Cheers to Mr. Latour for admitting the French have been arrogant. I stopped buying French wine when France doublecrossed us (again) at the UN. I think I'll buy Mr. Latour's product on my next visit to Bevmo.

The french paradox should contain additional facts like they are -1. Arrogant; 2. Stupid too !!!

Instead of destroying perfectly good wine to make alcohol, they could have even gifted them to newly emerging wine loving countries like India and China to make them aquire a taste for French wines, which are truly good despite the people having their nose in the air-may be from sniffing the wines too much!!! HA HA HA!!!
Destroying good wine seems a bad business decision especially when the market is being captured by emerging wine prodcing countries.

Surely it must be economical to use the distillate as a biofuel additive to petroleum fuel. Brazil presently adds 20% ethanol (distilled from sugar cane) to petrol with no mechanical vehicle modifications necessary. Here in Australia (N. Queensland) 10% blends are being trialled commercially, but public uptake is slow, largely due to a concerted Government/oil company scare campaign. Biofuels are coming, but government/corporate resistance is fierce and entrenched. I am surprised that this aspect of ethanol usage has not been mentioned in this article. Surely it has been considered? If not, why not?

its all drain cleaner anyway so whats the difference?

Overproduction may well be a problem but ripping out vineyards seems very shortsighted if demand for wine is growing in Asia. If Asian demand increases sufficiently, selling them Europe's wine will help the balance of trade which is becoming increasingly one-sided.

No doubt the EU will opt for the short-sighted solution as usual.

Another group of whining spongers milking the idiotic EU system. If I own a factory manufacturing car parts/electronic assemblies/knitwear etc etc and I over produce, who pays me?
Why should these people be paid for making mistakes?
As good fortune would have it, there's probably very little permament damage done by their stupidity, but how about the fishermen who we bail out year after year now that they've ignored decades of warnings and overfished the waters to the point that there is nothing left?
As you will have gathered, it winds me up no end.
And it will wind me up again next year when they all do it again and get bailed out again.

I stopped drinking French wine when they tipped our lamb on their streets and dunoed their golden "delicious" in our supermarkets

Don't even consider sending your surplus wine to China & India - think of the greenhouse gas generated by the transport!

Perhaps Brussels could allow it if the wine was exported via camel train or horse drawn carts. Or just forget about making wine and try basket- weaving and candle- making instead. They're pursuits much less likely to anger the earth goddess Gaia.

Typo
I stopped drinking French wine when they tipped our lamb on their streets and dumped their golden "delicious" in our supermarkets. Now they may learn that what goes around comes around

Another fantastic piece of European agriculture nonsense. Of absolutely no benefit to anyone apart from the producer. And where is the incentive to slow down production? Nowhere.

How you can justify paying people to dump wine so the prices on the stuff that is left over is kept high I don't know.

Maybe if there was no incentive for inefficiency they would produce less or drop the price.

haha ! americans will always make me laugh !
Thank you American Mark for that funny sentence.
Maybe one day the people of your country will open up their eyes and see how and why they are hated.
It's not a question of EU policy or French arrogance.
It's only business.
US dump its agriculture so do the same the EU because of the low costs in Asia.

Fek aff you French c***. You smell!

Tof.
America saves your culture from obliteration and you hate them??
Without the United States you would be speaking German in Paris.
And what a silly idea to pay farmers to destroy their stock. Is it any wonder that California produces more GDP than the whole of France with surprise, surprise half the people.

Aussie 'red'and New Zealand 'whites'are better anyway.

I have lived in France for 31 years and still do not understand their arrogant attitude to the rest of the world! Re France and the C.A.P., the farmers here just rape the coffers of the E.E.C., French agricultural inspectors turn a blind eye when it comes to farmers claiming for “set a side” land. How many of you have seen “set a side” land in France? I know farmers who laugh when I demand why they are growing crops on “set a side” land! Every little “part time farmer” is able to claim a E.E.C. grant for machinery, a neighbour with 5 acres of land has more machinery than many professional farmers in Great Britain. When are the Euro politicians going to wake up to the fact that France is robbing and raping the E.E.C. coffers at our expense?

Rodf :
yes thanks to US for coming 2 years after the beginning of the war and only because their boat were fired by the german Uboat. And i don't speak about the towns they have complety destroyed (Brest, Lorient etc..) and the money we still give them back for the Marshall plan !

Never mind it's not the question here. the "hate" i spoke wasn't about the agriculture but the vision of the world they have and how they want to rule it.

Agriculture is like any other business. Each company/farmer/country want to earn (ever more) money.
Of course it's silly to destroy their stock. it's worst when they burn corn instead to give it to Africa.
I don't know if you know José Bové but he said that yes we are in EU but each country should eat their own production and later sell or buy if it's not enough or too much.
It's a competition beetween states in the world.
EU increase its "help" to their farmers so do the US in order to protect their farmers.
And read and look what's happened around Oz or US not only what newspapers want to tell you. You'll see than more and more french people drink foreign wine.
I've tasted and tested wine from others countries (south america). they are more expensive and those i try was not bad.
Next time i'll try Oz or New Zealand ones.

Magus, sorry I haven't understant all you say (set a side). But you listen to much Tony Blair ! He should come entirely in Europe and then he could speak about Europe. Should I remenber the money that UK receive from Europe for i can't remenber the obscure reason ?

In spite of the support of UE, ever more farmers stop their activities.

So, never mind, "tchin-tchin" as we say in France when we drink a glass of wine wherever it comes !

