Bread and Wine

France gets a lot of bread from wine --specifically $1.5 billion a year in domestic sales alone. Wine is also one of the country's most bracing exports, at $500 million. This year, after a worrisomely chilly spring, the weather turned ideal, with just the right blend of sun and showers. As the grape harvest neared its end last week, prospects for the wine business glowed. The bumper crop is expected to yield 57 million barrels of wine, up better than 34% from last year.

Swimming in Grapes. In the Champagne district, the vines are more bountiful than at any other time in this century. The profusion of Pinot Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and other Champagne grapes sometimes led to confusion among the vintners. Moet and Chandon and Piper-Heidsieck had to rent Marne River barges to store their vinous overflow. Others used abandoned water towers and even swimming pools. Assessments of the size and quality of the grape crop in other wine districts were only slightly less heady. A spokesman for the Institut National des Appellations d'Origine, the industry's official group, summed up the quality: "For Bordeaux, it is the sort of harvest that comes along every 25 years, for Cotes du Rhone every 15, for Alsace every twelve, for Burgundy every ten, for the Loire every six."

Because of inflation and the tradition of setting prices according to the Institut crop ratings, which are high this year, the rich harvest is unlikely to bring down the price of wine. And the crop will not have much immediate impact on the U.S. market, despite a drop in the size of the California wine crop, which is down 20% from last year. Beaujolais, the first wine to travel, will not arrive in the U.S until next March, and this year's Champagne will not be in American shops before 1974. Still, spokesmen for French vintners grow euphoric when discussing prospects in the U.S., their largest single export market. Last year Americans spent $70 million for French alcoholic drinks, mostly wine. In this year's first half, U.S. imports of French wine climbed 30%. The demand for quality wines, whether foreign or domestic, is growing faster than supply.

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