The biggest new wine out of France last year was born in the mind of an American: Joe Gallo. That's Gallo, as in E&J Gallo Winery, America's biggest wine producer and a company many people still associate with California jug wines like Carlo Rossi. Three years ago, Joe, co-president of the company and son of legendary co-founder Ernest, returned from a trip to Europe and asked his consumer-research team to explain his French paradox: that most Americans still rated French wines as the best in the world but the French were rapidly losing market share to Australia and Italy. Why? The answer had less to do with anti-French sentiment than with France's wine-classification system, which Americans find too intimidating with its hard-to-decipher appellations, chateaux and mis en bouteille a la propriete. If the wines could be made more approachable, Joe concluded, Americans just might snap them up.
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