Here’s to Madame Catherine Gachet, not only a beautiful woman but a maker of the intensely sweet and flowery, white wine of Barsac, in the Gironde … and a skilled marketeer.  For, Madame Gachet has identified her product’s unique selling point and it isn’t the suppleness and finish of a fruit drink.  Nope, it’s the eternal soul of French life: chic with a subtle hint of sexuality.

Unfortunately, it’s just not plain and self-abnegating enough for the French government.  Under the latter’s strict advertising codes for purveyors of France’s greatest technical triumph no joie de vivre may be associated with the pleasures of the vine - no beautiful people, no romance, no excitement, until recently not even a simple description of the product’s taste.  Health and Safety are everywhere, it seems, and set upon the great task of saving the hapless Frenchman from a bibulous end.

I was rather depressed to learn about this, one would think, unlikely and very un-Gallic modern puritanism.  Obviously, the political hegemony of Les Chevaliers du Tastevinage has long since seeped into the oaken past of La Vieille France.  Personally, I think it’s all down to the demise of the old, fashionably rebellious, left-bank bohemianism of Paris.  That model of a slightly commie but very sexy artistic and intellectual elite was fatally compromised by its dependent relationship to Gitanes and the aristocracy of the vine.  But at least it didn’t want to rescue us from Madame Gachet’s charms.  The Jane Firkins & Serge Forwards of the twenty-first century are Fair Trade coffee drinkers with, perhaps, a small heroin habit on the side.  It just ain’t the same.

As in Britain, this cultural change   has been accompanied – and no doubt much influenced - by the rise of the shiny-faced policy wonk.  He is the herald of government by network.  Modern politicians don’t move a brain cell policy-wise without consulting him in the form of assorted specialists, experts, academics and the first two blokes who happen along in a horse suit, pretending to be an NGO.  In theory, anyone can play this game.  But it’s always the single-issue obsessives and minority hucksters of the B-List voluntary sector and, especially, the practictioners of life as cotton wool who do.  And they, with all too few exceptions, swing to the left.

Madame Gachet’s difficulties with these new puritans are but part of her travails, however.  For the very fact that she has to resort to advertising at all speaks of a malaise in French viticulture deeper than a spot of government interference.  The mistress of the vine it may be, but France’s age-encrusted industry has had to make some massive efforts over the last forty years to meet competition from the New World.  But in the end it has fallen victim to a changing lifestyle at home.  People have learned to worry about health.  They have been forced to worry about drink-driving.  In the 1960’s the average French adult slurped an impressive one hundred litres a year.  Now it’s only half that.

To make matters very much worse the world market is also turning its back on French growers.  Market prices are low and the French share is declining sharply.  In the short term growers can accept that sort of thing – or, at least, understand it.  What else is the Gallic shrug for?  What they have great difficulty in accepting is that the world market is a globalised market with globalised tastes and globalised expectations.  Blockbuster reds and heavy-flavoured, coloured whites are in demand.  Everywhere.  The beautiful French patchwork of infinitely varying terroir and all the countless, distinct wines which flow from it simply do not fit the corporate policies of American hotel chains.

The dilemma is a familiar one to any student of globalisation.  Does the grower cast individuality and distinctness to the winds and make what the buyers want at the price they want it?  Or does he try to re-secure his future by concentrating more than ever upon his traditions, making thereby wines that express the unique characteristics of his soil?

For now, Madame Gachet is sticking with the second option, the old way.  But she is trying to make it relevant to a changed world.  Wish her luck when next you raise a glass.  In one way or another we all have the global battle to fight, if not for market-share then for living space and if not for distinctiveness, for race and culture.