Foreign News: Barred Bars

• Share

Tipplers who headed for any of the 17 Whisky à Gogo (Whisky Galore) bars in Paris and on the Riviera last week found themselves locked out. On the doors were big red, white and blue signs that read cryptically: "Temporary protest shutdown. Scotch remains English. Champagne must remain French."

The Whisky à Gogo lockout, which Director Paul Pacini promises will continue indefinitely, was prompted by a new British court decision allowing a Spanish wine company to describe its inexpensive bubbly product as "Spanish champagne." The French reaction was choleric, for France feels so strongly about its right to the champagne name and label that one clause of the 1919 Versailles Treaty (which ended World War I) protected French champagne from German imitation.

Twenty thousand bottles of the Spanish champagne, headed by rail for the Christmas market in Britain, were turned back at the French border. Jacques d'Argent of the Champagne Growers Syndicate in Paris thundered that "there is only one champagne in the world just as there is only one Scotch whisky," warned that if Britain did not mend its ways, "we might very well subsidize a French whisky company to sell its produce abroad cheaply." When it was remarked that the U.S. has long marketed "New York State champagne," and Burgundies grown in California, Wine Expert André Simon snapped in London, "In America all sorts of things happen that don't happen here."

London newsmen thought the whole French fuss a joke. But in Paris it was no laughing matter. While Whisky à Gogo bars stayed locked up, Harry's New York Bar in Paris took a more popular method of showing its contempt for the British decision: double Scotches were sold for the price of singles. The French Barmen's Association was "contemplating action to defend France's reputation." It did not help to explain that for years the British have been buying South African sherry and Australian port without an outcry from Iberian winegrowers. Said a Parisian barman coldly: "The Spaniards and Portuguese have been foolish to allow this. France cannot—especially now that we have De Gaulle."