Sales of French Wine Decline, Study Says

The call to boycott French wine in retaliation for France’s opposition to the war in Iraq put a cork in demand that may have cost millions in sales, researchers said Tuesday.

Two Stanford University economists found that weekly sales of French wine dropped an estimated 26% at the peak of the boycott and resulted in a 13% slip for the six months or so that it lasted.

The economists looked at scanner data from supermarkets and large retailers in four major cities and found French wine sales dropped during the six months after the war started in March 2003. Extrapolating the data, nationwide totals may have dropped as much as $112 million, they said.