French wine sales down the pan and new rules for vin de table

During my daily early morning surf or site-seeing, two items caught my attention. Firstly a good report by Charles Metcalfe in the Telegraph on the rapid decline in sales of French wine in the UK.

A typical cut-price offer on Australian wine in a UK supermarket

'Zut alors! French wine sales go down the drain

New figures show Britons now buy more wine from Australia and California than France. Charles Metcalfe explains why.

The holidays are just about here, and the children are anchored to Facebook or reruns of inappropriate American cartoons. There must be somewhere better, sunnier, healthier, where shorts and flip-flops oust suits and shoes, restaurants cost less and wine runs freely.

Depending on priorities, the average Briton makes for Spain or France. Spain for sun, and France for quality of life (translation: brilliant food-markets, €20 three-course restaurant menus, and inexpensive, crazily drinkable wines). We love France (if not the French).

So why have we stopped buying their wines? French wine sales have dropped 6.5 per cent in the last year, says the new edition of trade magazine Off-Licence News.'

Read the rest here.

See also report on agrisalon on significant falls in the sales of vins de pays and vins de table.

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Then, secondly, this item in vitisphere.com about the new wine category that will be without IG (indication geographique – no mention of where they come from). In plain language the old vin de table category with new rules – principally that you can put the vintage and the grape variety on the label – previously this was not allowed.

'Vins sans IG avec indication de cépages et de millésime : un peu plus de clarté.
Le conseil spécialisé vins de France Agri Mer a voté jeudi 16 juillet à l’unanimité le nouveau cahier des charges des vins sans indication géographique avec mention de cépage et de millésime, nouvelle catégorie qui entre en vigueur le 1er août de cette année, donc pour la récolte 2009.

Le conseil spécialisé a choisi de donner à cette catégorie le moins de contraintes possibles, pour minimiser les coûts des entreprises et leur donner de ce fait des atouts sur les marchés d’exportation. Il n’y a donc pas de rendement maximal prévu, mais quelques contraintes ont été fixées par rapport aux vins sans IG simples. Les metteurs en marché seront identifiés par France Agri Mer sur simple demande, et le respect du cahier des charges sera vérifié de façon documentaire, au vu des analyses visant à prouver que la présence des cépages et des millésimes allégués est bien réelle dans les bouteilles. Il n’y aura cependant pas de contrôle de la qualité des produits et pas d’examen organoleptique.'

So no limits on the amount you can produce and no tasting control, although given some of the rubbish that gets through the appellation contrôlée agrément tastings ................. All the producers have to prove is that the bottles contain the grape varieties and the vintage claimed on the label. This all seems clear enough – just as well as the new EU wide category comes into force on the 1st August.

But, hang on, this is the French wine industry and things are never as straightforward:

'Si ce cadre permet dès 2009 de produire ces vins, certaines zones d’ombre persistent encore. D’une part, l’Alsace, la Savoie et le Jura ont demandé à ce que les noms de leurs cépages locaux ne puissent être présents sur les étiquettes de vins sans IG. La décision sera prise par le ministère de l’Agriculture au vu des conclusions demandées à Jérôme Despey, président du conseil spécialisé vins de France Agri Mer. D’autre part, le nom de cette nouvelle catégorie de vin n’est pas encore déterminé, l’expression « vin de France » prévue par les réglements européens étant contestée par les producteurs de vins avec IG, qui ne veulent pas que cette formule, utilisée d’autre part pour la communication générale des vins français, ne soit accaparée par une catégorie. Pour l’heure, la question n’étant pas réglée, on peut commencer à faire des vins sans IG avec noms de cépages et de millésimes en utilisant la mention « vin de France ».'

Full article here.

Certain French regions – notably Alsace, Jura and Savoie object to these new wines being able to put the names of their local varieties on the label. Although I can see that the name Riesling, Pinot Blanc or Pinot Gris even Gewurztraminer on a label may well help to sell the wine, I struggle to think that Mondeuse – a red variety from Savoy – or Savagnin – a white from the Jura – is going to help to shift any additional bottles. In any case what producer of high volume sans IG (there doesn't appear to be a convenient abbreviation here, so I'll go for SIG from now on) is going to use either Mondeuse or Savagnin?

The second objection to the use of the name vin de France by IG producers (ie what used to be called vins de pays) – could well prove to be more troublesome. These are the producers who have already had the designation 'vignoble de France or vin de pays de France' annulled in the French courts and sunk the earlier attempt – cèpages de France – to allow multi-regional blending.

What the legal objection to vin de France is I can't imagine, assuming that the SIG wine comes from France, but that probably won't stop a recourse to the law. You see echoes here of the hysteria that surrounded the perfectly sensible proposal to allow the blending of red and white wine to make rosé. It would be good to see the French Ministry of Agriculture throw both of these objections out but given the abject surrender by the Europe Commission to the pressure from rosé producers I fear they will crumble too.

I'm not surprised that French wines have suffered recently in the UK – the sudden drop is the sterling-euro rate certainly hasn't helped. Many price lists are sent out at the beginning of the year and were set when sterling was at its weakest. Several UK importers told me during this year's Salon de Vins de Loire that French producers were about to lose a substantial part of the UK market.

This may, of course, not be entirely bad news as Jérôme Chobet of Muscadet Côtes de Grandlieu has discovered: his sales in the Chinese market are growing fast and they treat Muscadet as a grand vin. How solid a market China turns out to be remains to be seen. Cognac has found Asia-Pacific, especially Japan, to be a notorious fickle market but wine is not the same as spirits...........

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One interesting aspect of the new SIG category is that it appeals to small, producers of individual wines like Mark Angeli in Anjou, Pascal Potaire in Touraine and others, who despair of the AC system refusal to say anything about looking after vineyards in a sustainable manner. A system that is full of rules about what grape varieties you can plant, etc. based on apparent typicity, but which permits the widespread use of an armoury of chemicals, which may or may not be fatal for the long-term life of the soils.

Although a number of wine makers have previously chosen to sell their wines as vin de table, this has supposedly prevented them from putting details like the vintage and where it comes from on the label. There are, of course, ways around this by calling a wine Cuvée for instance. Doubtless they will find ways around restrictions on saying where the wine was produced.