Are you sure that the rosé wine you drank during your vacation in France was really from a local producer? The Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes has revealed that millions of bottles sold as French wine were really Spanish wine.
Some French importers of foreign wine got caught putting Spanish wine in bottles clearly stating that the wine was from France. "We have found frauds among four importer producers," said Alexandre Chevallier, from the DGCCRF to Le Parisien. "These cases of 'Frenchification' concern more than 70 000 hectolitres of wine."
In some cases, the Spanish origin was written in very small characters at the back of the bottle. At the front of the bottle, you could find French imagery like the blue, white and red flag and French castles.
25 penalty tickets were given and over 16 000 bottles were taken off the shelves in France.
The Spanish newspaper El País has written that it was "a political problem, almost one of national identity".
