France: A Rich Little Wine

To specify a bottle of Préfontaines to a sommelier will make his eyeballs roll. Préfontaines is very much a vin ordinaire, the sturdy stuff that washes down the bread and cheese and accounts for 90% of the 1.5 billion gal. of wine drunk by Frenchmen every year. It will never make a select wine list, but it has made another important listing: the shares of the Préfontaines company, D.M.S., have gone on the Paris Bourse for the first time. This is an indication of the success of Préfontaines in France's $1.26 billion-a-year wine market, which is a bigger business...

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