purists, selling wine by the name of a grape — chardonnay, for example, or merlot — is heresy. But the French wine industry is in trouble, and the way out may lie in the ideas of a man viewed by many as a heretic.

Over the past three years, the country's wines have been losing ground in foreign markets. Indeed, Australian wines, particularly varietal wines, those sold by the name of the grape, have overtaken French labels in the United Kingdom. And Jacques Berthomeau, a consultant to the French government, is espousing a philosophy along the lines of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

Easier said than done. French winemaking is highly regulated, and individual growers cannot just decide to try out new grapes or new blends. But wine production is crucial for France: it is the country's most profitable agricultural export and follows only Airbus as the most important export across the board. In 2000, the latest year for which figures are available, wine exports earned $5.25 billion.

"The problem is that we have too much wine and that our wines are not adapted to the current market," Mr. Berthomeau said. "We need to put the consumer first."

Marc Parcé, the owner of Domaine de la Rectorie, a winery in the Roussillon region, supports Mr. Berthomeau but said: "He bothers the right because he doesn't talk about government subsidies. He irritates the extreme left because he talks about the reality of the marketplace, and then he bothers other people because he points out that some wines have no business being in appellations at all."

When the minister of agriculture, Jean Glavany, wanted to study the challenges New World wines posed to France, he tapped Mr. Berthomeau, an adviser on wine to previous ministers of agriculture. Mr. Berthomeau issued his report, "How to Better Position French Wines in the Export Market," in 2001.

French winemaking has traditionally been based on terroir, a word that does not translate easily into English. It denotes the idea that wines derive their particular characters from the specifics of a vineyard, with the climate and soil combining to give each wine its unique stamp of identity. Mr. Berthomeau's report questions the blanket application of this approach, saying that France would be more competitive if more of its wines were sold like New World wines: by the name of the grape.

Mr. Berthomeau envisions a future with parallel approaches to wine. "One is the traditional vigneron model, which emphasizes the place of origin, the terroir and man," he said. "The second is an approach resembling that of any other beverage, like beer or mineral water, an approach based on the creation of brands, like Australia's Jacob's Creek. It's wine at two speeds, and I think we should do them both."

The first approach would involve the wines produced under the appellation d'origine contrôlée, or A.O.C., system. Created in 1936, it was intended as a guarantee that a certain wine came from a certain geographic zone. Half of French wines have A.O.C. designations.

Mr. Berthomeau's report ruffled feathers when he noted that many a mediocre (or worse) wine hid behind the fame of an appellation, thus undermining the very notion of terroir. Bordeaux, for example, conjures images of noble wines aging in cool cellars. Some of the luster attached to names like Pétrus and Latour rubs off on ordinary Bordeaux rouge, which is often very ordinary indeed.

"We always say that an A.O.C. should make people dream," Mr. Berthomeau said. "But when you pay the same price for a bottle of Bordeaux as you pay for a package of spaghetti, is that going to make you dream?"

That is due in part to overproduction, Mr. Berthomeau said. He advised strictly observing the limits the A.O.C. regulations set for how much wine an appellation can produce. Overproduction reduces the quality of a wine, and can also result in unsold stock. Last year Beaujolais produced so much wine that the equivalent of 13 million bottles was distilled into industrial alcohol.

In vast industrial vineyard regions like Languedoc-Roussillon, Mr. Berthomeau says, wines should be tailored to what the average wine drinker wants.

"When I took the train from Paris to Brussels, I was served an Australian shiraz," he said, still taken aback by the experience. "Our vineyards in Béziers could easily make varietal wines like that. They may be less noble, but they get drunk."

WHAT Mr. Berthomeau proposes is the creation of brands like Blue Nun; Mouton Cadet; owned by Mouton-Rothschild; and Jacob's Creek, owned by the French company Pernod-Ricard. They would be professional, well-made wines that are easy to understand and export, are reasonably priced, are the same year after year and reinvest earnings in marketing and publicity as brands like Budweiser or Perrier do. They might blend grapes from different regions and could be sold under labels like Cépages (varietals) de France, Chardonnay de France or Merlot de France.

In the United States, some can-do company would create such a brand. But in France, the growers' unions and administrative bodies involved in making and marketing wine would have to agree on the drafting of a new law. So far, they do not.

Vintners from the south, who produce 85 percent of France's varietal wines (under the label Vin de Pays d'Oc), are strongly opposed to Mr. Berthomeau's proposition. Last year those growers protested in Montpellier because they had too much wine and could not sell it.

But Mr. Berthomeau has supporters. Peter M. F. Sichel, a New Yorker who is the majority shareholder of the popular Bordeaux estate Château Fourcas-Hosten, said: "If he succeeds in convincing the French wine trade to change and become consumer-oriented, it will bring French wine into the 21st century."