French Winemakers Target Bacardi Breezer Generation

On show next to the grand old names of French wine - the Chateaux Margaux and d'Yquem or the Chablis premier crus with their classic, understated labels - the pink screw-top bottles of Fruité Catalan look distinctly blousy.

What's inside the bottle conforms to the stringent standards for which France is famous: the wine is made entirely of quality grapes from Côtes du Roussillon produced under the old strict "appellation d'origine contrôlée" system.

But the packaging of this product is more Bacardi Breezer than Pichon-Longueville. Instead of a line-drawing of a stately chateau, the bottle carries wispy drawings of fruits and butterflies against a pink background. It is also a diminutive 25cl - a third of the usual size - as it is designed for drinking at the bar or for doing what the French call "le snacking".

These new blends of white, red and rosé wines were attracting lots of attention at Vinexpo, the world's largest wine fair in Bordeaux, this week. They are seen by producers as one possible way out of the travails of the French wine industry.

Vinexpo is where the international wine trade gathers every two years to decide what we will be drinking in the years ahead. It is here that you can spot the oenological trends and watch as nervous winemakers entertain supermarket buyers regally in the hope that their bottles will be the ones to make it on to our high street shelves.

The refined noses sniffing the claret glasses on every stand agreed there were two competing visions of the wine future. On the one hand, they see an industry that is consolidating rapidly in order to stand up to retail power.

In this new wine world, growers can only compete globally by making good wines that have an "international style", a taste that is easy and fruity if a bit bland and homogenous, and that can be aimed at new markets, at the young and particularly at women.

On the other hand are the keepers of the "terroir", that traditional French view that a wine should be a complex thing that speaks of its origin, and tastes of the soil in which it was grown.

In the two wine trends is a distillation of the wider row between Tony Blair and French president Jacques Chirac: the global free market Anglo-Saxon model, versus the local, subsidised, social French model. Yet joining the latter group are a growing number of producers making organic or biodynamic wines, including, ironically, leading Californian winemakers who are rejecting the hi-tech industrial methods that have forced the French to modernise and change.

The Fruité Catalan wines launched at Vinexpo are fine examples of the new international style. David Withers, sales manager for Vignerons Catalans, the big group of growers around Perpignan who are producing the brand, invited the Guardian, together with Adam Lechmere, editor-at-large of Decanter, to taste both the old and the new.

Mr Lechmere declared Fruité Catalan wines well-made, fruity, light and straightforward. The brand is being produced in industrial quantities in the south-west of France where there have been violent protests by some French growers against cheap imports from the New World and where many wine producers face ruin as prices have slumped. The French agriculture minister announced a package of €7m in government support at Vinexpo, in addition to special funds that have been negotiated from the EU, to help its beleaguered winemakers.

Then David Withers produced another Côtes du Roussillon: a red, made in the old style. It is the same blend of grapes used in the new Fruité brand but it is "all secondary aromas, not much fruit, coffee, chocolate, tobacco, leathery tannins, quite juicy," Mr Lechmere decided.

The difference comes both from the way the grapes are grown and harvested and in the winemaking itself. "New wine drinkers would never drink something like this," Mr Withers explains. "Young people are used to drinking ready-to-drink mixers and beer, not wine."

In Bordeaux, some of the top wine growers are also trying the new marketing and have launched a range called e-motif in an effort to throw off their stuffy exclusive image. It is made up of typical blends from the region, given names like "blanc excitant", "rosé complice" and "rouge fusion". The distributor, the long-established negotiant Maison Sichel, is selling them over the internet and aiming them at young adults. Their latest innovation is to put chips in the bottle caps that can text message your mobile phone to tell you where you can buy your next glass of their tipple.

David Skalli, a leading French wine consultant and grower whose family owns vineyards in Languedoc, Corsica and California is a moderniser. As well as being a winemaker, he has worked with Nicolas Sarkozy, the rightwing radical rival of President Jacques Chirac.

"The wine industry in France is divided into the new world and the old, there are people waiting for their subsidies, driving the industry down and people who want to work with supply and demand and listen to the market. This is exactly the current debate between Blair and Chirac."

He insists there must be much more consolidation in the industry but disagrees with those who say that will lead to the standardisation of wines. "These new consumers are into heavy tastes. If you are a Coke drinker, you need an intense flavour, you want to be shaken by the wine."

Randall Grahm is a leading Californian winemaker but he is more interested in bringing the Old World to his part of the New World. "The New World has been very clever with technology at producing reasonable facsimiles of great wines. But it is basically "maquillage", make-up. The challenge is to produce wines that have originality without make-up."

Mr Grahm has been farming biodynamically for two years - according to principles that "respect nature's rhythms". Wines from his Bonny Doon winery are complex and minerally. But then, like the old French "terroiristes" he believes that "a wine that doesn't express a sense of place is just generic, it can be nice but it doesn't have that eternal quality to it".

Wispy labels, screwtops and e-wines

The old world...

· Yvon Mau, which distributes brands such as Mau, Premius and Yvecourt, estimates that 10% of Bordeaux's 12,000 winemakers are in financial difficulties.

From 1994 to 2003, the number of commercial growers in France dropped from 196,600 to 112,500.

Exports fell from 168m cases to 148m between 1998 and 2003, while New World exports rose from 88m to 162m. Bordeaux has been badly hit and has an estimated 100m litre surplus from the 2004 vintage.

In France wine consumption has fallen to 50 litres per adult per year, compared with 100 litres in the 1960s. Many blame new, strict penalties for driving while intoxicated and younger tastes for alcopops and beer.

... and the new

· The big names of French winemaking are changing their wines to target young drinkers. Fruité Catalan, from Côtes du Roussillon, is packaged in pink and sold like a sweet fruit drink. It will be sold in small screwtop bottles for drinking in bars and with fast food or in full size bottles at about £4.99.

Top Bordeaux winemakers have launched a range of wines called e-motif, made from appellation contrôlée blends, that are sold on the internet as blanc excitant, rosé complice and rouge fusion, and targeted atyoung adults. The distributor is one of the great names of classic Bordeaux, Maison Sichel. Bottles are being developed that contain a chip that can send a text message to your mobile telling you where you can buy your next glass of the wine.

Biodynamic wines are made with grapes produced in a similar way to organic farming, without agrochemicals, but also on the principal of following natural rhythms, such as the cycles of the moon. Several big names in Burgundy have switched to biodynamic farming, including growers in Chablis, Côte d'Or and Meursault. Big names in Californian winemaking such as Bonny Doon have also switched to biodynamics.

To attract customers who seem to prefer the clarity of New World labels, producers are moving away from the complex appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) system in Bordeaux, which encompasses nearly 60 classings and 3,000 chateau names. More and more quality wines are being labelled with the grape variety rather than simply geographic region.

Many producers are mimicking Australian producers by using brand names to market mid-price French wines.

French producers have shown interest in Kent and Sussex estates which have been outperforming them in competitions. Kent's Chapel Down's Pinot Reserve beat several French champagnes to win the gold medal at last year's International Wine Challenge Awards.

Felicity Lawrence and Linda MacDonald