Comité Régional d'Action Viticole

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Comité régional d'action viticole (CRAV, Regional Committee of Wine Action), is a French group of radical wine producers. It has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks including dynamiting grocery stores, a winery, the agriculture ministry offices in two cities, burning a car at another, hijacking a tanker, and destroying large quantities of non-French wine.

The group has called for higher restrictive tariffs against the rising imports of wine from Spain and Italy, where lower social costs and less red tape leads to more economical wine production.

CRAV members are frustrated with declining prices as demand for wine within France continues to drop, increasing competition from Spanish wine and Italian wine within France, increasing competition in the world market from New World producers, eroding sales, boycotts against French wine, and other serious problems.

Frustration spreads far beyond radical producers. "Each bottle of American and Australian wine that lands in Europe is a bomb targeted at the heart of our rich European culture," argues grower Aime Guibert [1]. The French manager for the E. & J. Gallo Winery, Sylvain Removille, reports that he and his sales staff have repeatedly been physically assaulted (How to sell Gallo to the French).

Consumer preference for wine brands, uncomplicated wine labels, varietal labeling, and New World wine styles is leading to rapidly expanding exports from Australia, Chile, the United States, and other New World producers. According to Stephen Thanabalan of New Wine magazine, the trend is leading to lost markets as well as nascent markets in Asia for French wine producers.

[edit] See also

[edit] Sources

How to sell Gallo to the French. Decanter, June, 2006, p. 160.
Wine Terrorists
Wine war: Savy New World marketers are devastating the French wine industry. Business Week (cover story), September 3, 2001[2]
"The Judgment of Paris: What the French didn't learn from the legendary wine-tasting."

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