Zut alors! Fake French rosé is just cheap plonk from Spain

A GLASS of chilled French rosé is seen by some as a quintessential summer drink.

However, wine enthusiasts have been unwittingly drinking inferior Spanish rosé which was falsely labelled as French.

Fraudsters have sold some ten million bottles of fake French rosé to four of the largest wine distributors in the country. The inferior Spanish wine was then sold in French restaurants and hotels for three years. Britain is one of the largest export markets for French rosés and investigators believe some may have ended up in the UK.

French officials said criminal proceedings will be launched, but have not named the vineyards or merchants accused. A wine distributor near the Spanish

border is accused of concealing the origin of three million litres of Spanish rosé. The wine was either falsely labelled as French, or given misleading labels. Alexandre Chevallier, of the French consumer fraud office, said: ‘We first received warnings about “Frenchification” towards the end of 2015.’

Investigators found evidence of Spanish wine being passed off as French in more than a fifth of establishments they checked.

The profits are believed to be enormous.

A litre of Spanish rosé cost about 30p in 2016. Passed off as French, it would fetch up to three times on the wholesale market. It is the latest scandal to have tarnished the French wine trade’s reputation.

In March, police found over 66 million bottles of ordinary wine passed off as Châteauneufdu-Pape and other prestigious Côte du Rhône appellations.

‘Warnings about Frenchification’