FRENCH vineyards that are unable to sell their wine to an increasingly sober nation have begun selling vine soda, grape beer and other low-alcohol products.

With people drinking less wine than ever before, vineyard owners have cast aside centuries of tradition to unveil a series of derivatives at the International Food Fair in Paris this week.

Table wine producers are backing a national €2.5million (£1.7million) research project to develop low-alcohol wines of about 8 per cent, rather than 14 per cent, for drinkers who have grown more health conscious and in some cases more wary of France’s tougher drink-driving laws.

The state-financed programme, co-ordinated by the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA), involves nine laboratories. One, in Pech Rouge in southern France, has gone further than the initial aim, which is to produce acceptable wines with less alcohol.

It has developed a fizzy, alcohol-free grape drink in collaboration with a private company, Totovino.

Le Soda de la Vigne is on sale in a 25cl can for €1.50 (£1) in Paris. “It’s a way of opening up new markets and helping to cut the overproduction of grapes,” said Jean-Louis Escudier, the head of the INRA laboratory in Pech Rouge. Another company exploring the same avenue is Lir, near Bordeaux, which revealed a fermented and canned grape drink at the Paris food fair this week.

Ensô, which Lir defines as a sort of beer, contains 10 grammes of sugar and 6 per cent alcohol. It will go on sale for €3 in French wine cellars.

Two French supermarkets say they are considering placing orders for a third nouveauté at the food fair — Icône, which claims to have a taste similar to wine but only 0.5 per cent alcohol. The maker says that it has extracted the alcohol using a high-pressure cooling system. As part of the INRA research project, scientists are seeking to analyse other methods for reducing the alcohol content in French wines.

These include grape varieties with lower sugar levels; the use of carbon dioxide to strip alcohol vapours; vacuum distillation: and reverse osmosis through a membrane that retains aroma molecules. Although these methods are used elsewhere, French researchers say that there has never been a project to determine — and then reduce — the alcohol level at which a wine starts to lose its molecular character.

INRA hopes to develop acceptable wines with an alcohol level of between 8 and 9 per cent, compared with between 12 and 14 per cent at present. Below 8 per cent, French legislation bans a drink from calling itself le vin. Up to 15 per cent of France’s annual wine production fails to find a buyer and prices have slumped, with Bordeaux’s vignerons receiving less than the break-even price of €1,000 a barrel.

“When I first started looking at all this ten years ago there was a lot of scepticism in France. But things have changed because of the crisis and now winemakers are interested in what we are doing,” M Escudier said.

However, the upper end of the Gallic wine industry reacted sniffily.

“It would be easier just to add water to the wine,” said François Roncin, who is in charge of research at the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine, which represents fine wines.

“The world has gone mad.”

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