In May this year, a new acronym entered the lexicon of terror: CRAV. It stands for Comite Regional d’Action Viticole (the “regional committee of viticultural action,” approximately).

Suppress your smiles — although it may sound like an offshoot of the French government’s agriculture department, it is in fact a new militant group, centred in the Languedoc-Roussillon area of southern France, that has threatened violent consequences if there is not immediate state support for the area’s beleaguered winemakers.

They are not empty words: public buildings have been hit with makeshift bombs; some wine tanks of importers from Spain have been destroyed.

Winemaking in France is entering a crucial period, some might say an end-game. The year 2005 was crucial for Chateau Pecachard. It was when a young vigneron, or winemaker, 35-year-old Thierry Bernard, took over the entire production from A to Z.

He borrowed money, he bought new oak barrels, he transformed an old barn and cellars into a simple but effective winery, he created a company.

It was a risky business. Friday, May 13, 2005: the cabernet sauvignon vineyard lost 60 per cent of its grapes in one short savage burst from the sky. The valley was like a snowfield with six inches of hailstones the size of hazelnuts on the ground. The vineyard with the merlot and other grapes, separated from the other by a wood, was less scathed — there we lost about 20 per cent.

Thierry was predictably devastated. He was insured, but the recompense is basic and, more important, it takes two years for a vineyard to fully recover from such a storm — how was he going to live? His answer was to change colour. Instead of trying to make the usual red wine from the hail-damaged grapes, he suggested we make a rose. And in this necessary decision lay his salvation, as it turned out.

The Bergerac region has always made rose wines, but it was something anybody had never even contemplated at Pecachard. But the rose Thierry made after the October harvest seemed — to be exceptional. Rose is very cheap in Bergerac — a winemaker will be lucky if he can sell a bottle for a dollar. He had 3,000 bottles of it. The figures were stark.

But there is one country in the world where rose is loved and consumed in vast quantities: Britain. It was a case of export or die. It was a complex business, but eventually a wine importer in London was so impressed with the samples of rose Thierry gave him to taste that he took the lot.

Exported rose is more expensive; Thierry sold him his entire stock at around $3.50 a bottle. The importer then doubled that, or more, and sold it wholesale to restaurants. In the few London restaurants that sell Chateau Pecachard rose, it will cost you around $40 a bottle. Clearly there is money to be made in selling wine, after all.

Early this year he sold all the 2005 red and 3,500 more bottles of 2006 rose — all of it to export. The doom and gloom of that Friday the 13th hailstorm is steadily receding. And here perhaps lies the lesson for the French wine industry and the militants of CRAV.

NYT