France: A Rich Little Wine

To specify a bottle of Préfontaines to a sommelier will make his eyeballs roll. Préfontaines is very much a vin ordinaire, the sturdy stuff that washes down the bread and cheese and accounts for 90% of the 1.5 billion gal. of wine drunk by Frenchmen every year. It will never make a select wine list, but it has made another important listing: the shares of the Préfontaines company, D.M.S., have gone on the Paris Bourse for the first time. This is an indication of the success of Préfontaines in France’s $1.26 billion-a-year wine market, which is a bigger business than auto sales.

The vin ordinaire market is being transformed from a family trade into a highly mechanized industry. Blending and bottling are being automated, national-brand chains are muscling in on traditional local markets. Wine in cans, paper cartons, even greenish plastic bottles, which make the stuff look like motor oil, is being test-marketed. Distribution is still fragmented among 12,000 individual bottlers, but a shake-out of weaker firms seems assured.

Bombed with Beer. Préfontaines, with annual sales of 52 million gal. worth $51 million, controls just 4% of the French market, but that is more than any competitor has. And only Préfontaines has Marc Henrion, 39, a Harvard Business School graduate, as director-general. At Harvard he distinguished himself by bombing the Baker Library with empty beer cans as he flew over it in his old Fairchild. Harvard grounded him but graduated him too (’50), and the next year he had a chance to apply his learning when André Dubonnet, of the company that produces Dubonnet and Cinzano apéritifs in France, asked him to take over its musty little Préfontaines division at $210 monthly. “I was lucky,” says Henrion. “I came into an antiquated business and just applied the book from Harvard.”

To supply a national market, Henrion set up 76 local bottlers around France. His most striking innovation was an automated $8,000,000 bottling plant, the most modern in Europe, built in 1963 on a canal north of Paris. There shifts of 90 men, working around the clock, turn out as many as 1,000,000 one-liter bottles of wine a day.

Keeping Track. The bulk wine arrives from southern France in barges or 40-tank-car trains, rests eight days in 1,000,000-liter tanks to let the sediment settle, then streams through stainless-steel mains to sterilized, electronically inspected bottles. They are automatically topped (with plastic and metal, not cork), stamped with labels, dropped twelve at a time into cases and conveyed to a mechanical loading dock. There a monitor at a control board punches out orders that fill up waiting trucks at the rate of a truck a minute—fast enough so that some drivers do not bother to get out of their cabs. After the style of U.S. aircraft carriers, Henrion keeps track of his men by dressing foremen in beige overalls, wine handlers in red, mechanics in brown, bottling-machine attendants in blue, and forklift truckers in yellow.

All this is enough to turn a discriminating wine fancier to stronger stuff. Henrion does not argue that fine wine should be handled like Préfontaines or that Préfontaines is a fine wine. “In my mind,” he says, “this is something else, like Coca-Cola, like beer. It should be marketed that way.”