Wine festival cancelled over far-right stall

For 63 years, la Fête des Vins d’Anjou-Saumur has celebrated some of the Loire Valley’s finest wines at a festival that offers tastings accompanied by local dishes.

This month, however, the event has been cancelled after being caught up in the toxicity of French politics amid claims that a food stall serving stuffed buns that are a Loire Valley speciality is owned by a far-right activist.

The Union of Producers of Great Wines scrapped this year’s edition of the festival, which had been programmed next weekend in the small and usually peaceful town of Chalonnes-sur-Loire, in the face of what it called “a campaign of intimidation and threats of anti-racist protests”.

The row erupted when flyers began circulating in the town denouncing La Flamme Angevine, which has had a stall at the wine festival for the past two years and was due to return this month. It specialises in fouées, a traditional bun stuffed with ingredients such as garlic and parsley butter, black pudding or mushrooms, onions and lardons.

The chief executive of La Flamme Angevine is Jean-Eudes Gannat, formerly the spokesman for Alvarium, a far-right group banned by President Macron’s government in 2021. The ban was upheld by the State Council, the country’s highest administrative court, which said Alvarium had “published messages justifying discrimination against and hatred of foreigners or French people of immigrant origin by likening them to offenders, criminals, Islamists or terrorists”.

Activists accused the area’s 350 or so wine-makers of “supporting these people and therefore their ideas” by allowing them to have a stall at the two-day festival, which usually attracts about 15,000 people. Pascal Baruchi, the winemaking union’s chairman, denied the claim, telling local media outlets: “That’s defamation. Our committee is apolitical.” He said that he had been unaware of La Flamme Angevin’s links with the far right when it had been invited to the festival, adding that it had undertaken no political activities on the two past occasions that it had been present.

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Baruchi said winemakers had been caught between “a rock and a hard place”. If La Flamme Angevine had been allowed to put up its food stall, the festival would have been targeted by left-wing protesters. If the firm had been banned, it would have had grounds for suing the organisers. He said the only option was to cancel the festival altogether.

Gannat told local media outlets that he had fallen victim to “political discrimination”.