Vintage Protest : Nuclear Test Foes Put the Squeeze on French Wine

After President Jacques Chirac decided to resume nuclear-weapons tests in the South Pacific, one nation recalled its ambassador to France. Protesters burned the French flag and set fire to an embassy, 3 million people signed petitions and environmentalists disrupted French military operations.

But of all the worldwide protests, the one that has hit home here is the campaign by France’s own European neighbors to boycott that most enduring symbol of all that is French: wine. And it is not merely a matter of national pride.

The boycott is already blamed for trimming the country’s Bordeaux exports by 5%, and with international outrage mounting over France’s detonation of a nuclear device Tuesday in the South Pacific, vintners fear the damage could get far worse.

Other French industries are concerned too. Groups opposed to the nuclear tests have called for an even broader boycott to include such French products as cheese and foie gras .

The French have been particularly dismayed by the boycott call contained in an advertisement devised for movie theaters by anti-nuclear forces in Great Britain, which happens to be both the top consumer of French wine and France’s historical nemesis.

The ad, prepared without charge by a London agency, is a takeoff on a scene from the movie “The Day of the Jackal.” It shows a Chirac look-alike drinking wine at an outdoor cafe as a sniper takes aim at him.

“There’s only one way to stop Jacques Chirac from his program of nuclear tests in the South Pacific,” a voice says as the sights of the sniper’s gun focus first on the target’s head, then his chest and, finally, beneath his belt. “It is to hit him where it really hurts.”

Suddenly, the gun is fired and the wine bottle on the table explodes in red, splattering the Chirac stand-in.

“Drop a bomb on Chirac’s plans,” the announcer says. “Boycott French wine.”

“That advertising spot is scandalous,” said Hubert Bouteiller, a Bordeaux wine grower and president of the region’s producer association. “It is a declaration of war.” In fact, the French government has lodged a protest with the British government.

Danny Thompson, spokesman for the National Peace Council in Britain, countered that while the ad “is pretty hard-hitting, we see it as humorous. A spoof. Having seen the fuss it has caused in France, though, seems to justify our decision to go ahead with it.”

The advertisement technically hasn’t yet made its debut. It still awaits the approval of British censors who, Thompson says with some concern, “are taking an unusually long time in passing on it.” But descriptions of it have been widely disseminated in France on television and in newspapers, in reports on the boycott campaign.

The boycott call has wine producers here worried and angry.

French wine makers exported $4.4 billion worth of le vin last year, which represented nearly a 7% increase over the year before and a 40% increase in the past decade. The British import 40 million bottles of French wine a year and alone account for nearly a fifth of French wine exports.

Although it’s still too early for firm figures, the Bordeaux wine-producers’ association says it already has seen about a 5% drop in orders from abroad. And the critical pre-Christmas sales months are fast approaching. Some producers could lose as much as 35% of their revenue this year, the industry association says.

French wine producers are especially anxious that even a small boycott would allow other vintners, including those in California, to increase their world market shares.

“This is a weapon of last resort, and we thought about it carefully,” said Thompson, whose group is part of the British Nuclear Test Ban Coalition. “We didn’t want to single them out, but that’s what’s happened, because French wine is the most identifiable consumer item.”

The aim of the British boycott is to persuade France’s powerful agricultural lobby to use its influence with Chirac. “What we’re saying is, ‘Use your voices now, and tell Chirac that what he’s [doing] is unacceptable,’ ” Thompson said. “This is not against the French people.”

But, said Bouteiller, “No one has the moral right to do that. It’s an act of economic war. We aren’t just going to sit on our hands waiting for our products to be replaced by other products from the rest of the world under the pretext that our president has decided something for which we didn’t have a word to say.”

Chirac, who has repeatedly described his decision on the tests as irrevocable, has been under considerable pressure at home to call them off. But he went ahead this week, conducting the first of what he says will be seven or eight tests by next May, after which France would end all tests and sign the international nuclear test-ban treaty.

A recent public opinion poll found that 60% of the French oppose a resumption of nuclear tests. But French citizens of all persuasions have been angered by the campaign against their country’s products. That feeling was summed up in the current issue of the magazine Paris Match, which ran six frames of the British ad with the headline: The English Hit Below the Belt.

Some wine growers see the boycott as a veiled attempt by their neighbors in Europe, jealously guarding their own wine producers, to reduce the market share of French wines. “The protest against nuclear tests is only a pretext,” said a wine producer who asked not to be identified. “The issue is money, and how to destabilize the economy of a country.”

“That’s rubbish,” Thompson said. “We’ve been deluged with calls from conservative voters who would never contact the National Peace Council in a million years. They say they are disgusted with Chirac and have stopped drinking French wine. There’s no point in doing that unless we tell Chirac that is why we’re not buying.”

While economists say an economic boycott against France is unlikely to imperil the country as a whole, the impact already is being felt in specific industries. And nowhere will it bite harder than in the Bordeaux region in the southwest, where the gravelly soil produces timeless classics. Bordeaux wines account for 42% of French wine exports.

“The risk to our livelihood is incontestably large,” Bouteiller said. “We know that whenever a consumer replaces a Bordeaux with another wine, it is very difficult to win him back. Our image is at stake.”

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Close to Home

The boycott of French wine by anti-nuclear activists has already cut Bordeaux exports 5%, which is of no small concern to the French economy. Dollar value of French wine exports, in millions, to top 10 importing countries in 1994:

Britain: $900

Germany: $750

United States: $556

Belgium/Luxembourg: $493

Switzerland: $312

Netherlands: $296

Japan: $185

Denmark: $170

Canada: $155

Italy: $120

Source: French Center for Foreign Trade.