Too much champagne, not enough caviar

When Jean-Luc Barbier uncorks a bottle of millesime champagne on New Year's Eve, the secretary-general of the Comite Interprofessionnel des Vins de Champagne (CIVC) will also be celebrating the mighty French champagne growers' recent victory over a little Swiss village on the banks of Lake Neuchatel.

The French Champagne region produced 269 million bottles of bubbly last year and has set aside enough grapes to increase production to over 300 million bottles in 1999, in anticipation of the millennium rush.

By contrast, the little Swiss village called Champagne produces only 50,000 bottles each year of its cheap, dry, still white wine with screw-on caps, not corks. They are for domestic consumption, not export.

Yet earlier this month a complaint filed years ago by the CIVC with the European Commission reached maturity. "We didn't ask them to change the name of their village or stop producing wine," Mr Barbier told me on the telephone from Epernay, the champagne capital of the world. "We just wanted them to stop putting the name champagne on their labels." The EU demanded that Switzerland, not a member of the EU, respect its appellation d'origine controlee, and the Swiss village now has until 2001 to comply.

"The name champagne is priceless. It is the shared patrimony of all the Champennois (the people of the Champagne region)," Mr Barbier said.

Fizzy white wine from Champagne has been sold since the 1600s. "Three hundred years ago, ours was a poor and unknown region," Mr Barbier continued. "It took hard work and perseverance for them to establish the name. You can calculate the value of vineyards, stocks and bottles, but the name is irreplaceable. The name champagne will never be for sale to anyone. It is an eternal, collective property."

Others have learned the hard way how ferociously the CIVC defends its name. When the designer Yves Saint-Laurent launched a perfume called Champagne three years ago, the CIVC gently asked him to change it. He refused, and the champagne growers won their case in the Paris tribunal and in appeals court. Mr Saint-Laurent paid damages and changed the name of his perfume to Ivresse (drunkenness).

But as Martial Girod, the president of the Bonvillars winery which produces the Swiss champagne, told me, "The French have got their work cut out for them." Chile produces large amounts of white sparkling wine with champagne labels. "They went after the little guy," he grumbles. "It was David and Goliath." In his sour grapes mood, Mr Girod will boycott French champagne tomorrow night, in favour of more patriotic Swiss sparkling wine.

The Swiss village has been called Champagne since 885, Mr Girod said, and for him, too, the row is a question of national heritage. Mr Barbier said the Swiss only started calling their wine champagne a few years ago, "to profit from our name". But Mr Girod claims he has labels dating back to the 1930s. And the Swiss village's legal travails are not over. The CIVC now plans to go after the pencil-shaped biscuits they make and dare to call Flutes de Champagne.

"What is really upsetting is that the Swiss government haggled over our patrimony," Mr Girod complained. "They took our name away from us in exchange for aircraft landing rights in Spain. They compromised our Swiss heritage."

The 650 villagers of Champagne are "sickened" by this month's agreement. Just before Christmas, they formed the Comite d'Action de la Protection d'Identite de Champagne, which has dashed off some angry missives to the government in Berne. "It's not going to calm down," Mr Girod predicted. "We cannot accept this."

He hints at more drastic measures, such as a political campaign demanding a referendum on the cessation of bilateral negotiations between the EU and Switzerland. "Secretly, I would be pro-European," he said. "We sense that in the long term Switzerland must open up. But this kind of thing discourages us."

Yet if champagne-lovers can rest assured that their expensive habit will be protected, caviar-eaters have real cause for worry. The sturgeon, the prehistoric-looking fish that produces the tasty little black beads, is an endangered species. Visitors to the Paris Maison du Caviar or Petrossian's are in for a shock. Caviar now sells for up to 14,800 francs (£1,772) per kilo.

Champagne-makers must store bottles for 15 months before they put them on the market, during which time each bottle is hand-turned daily. But if that seems complicated, consider the fact that the female beluga sturgeon (which gives the most valued caviar) spawns only once every seven years.

Efforts to protect sturgeon in the Caspian Sea and Volga river collapsed with the Soviet Union. Poaching and catching small, young fish have led to what French experts call "a massacre" of sturgeon in the former USSR.

In the 19th century sturgeon were plentiful in French rivers, but they, too, have been depleted by over-fishing, pollution and the destruction of their spawning places. Scientists in the Bordeaux region are trying to repopulate the Gironde river, with limited success. Unlike trout and salmon, the fussy sturgeon rejects fish food and often refuses to eat in captivity. It takes three tonnes of shrimp and molluscs to feed a captive sturgeon for a year, and even then he isn't happy.

Cheers!