Wine Literally Flows Down Streets In France

It's been called an “act of sabotage” and the action of “wine terrorists.” Whatever the designation, red wine flooded the streets, entering cellars of houses and apartment blocks and even an underground parking garage this week in the Mediterranean town of Sète, near Montpellier in southern France.

More than 50,000 liters were poured out of five huge vats into the road and the red liquid ran as a river, several inches deep along the Avenue Marechal-Juin, directly in front of the premises of a well-known wine merchant as its aroma filled the air of the district.

Midweek, according to local press, a radical group of French wine producers claimed the action as a protest against the arrival of cheap foreign - especially Spanish - wines to the shelves of stores and supermarkets.

The group known as the Comité d'Action Viticole (Wine Action Committee), or CRAV, organizes radical militant acts to protect local produce from foreign imports, working mostly in the Laguedoc-Roussillon and Midi- Pyrénées regions, the country's largest wine producers.

This is not the first time this year that wine has spilled down the streets. In April, near the border between France and Spain in the historic city of Béziers, “French farmers emptied the contents of Spanish wine trucks in a protest against falling food prices in France,” reported The Local.

On that occasion, more than 90,000 bottles of red and white wine spilled down the roads to fight unfair competition. Local press speculated that CRAV was behind that action as well.

Industry statistics indicate that France, at 400 million hectoliters, is the biggest buyer of Spanish wine.

“There is an ‘urgency to act’ in the face of the import of Spanish wines at low prices that are causing anger among the wine growers in Languedoc-Roussillon,” explained the region's senator, Henri Cabanel, in a letter to the agriculture minister that was published in the French press. The senator, himself a wine grower, complains that the competition from neighboring countries is an injustice because their production is not required to comply with the same regulatory constraints as French wines.

"Years of effort, restructuring the vineyards, and starting new labeling are falling apart," he wrote. "Add to that the lack of water in some sectors and inventories of cooperatives full due to unsold wines, and you get the beginning of a crisis," he warns.

The wine spill joins a long list of outrageous actions organized by French farmers and other organizations to vent their anger and to protest E.U. measures, unfair competition and falling prices that have included dumping four tons of carrots in front of the Socialist Party headquarters in Paris last year and 100 tons of manure and rotten vegetables in the center of Chartres in 2014.

A list of the latest, more unusual protests published by The Local includes smashing more than 200,000 eggs by poultry farmers in Brittany in 2013, dumping hundreds of liters of milk in the streets of Boulogne-Sur-Mer in northern France and in a field near Mont Saint Michel in western France in 2009, releasing scared piglets in the aisles of supermarkets last year in Rennes in western France and this year’s attack on anti-riot police with straw from a straw spreader machine in northwestern Le Mans.