Joe wrote recently that "...French wine has gone the same way of Simplex, Mafac and Huret here in the UK..." and I think that this was said in a pejorative sense.
I think you have to remember that those French manufacturers made some wonderful contributions in terms of technological innovations.. innovations blatantly copied years later by Japanese companies, but they just failed to market the products as well as they should have done. However these companies were world leaders at a time when the market-makers..those powerful people who decide just what we should drink, eat, wear, ride, drive etc had not taken over the world of business, and as we know to our own loss, frequently we have to buy the goods that the market-makers think we should have rather the the ones that we might otherwise wish to buy.
This is surely the case in the UK where the large supermarkets dictate the types of wines that we, their customers, will drink. The other problem is that many British wine drinkers are too idle to actually study the world of wine in any greater depth than the biased hand-outs given out by the supermarkets, and I have little doubt that if CocoCola or Pepsi Cola decided to bottle wine eg PepsiShiraz or CocaMerlot, the average undemanding British wine drinker would buy millions and millions of cans of the stuff, in the knowledge that every can of that generic wine regardless of the year, would taste just the same as every other one from the same supplier, again regardless of year of production.
French vineyards probably have, but I am willing to be corrected, the widest variety of grapes of any country in the world. There are varieties grown over there that produce absolutely delicious wines on a par with anything produced in any other part of the world, but because the French system of categorising wine, with the AOCs representing the top-end wines, does not specify in large easily-read type on the front of the label whether its sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon ,chardonnay, merlot, syrah, pinot noir etc..many undiscriminating British wine-drinkers cannot make the effort to find out what varieties of grape are in the bottles...so they don't buy the wine.
I have properties in both Sancerre and the Rhone valley of France so I have a vested interest..and I buy all of my wine from local producers..but you show me a New Zealand sauvignon blanc and I will show you an even better Sancerre or a Pouilly Fume...show me a syrah(shiraz) from anywhere in the world and I will show you an even better Hermitage..
It's the supermarket wine-buyers of the UK that are killing off the British consumption of French wines , not the French wines themselves..if the buyers who control our tastes dont put the stuff on the shelves..then the customers cannot buy it..But there again there are some excellent independent wine-merchants in the UK who have not sold out their souls to market forces and the bland world of the mundane and totally generic chemically-doctored beverages.
Sorry about that Dale...but I am as enthusiastic about wine as I am about old bikes..and I do admit to having vested interests in France.
Norris Lockley