You know times have changed when French wines, bruised by competition from the “New World,” fight back with the upstarts’ own weapon — dropping complex regional labeling for the plain old grape name.
Even the staunchest of Gallic wine lovers now order chardonnay or cabernet sauvignon instead of, say, their favorite Chablis or Bordeaux.
The change concerns everyday wines, notably those bound for export.
Labels on better varieties, grand cru and AOC or “controlled designation of origin” wines will carry on in time-honored fashion.
But it’s a jolt in a country where regional identity remains strong (are you from Brittany? Provence?), where the term terroir — soil — is an agricultural mark of pride and where wines can be declined down to the hillside where the grapes grew.
CONSISTENCY
The strategy? Market recognition, consistent taste.
“It’s like creating a well-known brand name, like Apple or Coca-Cola,” said Valerie Pajotin, director of Anivin, a trade organization formed last year to promote Vin de France, the new denomination that has replaced the old vin de table, or table wine, a term that carried a negative connotation of low quality.
The goal? Winning back ground from “New World” competitors, notably Californian and Australian wines that overtook French sales in some key foreign markets like Britain, Germany and the US.
“In one generation, we lost 20 to 30 percent of the share of our principal markets,” said Bertrand Praz, purchasing manager for Grands Chais de France, which bills itself as the leading French exporter of wines and spirts.
Last year alone, exports of French wine tumbled 19 percent to 5.5 billion euros (US$6.7 billion), dropping to levels of a decade ago, according to figures from Ubifrance, the French agency for international business development.
Some critics feel the change could damage local wine traditions, but Praz insists that French growers need “to be more humble and rethink how they work.”
Historically, place has been primordial, even in everyday wines. French producers relied on their reputation for quality and savoir-faire and did not worry about making labels understandable to the uninitiated, he said.
Add to this vintage — good years and bad years — to confuse the choice.
In came “New World” wines, starting several decades ago with the US, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and more recently Chile and Argentina, who wooed away clients with user-friendly labels touting the grape name.
GRAPE VARIETY KEY
“You can no longer ignore the fact that grape variety is now the undisputed reference” for consumers trying out wines, Anivin president Rene Moreno said.
The client will ask for a “sauvignon” if he wants a dry white wine or a “chardonnay” if he prefers one that’s full-bodied, he said.
Chris Adams, chief executive of the major Manhattan retailer Sherry Lehmann (SL), said he thought the changes could help French sales in the US.
“It’s been a long time in coming and there is some ground to be made,” he said.
“Newer world varietal wines are starting to lose a bit of traction, and I think what we term ‘French country’ wines here at SL can gain some ground with this move,” he said.
Wine trade sources say the new labeling could also boost domestic sales, notably in supermarket chains and with younger clients.
The new approach was helped by 2008 reforms in the EU wine sector that allowed use of the generic term Vin de France.
“The goal is to simplify French offerings based on a label, a taste, a national origin, with a consistent quality, the way New World countries do,” Moreno said.
The reforms allow producers to mix the same grape variety from different regions to “allow more creativity and to adapt easier to market demands,” said Pajotin, whose Anivin group has an annual 800,000 euro budget.
“This possibility of mixing ensures a consistent quality wanted by the consumer who is expecting the same taste from January 1 to December 31,” she said.
Like Coca-Cola.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS