BRUSSELS – Drinking a Bordeaux wine from a “chateau” is as French as swigging Kentucky bourbon is American.
But now tempers are flaring across the vineyards of France. The United States wants to sell some of its wines in the European Union with – sacrilege – a “chateau” or “clos” label.
Is that cheating? Misappropriation? Whatever it is, the issue has the Bordelais turning claret with anger.
“What is at stake is the respect for tradition and quality,” Laurent Gapenne of Chateau de Laville and president of the Federation des Grand Vins de Bordeaux told The Associated Press.
For American vintners, it’s a question of selling more wine in their top export market, unshackled by historic language or restrictive terms in the world of 21st century globalization.
“People use words in different ways,” WineAmerica chief operation officer Cary Greene told the AP, arguing there should be no ban on U.S. bottles carrying the word “chateau.”
But the French argue that hundreds of years of craft are at stake. They’re worried that the cachet a mention of “chateau” or “clos” – which shows the origin of the wine – carries is diluted if other winemakers started to stick it on their bottles in Europe.
Today, EU experts from the different member states were supposed to vote on the issue, but that was postponed after talks Monday between the EU and French Farm Minister Stephane Le Foll .
“I asked my services to clarify all of these matters,” EU Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos said late Monday, effectively ruling out an immediate decision.
It’s the latest skirmish in a trans-Atlantic wine war that has seen the United States grow from an upstart to an increasingly confident competitor on world markets.
U.S. founding father Thomas Jefferson was enamored with French wines and the French held dominance over world wine traffic until well after World War II. Then came the 1976 “Judgment of Paris,” when, to French astonishment, California won a major blind taste test over French wines.
To this day, that event is considered the “tasting that changed the wine world.” That never sat well with the French, and since then wine relations have often had an edge.
So when the European Commission decided to act on a U.S. request to regain permission to export ‘chateau’ and ‘clos’-labeled wines to Europe – including France – the anger was palpable.
“The European Commission is bartering our heritage and our economic clout at the expense of globalization,” said Gapenne. “I cannot understand that they would yield on this.”
For the U.S., the benefits of tapping the European market are clear. Even though it is declining, the 27-nation European Union still accounts for 57 percent of the global wine consumption.
Last year, 34 percent of U.S. wine exports by value went to the EU, accounting for $478 million.
And the industry is counting on removing trade barriers worldwide to push exports even more.
In comparison, the EU said its exports to the United States stood at $2.86 billion last year, boosted by many of the top-edge chateau and clos vintages that have come to define the continent’s best wines.
The global turnover of France’s Bordeaux wines stood at 4.2 billion euros and 55,000 jobs while the Burgundy region added 1 billion euros and 20,000 jobs last year.
“The notion would be totally discredited and empty of any meaning.”
