France needs a united front.

(From Off Licence News)

The French," General Charles de Gaulle once argued, "will only be united under the threat of danger." The great French leader was talking about physical invasion, an all too recent memory in 1951, rather than an economic threat, but his words could be applied with equal precision to the country's wine industry.

It's taken the French a long time to react, but over the past few years they have begun to realise that the challenge posed by the so-called New World is not going to go away. I wouldn' say they have come over all touchy feely (they pride themselves on being individualists after all), but there are signs the French are starting to formulate collective responses to deep-seated problems.

Necessary reforms Two things are worth commenting on. The first is the likely introduction (still to be ratified by the government) of a catch-all category, Vin de Vignobles de France, along the lines of the South Eastern Australia denomination. This will enable producers to source grapes (or wine) from France's 64 different wine regions and blend them together. In the past, such pan-regional wines had to be labelled as Vins de Table and were not allowed to use a vintage or the name of grape varieties on the label.

Of even greater importance (at least from my point of view) are the changes to the appellation contrAlAe (AOC) system that will come into effect later this year. Instead of being run by local "syndicats", which always struck me as counter productive at best and a blatant conflict of interest at worst, this will now be administered by a new, national body called the Organisme de DAfense et de Gestion (ODG).

Another responsibility that will be taken away from the syndicats is the granting of the "agrAment", the system by which appellation wines are deemed to be of sufficient quality to be sold to the public. In the past, this was a joke. Very few wines were rejected, and those that were often failed because they were interesting, rather than faulty. Now that certified independent bodies will conduct the blind tastings, France's appellations have a chance to re-establish themselves as a guarantee of quality as well as origin. Let's hope those bodies show some teeth.

One decision that has not been taken at a national level, and should be, is to appoint a single person to represent France's vinous interests in the UK. Let's call such a person Mr or Ms France. Sopexa does a good job, but the fact that it doesn' represent Bordeaux (handled by R&R Teamwork), Champagne (Peretti Communicatons) or Roussillon (Focus PR), and shares the Languedoc with Westbury, undermines France's ...