French vintners find European Union concoction unpalatable

TARADEAU, France -- To the buttoned-down European Union bureaucrats in Brussels, the idea was simple: squeeze costs, conquer new markets, maximize profits. But to the vintners of Taradeau, a sun-splashed Provencal village 800 miles to the south -- and a world away, mentally -- it was an attack on their Mediterranean heritage, a crack in French civilization, a fraud against wine lovers everywhere.

Never, they cried, can you mix a bucket of red wine into a barrel of white and call it rosé. Only the age-old process in which grape skins macerate in the juice for a finely calculated moment before fermentation, they protested, can produce the seductive color, fruity aromas and delicate structure of a true rose. Mixing red and white, they sniffed, may make something pink to drink, but it is not rose wine.

The trouble began in January when the European Union's agriculture commission decided, as part of a broad revamping of regulations on the wine industry, that starting Aug. 1 European producers can mix red wine with white and label it "rose." To add insult to injury, vintners in Provence complained, France's representatives voted with the majority to make the abomination possible.

"They were had," charged Marc Rolley, director of the Cotes de Provence Wine Union in Les Arcs sur Argens, 15 miles inland from Saint-Tropez on the Mediterranean Sea.

Undeterred by the outcry here, the EU agriculture commission had been due to finalize its decision last week. But French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier obtained a postponement until June 19. Between now and then, rose producers said, the French government will attempt to line up enough support among the 27 EU governments to cancel the rule change.

Johan Reyniers, a spokesman for the commission in Brussels, Belgium, said EU officials meant well and had their reasons: They were seeking to arm European vintners for competition in emerging markets such as China, where producers from Australia and South Africa, for example, do not hesitate to mix red wine with white and undersell European rose by several dollars a bottle. Anyway, he added, relaxing Europe's rose rules was only "one little thing" in a vast program to unshackle the wine industry from outdated regulations.

The clashing perspectives -- this "one little thing" is a way of life in the hills of Provence -- have once again pitted France's tradition of good living and great gastronomy against the seemingly unstoppable march of economic imperatives. Across the country, from wine cellars to cheese vats, from sausage makers to bakers, artisans are confronted by 21st-century demands for efficiency, cost-cutting and homogenization.

Consumers' shopping carts may be fuller and supermarket chains' profit ledgers may be blacker as a result, but something is being lost in the process, traditional producers say.

Looking across the sloping hillsides lined with grapevines that surround Chateau de Saint Martin here, it is easy to understand their point. Ever since the Count of Rohan Chabot bought the beautiful vineyards from a group of monks in the 17th century as a dowry for his daughter, the same family has been producing a sunny line of red, white and rose wines with a proud heritage.

When Chateau de Saint Martin marketers decided to call a premium old-vine rose "Comtesse de Saint Martin," for instance, they had only to go to family portraits hanging in the chateau to make a historically accurate label. Strikingly, the enterprise has been in the hands of several such women through the years, the current owner and operator being Adeline de Barry.

To her, the new rule was a "stupid" decision, taken to allow merchants to dump large quantities of white wine, particularly from Spain, that have backed up in storage since rose overtook white in recent years as the second most popular wine, after red, in France; as of last year, nearly a quarter of all the wine consumed in France was rose. If nothing can be done to reverse the decision, she said in an e-mail, then at least some clear term must be devised to distinguish real rose from mixes.

And, she added, the term must be "chosen not by incapable politicians but by international marketers to avoid words that have no sense except in bureaucrats' offices and outside our borders."

That was Ms. de Barry's way of dismissing a suggestion from the EU agriculture commission that the concerns of French rose producers could be met simply by adding "traditional" to the label of real rose.

"I think that the advantage of rosé is above all a delicacy," Ms. de Barry said, "and a variety of savors that one cannot obtain except, at harvest time, by judging the maturity of the grapes for a rose, except by a learned dosage of contact between skin and juice so the color is perfect, except by precise work on the temperature according to what one is seeking in the rose."

Gregoire de Bucy, the chief winemaker at Chateau de Saint Martin, said the several hours during which the skin remains with the juice are mainly responsible for giving rose its personality. Losing that moment, he added, means losing the aromas, the fruity accents and the colors that, taken together, evoke the sun-baked hillsides and Mediterranean breezes of the wine's birthplace.

Adding red to white, he said, will produce nothing but white wine with a little color. Linda Schaller-Gallet, marketing manager of nearby Chateau les Crostes, said it was possible that, over a few years, the pink color of a mixed wine could fade away, leaving a clear, white drink.

"Every year is different when we make rosé," Mr. de Bucy said. "That's why we never end up with the same wine from one year to the next. With mixing, they would be making a sort of Coca-Cola, so they would standardize it completely."

Francois Millo, director of the Interprofessional Provence Wines Council, said it would be incongruous to allow mixes to be labeled as rosé when the World Trade Organization and individual European governments are waging war against counterfeit brands of handbags, perfumes and clothes.

"Here we have the contrary," he added. "The European Union is legalizing fakery."

Barnier's agriculture ministry, apparently not proud of its performance so far, declined to respond to a query on the controversy. Producers said Barnier has promised to push hard for a return to rules requiring the traditional process. "But the minister's not going to be there for very long," cautioned Gerard Audibert, a winemaking consultant in the Cotes de Provence region.

The European Union's parliamentary elections are scheduled for June 4 to 7, two weeks before the vote in the agriculture commission, and President Nicolas Sarkozy has put Barnier at the top of a list of candidates from France's ruling majority. His likely victory means he would no longer be agriculture minister for the vote on rose, raising fears among rose producers that their concerns will be dropped again and that mixed wine will flood the market beginning this fall.

"And what if it's good?" Mr. Audibert asked, half-smiling.