For the French, it is the sort of thing that is never ever supposed to happen.
Second-rate wine has been finding its way to restaurant tables in Paris and elsewhere in France masquerading as good Bordeaux, with the origins apparently guaranteed by serious-looking labels. The prices, of course, were upgraded to match.
For more than two years, a company in southwestern France, Bergerac Selection, had been buying the wine from producers in the area, bottling it as fine wine-often with the growers` knowledge-and reselling it to restaurants and to Vinyrama, a distribution company that provides wines to French supermarkets.
This lucrative business came to a shuddering halt about two weeks ago when police made the first of 13 arrests in a case that shows just how seriously the French take their wine.
The affair, after all, is simply one of fraud and not one of health, unlike the problems encountered by the Austrian and Italian wine industries four years ago when wine deliberately tainted by dangerous chemicals to boost its alcohol content was finding its way to consumers.
But the crime affects the reputation of a huge trade based on quality controls that rely a lot on trust and that are widely viewed as being in the interest of all, from the grower to the drinker. Wine, after all, is big business in France.
Sales of Bordeaux topped the 10 million franc mark ($1.7 billion) for the first time last year for a production of 5.2 million gallons.
The current scandal has its roots in European Community controls on wine production, a Brussels-inspired effort to reduce the virtual lake of surplus wine and make only as much in Europe as consumers are likely to drink.
These controls restrict the output of wine from each region to a certain number of liters each year. Any surplus must be turned into vinegar or distilled into alcohol for industrial use.
With improved methods of winemaking and grape-growing making the wine trade ever more efficient, and with particularly clement weather smiling on the Bordeaux region`s fortunes over the last few years, surpluses are a regular occurrence.
In the Bergerac region, part of the Dordogne area that borders on Bordeaux, police turned up evidence that three wine wholesalers, Michel Barbe, Patrick Geneste and Henri de Dietrich, had been turning such surpluses into fake Bordeaux.
Winegrowers were delivering their extra production to De Dietrich, the head of Bergerac Selection, who had it bottled and labeled as having come from various chateaux in the Bordeaux.
As the first news of the scandal surfaced, various French press reports speculated that the very ordinary Bergerac or the Premieres Cotes de Bordeaux, wines that usually retail on supermarket shelves for around $2, were being sold for many times more under some of the best-known labels in the world.
This provoked an angry response from the more prestigious growers, who came up with proof that this could not be so. In the case of the famous Chateau Petrus label, for example, the makers pointed out to consumers that not only did their wine carry a label but that the name of the wine was engraved on the base of their bottles as further protection against imitation. To the relief of such growers, it transpired that the fraud involved labels of origins that simply do not exist.
De Dietrich and his accomplices had created an association of chateaux that enabled them to print their own labels, claiming that the wine had been bottled by the maker. Then they invented names of some imaginary chateaux to give their wines that extra zest of prestige.
But their inventiveness did not stop there.
The movement of alcohol around France is strictly controlled, and drivers of trucks carrying loads of wine are likely at any moment to be asked by police to produce papers authorizing the transport.
To get around this, producers of the phony Bordeaux provided transport papers that had already been issued for genuine shipments, and these papers would be used several times over a period of a few days for different loads of illegal wine.
With the police fraud squad in the area notoriously undermanned, there seemed to be little risk in the venture.
In the Paris region, the phony wine trade was handled by one Henri Boeringer who, offering restaurants a Lalande-de-Pom Erol or a Saint Emilion at a bargain 17 francs (just under $3) a bottle, sold off products that otherwise would have brought the growers just forty centimes a liter.
If the restaurant-owners` suspicions were not aroused, it can be attributed to a series of good years for Bordeaux in the 1980s that have brought the prices of the region`s wines tumbling.
Five of the last eight years` production have been pronounced excellent by the experts, making for a welcome glut of quality wine. To free storage space in their chateaux for following years, the producers have been slashing their prices.
And if the consumers` suspicions were not aroused, it was possibly because, owing to the lower prices, many of them were drinking Bordeaux as a regular table wine for the first time and they were simply not that aware of how the real thing should taste.
One supermarket chain, which is not implicated in the current scandal, sells a palatable Bordeaux for 10 francs, about $1.60. In earlier years, only very minor wine-growing regions could sell at such prices. A bottle of beaujolais, considered an upstart among wines, retails for about two and a half times that price.
It was not until Jean de Maillard, an examining magistrate in the city of Bordeaux, started to take an interest in apparent differences between the declared production and actual sales of Bordeaux wine that the affair ground to a halt.
Six of the people he charged with fraud are still in custody, and the judge, expressing surprise that such morals appear rather general among wine- growers in the region, is hinting strongly that others soon may join them.
It is not the first time that fraud has hit French wine. But it is the first time in recent years that fraud has affected the French themselves so widely via restaurants and supermarket distribution.
In the 1970s, a huge trade in Bordeaux that had been mixed with cheap Algerian wine was uncovered. In that case, the wine was intended for export, mainly to the United States. There was speculation at the time that the guilty parties never would have dared to try to cheat French palates.
Some of the new crop of phony Bordeaux did make it abroad, but officials say that 90 percent made its way down French throats.
A votre sante.
