Word: winings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...local farmers are demanding financial aid from Paris. But European Union rules limit how much help the French government can extend; Brussels has repeatedly urged growers to cut costs by letting nearly 500,000 acres of land lie fallow and by swapping plonk production for more expensive, higher-quality wine...
...much wine, it is known, can cause violent behavior. But few have gone as far as the grape growers of France's Languedoc-Roussillon region, the world's biggest wine-growing area by volume. Hurting from overproduction and cheap imports and punished lately by the rising cost of gas, a small group of local winegrowers has resorted to "wine terrorism" in a violent attempt to shock the French government into helping them...
...Those incidents are just two of many in a series of violent and destructive acts by local grape growers over the past three years that has targeted public and private buildings, supermarkets, tanker trucks hauling cheap imported wine, and businesses accused of gouging growers with ever shrinking prices. Claiming responsibility: a clandestine group known as the CRAV, or Regional Committe of Viticulture Action...
...sympathizers, have since repeatedly carried out bombings and other acts of vandalism, including three acts of property destruction in a 10-day span in May. In mid-July, CRAV logos were discovered spray-painted at a Narbonne agriculture collective whose vandalized vats had drained nearly 132,000 gallons of wine to the ground - an estimated loss of around $450,000. Last year, it sent a video to newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy demanding assistance to the region's grape growers or else "blood will flow...
...Quixotic as it may seem to outsiders, the group - and many Languedoc-Roussillon growers who support its aims while condemning the violence used to achieve them - want the French government to protect them from a rapidly globalizing market. Foreign wine from cheaper producers such as Italy, Spain, Australia, the U.S. and South America - where costs can be one-fifth those in France - has saturated the market and driven down demand for locally grown grapes. That has depressed the price Languedoc-Roussillon growers get for their crops up to 50% in recent years...