THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

For many years in the US if you wanted a cheap plonk you bought Gallo wines. Lately the Gallo family has worked hard to improve their product line, going so far as to import wine from France to bottle under a fancy label.

Today, in a courtroom in the south-western French town of Carcassonne, 12 figures from the local wine industry were convicted of masterminding a lucrative scam in which E&J Gallo, the leading US winery, was conned into buying 18m bottles of plonk which had been repackaged as pinot noir.

In one of the most far-reaching scandals to have hit French vineyards in years, the executives from the Languedoc-Roussillon region were found to have made a €7m (£6.1m) profit through a fraud which lasted from January 2006 until March 2008. Overall, 13.5m litres of fake wine were shipped to the US to be drunk by unsuspecting US consumers. Gallo, founded by brothers Ernest and Julio following the repeal of prohibition in 1933, is now the biggest family-run winery in the US, known internationally as the leading exporter of Californian wines and within the industry as the world's most powerful wine brand.

The court made clear who it believed had been the "kingpin" of the affair: Claude Courset, head of Ducasse wine merchants, who acted as an intermediary between local producers and a conglomerate which resold the wine to Gallo. Courset was given a six month suspended jail sentence and a fine of €45,000.

Sieur d'Arques, the trading company that worked with Gallo on its popular brand of Red Bicyclette wines, was ordered to pay €180,000. The business had been the only defendant to plead not guilty in the affair, insisting that the fraud had been carried out without its knowledge.

The other defendants, including eight co-operative wine cellars from the surrounding Aude and Hérault regions, were fined according to their responsibility in the affair. Gallo has not yet filed any complaint to the French courts.

Still cheap plonk, but Two Buck Chuck is a better value.