On another note, there's a nice article at Slate examining why French bureaucrats and AOC standards are shooting its own wine industry in the foot.
It is often assumed that the wine industry, like other sectors of the French economy, is micromanaged by bureaucrats in Paris. The INAO does oversee the appellation system, but as wine writer Tyler Colman (a friend of mine) notes in his informative new book, Wine Politics, viticulture is an exception to the norm in France, in that it is mostly administered locally by the winemakers themselves. This arrangement, plainly fraught with conflicts of interest, has had onerous consequences.
In some appellations, the boundaries have been extended to include land not fit for making decent wine. Yield limits are now routinely flouted in many appellations, and a number of them also permit mechanized harvesting, which is a surefire way to produce rotgut. Then there are the taste tests, whose results are about as trustworthy as Zimbabwean presidential elections. In a survey released last year by the French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir, wine industry insiders acknowledged that as many as one-third of all AOC wines were undeserving of the distinction. Local control, combined with reckless growth, has been a disaster, and the wine-buying public has taken note. In the past decade or so, the French share of the global wine market has declined sharply. Fine cabernets and chardonnays are being produced around the world nowadays, and while the most celebrated French wines—the Romanée-Contis and the Latours and Lafites—are more popular and expensive than ever, the market for many lesser ones has all but dried up. Alain Bazot, UFC-Que Choisir's president, summed it up well: "For years, there has been a steady fall in the quality of many AOC wines which has completely undermined the confidence of consumers in the system." This, combined with the continued decline of domestic consumption in France (it has plunged 50 percent over the last four decades), has left thousands of winemakers in danger of losing their livelihoods.
