Tradition dies hard in the French Pyrenees, but winegrowers are shrugging aside Gallic pride to bottle their wine in plastic to meet a demand for lighter, unbreakable bottles. "Plastic bottles are difficult for me," said Pascal Fernandez, a winegrower from the Pepieux cooperative in the Languedoc. "In the French culture, a glass bottle with a natural cork is engraved in our genes." But Fernandez and some other growers who recently gathered at a local bottler and producer, Les Celliers Jean d'Alibert, say they must overcome cultural taboos and adapt to new consumer demands if they are to survive. It is understandable these winegrowers listened when one of their top clients, Robert Joseph of Hugh Kevin & Robert, proposed bottling their Greener Planet wine in plastic, with an initial order of 75,000 bottles for Asda, the British subsidiary of the mammoth US discount retailer Walmart. "A lot of the wine trade is a one-night stand relationship," said Robert Joseph of his company's collaborative, demand-driven project. "We are trying to create an enduring relationship - consumer to distributor to producer to growers." Joseph and analysts at Euromonitor International say the move to plastic has been driven by demand from buyers as varied as airlines, Texas supermarkets, Nordic and Canadian state liquor monopolies and restaurant chains in Britain. However, plastic-bottled wine has met with vitriol in other parts of France, despite consumer demand. When the Boisset Family Estates lightened the load with PET-bottled Beaujolais Nouveau in Japan, Canada and the United States - "where the environment is important," noted Nathalie Berges-Boisset - producers were outraged. The Beaujolais winegrowers union has since banned bottling their wine, including Nouveau Beaujolais, in plastic. Boisset put its Beaujolais back in glass but continues to bottle wines from other regions, including the Languedoc, in plastic. "I'm not ashamed," said Boisset. "We don't have any taboos and we believe in the environment."
