Let’s Discuss Scum
No, not that kind of scum. This kind of scum:
"FRENCH WINE TERRORISTS ATTACK MERCHANTS SELLING FOREIGN PRODUCE"
The most telling part of this article on the children that call themselves CRAV is this:
"
While nobody will own up to being a CRAV member, it is not hard to find
sympathizers."
It used to be that disobedient civilians understood that the very nature of Civil Disobedience entailed paying the consequences fo your actions. Remember Martin Luther King, the civil rights marchers, the lunch counter sit in, Rosa Parks. Every one of them understood that taking a stand meant taking the consequences.
I wonder how far MLK would have gotten if instead of walking into a "Whites Only" restaurant and sitting down at the counter instead broke into the place a 2:00am and sat at the counter when no one was watching so to make sure he wasn't caught breaking the law.
The cowardly children who call themselves CRAV (translated: "Regional Committee for Viticultural Action), don't possess the courage of their conviction. The fact that they also choose to destroy private property under cover of darkness also means they have very few supporters. And why wouldn't they only have a few supporters? They are after all petty thugs with an entitlement complex and a wrench.
Then there is this from the Telegraph Article:
"Gilbert Foucart, head of the Les Collines du Bourdic cellar in
the Gard, said that he understood people were angry that merchants intended
to drop prices. "They want to cut them by five euros per hectolitre. If
you've got 80,000 hectolitres like me, you stand to lose 400,000 euros,"
he said.
Mr Foch said that he agreed that market prices were "catastrophically low".
"Wine growers cannot live given the current market prices. But the
problem is I have to sell wine," he said."
My advice: Make something other than plonk and you'll get a better price. Or at least make some drinkable plonk and stop complaining that that someone else besides yourself ought to take the financial hit for the French deciding to drink less, but better wine.
Well said Tom! Here, here I applaud your post here and the take no prisoners approach to calling CRAV on the carpet!
You’re asking the French to be American. Or maybe, this round, they are a protectionist precursor.
CRAV isn’t a bunch of kids. They got caught up in the heady late ’90s, bought more land and more equipt than they should have (though credit is much tighter in France) and got busted when the Australians (and later the Argentines) took the shelf space they thought they were promised.
By misbehaving, they continue to get subsidies cut.
They also threw out Mondavi who was willing to spend lots to upgrade a coop (I saw the land the the coop) and voila, Mondovino.
They ought to be jailed for their effectively terrorist tactics. But the French are innately revolutionary and won’t denounce nonconformist opinions, regardless of how destructive the result.
Let’s separate mob rule with a good PR machine from whether the region can deliver good wine.
The opening line of the article was jaw-dropping in itself, “French police are searching for members of the group which poured more than one million bottles worth of red, white and rosé down the drain.” Unfortunately, that’s what makes this terrorism and not civil disobedience. Terrorism hides behind a mask, it doesn’t show itself other than revealing enough that it exists.
Regardless of whether they are right in doing so, this is definitely not the way to promote their cause.
It is surely not the way to promote their cause, but as you name la coopérative “Les collines de Bourdic”, whose representatives I’ve met several times at the big international Prowein Exhibition at Duesseldorf (Germany), where I had the opportunity to taste their wines (they installed a quality orientated work starting from the vineyard and continuing through winemaking up to dynamic marketing a long time before others), I think, it’s not the right person to blame.
They are definitively not on the plonk side of the market! And if even people like them are no longer able to pay their winegrowers decently, that is really a problem.
Take it from a French guy: French society is really diseased by this attitude towards “political or economic violence”.
If violence can somehow be justifed/explained by some economic or political motivation, then the French see no good reason to enforce the law and are generally complacent… If Jose Bove bombs a McDonalds to protect French food, it’s somewhat ok. If a French-Algerian fire-bombs a car for fun, he goes to jail. It’s all part of the message, not the act itself. Americans cannot understand this typically French double-standard, nor should they. I can’t even begin to explain why the French tolerate the huge paralyzing strikes that routinely happen, but it’s in the same vein.
As a frog, I say “excusez-nous”.
I would not overlook the possibility this was an action by another group, a business rival, and not the work of CRAV. I find it amusing that all that is necessary for attribution are letters painted on a wall.