Wine sales - which country leads?

[Thomas]

Blue, you said a veritable mouthful. Incidentally: historically, Italy has been a great wine producer since about 121 BC. France benifitted from a problem Italy had--namely, the fall of the Roman Empire. From that point, it has been a long trek for Italy, but the wines have always been reasonable and often great; why else would French producers include Italian wines in their blends for centuries, especially when they had to during the phylloxera blight?