the champagne cartel

From Christina Passariello in the WSJ...

Champagne producers agreed to pick 32% fewer grapes this year, leaving billions of grapes to rot on the ground, in a move to counter fizzling bubbly sales around the world amid the economic downturn.

The result of the slashed harvest and other reductions will be a 44% cut in the number of bottles produced this year...

It is one of the starkest signs yet of how cutbacks in consumer spending are affecting this segment of the luxury-goods market. Grape growers and bottlers of the wine in the Champagne region of France haven't significantly cut the volume of usable grapes since 1955, when a bumper harvest was reduced....

The Champagne industry's governing body, the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne, estimates there are more than 1.2 billion spare bottles sitting in warehouses....The committee decided the volume of grapes that can be picked this year will be 9,700 kilograms per hectare of land, compared to 14,200 kilograms per hectare allowed last year. Also for the first time, only 82% of the harvested grapes will be bottled this year -- the rest will age in tanks for at least another year until the drop in sales stabilizes. The reductions will produce 44% fewer bottles of the wine this year....