news from Paris

a report from Paris in the FT:

There’s been a spectacular decline in wine drinking. I sometimes ask people to guess which country was the world’s biggest exporter of wine in 1970. The answer: Algeria. Even after independence, the Muslim country was still producing cheap plonk that kept the former motherland pickled. French winemakers did their bit, too. But since the 1960s, the average French person’s consumption of wine has dropped by about 70 per cent, to below 40 litres a year. Wine barely exists at lunchtime any more. Younger French people prefer cannabis.