Tof,

I would have thought that American historical involvement in defending France would have brought warmness to the hearts and gratefulness from proud Frenchmen everywhere. Perhaps not.
I have absolutely no idea who José Bové is but it sounds like the countrymen of places like France should listen a lot less to what he says if it hopes to pull itself out of it's economic quagmire.
Why consume your own production if you can't produce it as efficiently as somebody else? Better to purchase higher quality cheaper products from countries that have a comparitive advantage in whatever they make and a country like France can then sell things that it is more efficient in making, whatever that may be. That way the standard of living is higher for all concerned.
It has been so long since I have had a French wine but given the low cost and increasingly high quality of Australian and New Zealand wines that shouldn't come as a surprise. It's like paying $20 to eat sausages when you can eat steak for $5. Being completely objective I can't even imagine how French vintners could compete with Australian vintners in terms of both natural advantages and the lack of a nanny state mindset in Australian farmers that pushes them to higher levels of achievement. While ever countries like France persist with such huge subsidies to protect inefficient farmers it will continue along its economically unsustainable trend backwards.

Most Chinese prefer sweet wine that borders of viscosity approaching cough syrup. That said, the quality and assortment of European-style wines has grown remarkably in the past few years and this will contain demand for imported wines, especially since a number of French wines do not travel well for a variety of reasons.

In addition overpricing of ordinary French table wines is decredibilizing the prices asked for quality wines.

Finally, for any given price range up to EUR 15/bottle, I now know the local brands well enough to get better value from them than from French imports.

In short, I think the French vintners are dreaming if they think the Chinese market will soak up their bottom-of-the-barrel brands -- which includes Beaujolais that was never more than a short-lived working class drink in the cafés of Lyon and its region: a French table wine at 8 euro tastes no better than a local dry wine costing the equivalent of 2.30 euro while I've seen Appelation controlée wines going for 6.00 (still twice the French domestic price).

At the very least, the prices of French table wines in China need to be cut to about 1/3 of their current retail prices to establish a link between price and quality in the consumer's palate; otherwise the mid-range wines will suffer in the long run and reputations are easier to destroy than to re-establish.

On the American defense of France in World War II, um, actually most French were pro-German throughout the war, except for the local Communists and 4/5 of members of the Resistance movement joined after Allied Forces captured Paris. Moreover, 80% of damage to buildings and infrastructures was the result of Allied aerial bombardment, not German action. And then there was talk afoot at Allied HQ of treating France as an occupied country on a par with Germany and Italy, which still rankles a few folks still around to remember that.

Rodf : I can thanks them for what they done for the rest of the world but it was 60 years ago !
Should we still be against germans or italians ?

Times have changed.

Arthur Borges : what this shit ? "actually most French were pro-German throughout the war"
Ask a tibetan with a chinese gun on his head if he hates chinese ...

Better heard that than to be deaf...

I nearly stopped buying French wines before 2002 because they were over priced for the quality (plonk). After de Villepen at the UN and the intrusion into Turkish/US relations, I stopped entirely.

Perhaps, we should list France as the speed bump the US encountered on its way to Germany, twice.

I don't wish to dwell on 20th Century history in a discussion of wine, but Tof says: "...thanks to US for coming 2 years after the beginning of the war..." That's not a good argument to use around Americans, who immediately ask, "Well, why was the war still going on in December 1941? Why wasn't it already over in Sept. 1939, June 1940, June 1941? It was Europe's problem, after all." Tof's argument invites unflattering thoughts about Europe. Best to abandon it.

Back to wine: The big reason French wine doesn't sell in the US, which is a huge market, is that US wine is better quality, and a better value. Once the California vinyards recovered from the ravages of Prohibition, it was only a matter of time before Americans would be consuming their own produce, irrespective of the CAP or French diplomatic perfidy.

Maybe wine consumption in Europe is down because traditonal Europeans are down. Traditional Europeans kill their young in larger numbers than any other group in the world. Those traditonal Europeans that aren't killing their young are choosing never to conceive in the first place. Replacing the traditional Europeans are the new Europeans. The political-religious belief of these new Europeans forbids the driking of alcohol and these new Europeans don't kill their young, although they are increasingly killing traditional Europeans.

Thank you, Jericho. I was just about to make that very point. As France moves from a European epicurean culture to a Middle Eastern abstinence culture, consumption of alcohol will decline. As France alienates other countries with their arrogance, people in those countries will look to other suppliers for their wines- and discover that good wines are not the exclusive property of the French.

haha !
always the same country which ad a post ! it makes me really laugh this morning ! thank you.

Seriously, have a trip one day in Europe and you'll see that, at the end, we are not so different.
Don't believe all the propaganda dispatched by the US Gov. I make the same with my gov.
Just believe what you see not what you think is done at 4000 km...

Bye !

"[H]ave a trip one day in Europe..."

Why, after our ancestors worked so hard to escape the place?

Actually, Tof, we have visited Europe. My grandfather got to visit St. Entienne. My uncle visited Salerno and the Rhone Valley; my father visited St. Lo, Metz and the Ardennes. I've made four trips myself. The consensus: Thank G-d our forefathers got on that boat and opted for an empty wilderness in America.

... and ask your father if he liked Metz. I was born there...

"Seriously, have a trip one day in Europe and you'll see that, at the end, we are not so different"

I think that is true. The French say nasty things about Americans and the Americans return the favor. ;)

I love France, Tof. I don't always love the French. And I buy very little French wine any more because it is not particularly good value and because I prefer Italian and Australian wines except for my favorite vin blanc, which is dry Reisling from Alsace. The trouble is that Alsatian Reisling costs £2 more per bottle than Australian Reisling which is very close in quality - so I drink Australian mostly....

I've never been to Metz, I hear it has a good cathedral. What else is there to like? I like Alsace, Burgundy, Dordogne, Haute Provence and Normandy. Also Paris although Parisians are haughty compared to the people from the Pays.