Champagne is a French drink and so it seems only right that the French have a right to find other uses for their bubbly then drinking or exporting it. There is always a possibility of holding a few bottles ransom to make your employer give in to your demands. Striking is so last year, mon cheri.
Angry workers at a French champagne manufacturer are threatening to dump large loads of champagne in a protest over the uncertain future of their firm, Bricout-Delbeck. Noel Sainzelle, a worker from the CGT trade union was heard yesterday:
We’re fed up and we’re determined. If recent mistakes are not corrected, we will destroy some of the stock.
Way to go. That really is going to help the company that employs you.
Reuters reports that staff at Bricout-Delbeck have seized six million to seven million champagne bottles and 800,000 bottles of the firm’s not yet fully manufactured wine stock, estimated to be worth about 200 million pounds. Several dozen workers at the company in the eastern French champagne producing region have already destroyed 300 litres of not fully manufactured stock.
The champagne apocalypse hangs on a court decision on the firm’s future in November. Bricout-Delbeck was purchased by a U.S. group earlier this year for the symbolic sum of one euro, but was declared bankrupt in April. Market leaders Moet-et-Chandon and Vranken-Pommery then launched a new plan for the firm, offering to take on 95 of the 133 employees and some stock and production facilities. The firm’s previous owners have appealed the plan and a court decision is due on November 13. The delay and uncertainty sparking the protest by staff.
I do not have more detail about the ‘Champagne Affair’. I appreciate the distress of the employees over their future and their right to protest. However, ruining the business of the company that they work for strikes me a bit short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating. But who knows, if they fulfill the threat, the vintage may become extraordinarily expensive due to its rarity. Markets work in mysterious ways…
“If you don’t not bankrupt this company, we will!”
Brilliant logic, Noel. And money grows on trees (but they are all controlled by Zionists).
This sounds like a very straightforward case of theft, extortion, and destruction of property to me. Why aren’t the culprits in jail?
The dumpers may be sorry if they end up violating some Euro-environmental regulation. It would be safer to burn down a synagogue.
RC Dean:
They’re French. That’s why they’re not in jail. (Cue Kodiak….)
A few years back, another batch of angry unionized geniuses dumped toxic chemicals in a nearby river to prove how determined they were and get the national attention.
I was home around that time and actually sat through 15 minutes of TV blather on how, supposedly, a huge chunk of the population sympathised with, and understood their “struggle” against evil capitalism.
I just couldn’t look away. It was just too unbelievable, in a weird voyeuristic sort of way. And that was nothing next to the editorials that followed the next morning.
I have no idea what happened to the offenders. Probably next to nothing, relative to the crime. After all, this kind of freedom of expression is part of what supposedly makes France a social model that is the envy of the western world. Yes, they actually believe this stuff. I swear. It’s like a weird, twisted, secular version of those people who believe in Genesis as an account of world creation. Except the latter’s beliefs don’t cause anyone else lose their jobs, or property to be destroyed. Or worse, sometimes.
The most entertaining outcome is that if these idiots manage to spread their movement and do act on their threats, the bigger producers, many of whom are controlled by foreign owners, including British and American ones, will be able to charge more for their product this Christmas as a result of the diminished supply.
Bottom line : Bricout-Delbeck out of business, all its employees out of a job, and fatter profits for the big bad capitalists.
These people just have a knack to put themselves in lose-lose situations.
Ever dreamed of a day of truth in advertising ? Imagine the ads for trade unions : “None Of Us Is As Dumb As All Of Us Together !! Join Now !!”
“Champagne is a French drink”
Well, sort of…
Champagne is basically bubbly wine and the English invented the process of making “Champagne” 30 years before the old blind monk Dom Pérignon allegedly made his first sparkling Champagne. And Pierre Perignon put those bubbles into his wine in the 1690s. The English started doing it in the 1660s.
It must really ‘tick’ the French off that their sparkling drink was actually invented by the Brits. The English possess the necessary technology to make Champagne long before the French – and we have the historical documents to prove it. The English even had reinforced bottle glass manufactured in order to keep Champagne.
“I appreciate the distress of the employees over their future and their right to protest. However, ruining the business of the company that they work for strikes me a bit short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating.”
Ummm…holding your employer’s property hostage and threatening to destroy it seems just a tad more worrisome than “self-defeating.”
Here in the States, such actions would be referred to as “G_Ddamn criminal.” Extortion would be the likely charge, along with grand larceny or some such offense against property.
If this was occuring in the Sonoma Valley, the hooligans who dreamed this scheme up would have been shot dead by a police SWAT team by now, or in jail pending charges.
Actually, as far as I can tell, the Enmons decision of 1973 exempts union officials and members from extortion charges. Check out this from the Cato institute.
RK Jones
Gregory, well yeah, why do you think these people hate the American model so much ? Because in America, they’d have to work. And they’d be responsible, and accountable, for their own actions. And that would just be no fun at all.
And unfortunately, it’s neither novel nor isolated, but part of an old trend.
The thing is, this kind of stunt does not cause too much anguish because the tolerance level for all kinds of crime has become so high, thanks to years of excuses and socialist rationalizations that blame anything and everything on “society”.
Some Muslim guy and one of his buddies recently sliced a girl’s face because she dared wearing cross-shaped earrings (the nerve !). Let’s pass on the obvious courage and guts of the said individuals. Apparently, some so-called intellectuals believe this kind of behavior is the result – you’d better sit down – of our collective islamophobia.
In other words, we made them do it.
So in the Champagne case, the boss is undoubtedly responsible for all the damage. I’m not joking.
The old East Germany has different labour laws to the West, a relic of partition. Earlier this year the giant industrial union IG Metall tried to organise widespread strikes to get the eastern working hours brought down to the western limit of 35 hours per week. Much to the union’s surprise the eastern workers realised that they were possibly risking their jobs and many stayed in their factories 24 hours a day to keep working and avoid IG Metal’s drafted in pickets.
The full tale is here, oh and Norbert Walter, Chief Economist Deutsche Bank, will surprise you.
Jeebus. What a pack of friggin’ bedwetters.
You put a gun to the neck of my bottle of champagne, I’ll kick yer freakin’ ass. Not ‘cuz I like champagne all that much. Hell no. I’d do it ‘cuz I hate extortionate thieves.
I just don’t respect a man who lets a pissy sommellier get between himself, and his booze.
Yup. You can get my (probably empty) Sierra Nevada from me when you pry it from my cold, passed-out fingers.
mmmmmmmmm…Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale…..
“…a protest over the uncertain future of their firm…”
Detroying the company would be a perfectly effective way of eliminating that uncertainty. So if its the uncertainty they are protesting against, it’s actually all quite logical.
Well, RK, that certainly reinforces my view that labor unions are little more than legalized criminal enterprises in the US. “Labor law” basically boils down to a series of exemptions from other laws that the rest of us have to comply with.
Pointless off-topic screed deleted by Samizdata Admin.
Dear Samizdata Admin,
Should you happen to be a Lady, and should you happen to be single, I would very much like to offer you a diner with, say… Champagne.
And also, any chance I could borrow that bug-b-gone graphic?