Grapes of Wrath

"A state of revolt reigns in the south of France," warned Emmanuel Maffre-Bauge, president of the French Table Wine Association. "There are grapes of wrath in the Midi." Not only there. In the Mediterranean port of Sete, 30,000 irate French farmers rioted, protesting imports of Italian wine. In the Sicilian town of Marsala, schools were closed, anti-French demonstrations broke out in public squares, and local unions called for a general strike of the area's 20,000 workers. From Marseille to Perpignan near the Spanish border, French growers, meanwhile, set up roadblocks of burning tires to halt the influx of hated Italian vino by truck. Italians threatened to retaliate by stopping yearly imports of 2.8 million gal. of French champagne, plus cereals and meat.

Incensed by government inaction, some French peasants occupied the Cathedral of St. Pierre in Montpellier and hoisted a separatist flag, consisting of a cross on a wine red field. A group of French commandos broke into warehouses in Marseille and destroyed 450,000 gal. of Italian wine. Countless other barrels were sloshed into the Canal du Midi at Beziers, in a Gallic version of the Boston Tea Party.

All these skirmishes were part of what Europeans call the Great Franco-Italian Wine War. The casus belli is a glut of gros rouge, the rough red wine that is the lifeblood of most Mediterraneans and a mainstay of France and Italy's agricultural economy. A bumper harvest last year helped to create a Common Market surplus of 2.6 billion gal. At the same time, French consumers have been cutting back at the rate of one bottle a head; consumption dropped from a total of 1.3 billion gal. in 1973 to a mere 1.2 billion in 1974. Complains one French grower: "Young people are not drinking wine like before."

The French are enraged by the massive flow into France of cheap Italian wine. Imports of Italian wine peaked at 50.2 million gal. in the first two months of 1975, compared to 76.5 million for the crop year of 1973-74. "Unfair competition!" cried Maffre-Bauge. "Italian wine production is a mess like everything else in that country. They can change white into red, add chemicals and call it wine." Last month the French government ordered a four-week boycott of Italian wine. Italy protested to the Common Market in Brussels, charging France with violating the principle of free circulation of goods.

Lake of Wine. Next week the Common Market agriculture ministers will meet to discuss ways of siphoning off the surplus wine that now threatens to engulf all Southern Europe. One solution is to distill it into alcohol for industrial purposes--an expensive process that would require unpopular subsidies by all Common Market nations. Another proposal: sell it to the Soviet Union, which is willing to buy up to 26.4 million gal. at rock-bottom prices. A third solution: give some of the excess to soldiers, hospital patients and inmates of old folks' homes. British Labor Party M.P. Neil Kinnock, an interested EEC observer, declared last week, "We must drain this wine lake in a way that can benefit people who deserve a tipple. In these lunatic circumstances, perhaps we had all better get drunk."

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