French winemakers nabbed five tankers of Spanish wine and emptied the contents onto the motorway on Monday.
The incident on two tankers took place a Le Boulou, close to Perpignan and less than ten kms from Spain. The remaining three vehicles were allowed to leave with just half their contents after being daubed with “vin non conforme” (non-compliant wine).
Around 150 vintners from Aude and Pyénées-Orientales departments took the action to protest “unfair competition” while local police were reported to have observed the “social action”. French vintners took samples to check for fraudulent wine, after the equivalent of 90,000 bottles of red and white spoiled on the road.
Many vintners in the southwest feel that French wine deserves greater protection and fear that cheaper Spanish and Italian imports will harm their livelihoods.
Denis Pigouche, president of Pyrenees-Orientales winemakers, said: “These wines have no place in France. What’s more they’re not even necessarily European. I suspect they are from South America and then ‘Hispanicised' in Barcelona and then Europeanised, or even Frenchified in France.”
“If a French wine maker produced wine with Spanish rules, he simply wouldn’t be able to sell it,” said Frédéric Rouanet, president of the Aude winemakers’ union. “Europe’s all very well, but with the same rules for all.”
The vintners’ distress was heightened after French industry data showed that France has become the largest buyer of Spanish wines, a 40% leap from 2013 to 2014.
At the same time, Italy has eclipsed France as the world’s biggest wine producer.
Unions say that negotiations with local authorities have not resulted in sufficient assurances that the concerns were being taken seriously.
“So we’ve decided to take matters into our own hands,” said Mr Rouanet. He added that the tanker hijack was “just the beginning”
“We will continue until we’ve proved that the illegal traffic of wine is going on. We are going to protect our consumers. You can trace our wine from the vineyards to the bottle and those same rules should apply to all.”
Wine producers in southwestern France have a long history of protecting their local produce.
