30 April 2025, 00:01
Restaurants and bistros in Paris have been caught serving low-quality wine to customers paying for premium glasses, an investigation has found.
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Restaurants and bistros in Paris have been caught serving low-quality wine to customers paying for premium glasses, an investigation has found.
Tourists in particular are being targeted in the widespread case of wine fraud in the French capital.
The cafes are replacing fancy wines with cheaper alternatives,an investigation by the French paper Le Parisien has found.
The newspaper sent two sommeliers to taste the wine in different cafes while pretending to be tourists, who then discovered the scam.
They found that customers ordering a glass of chablis or sancerre, priced at around €9 (£7.65) were instead served a sauvignon – the cheapest wine on the menu, which costs around €5 (£4.25).
One of the sommeliers posing as tourists, wine merchant Marina Guiberti, found that a €7.50 sancerre was replaced by a cheap sauvignon priced at €5.60, but was still charged the higher amount.
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Giuberti complained to the waiter, and was brought another glass of wine – which again was not the sancerre she paid for.
Giuberti said: “It’s a pity for the customer and for the image of the wine appellation, for the winemaker and for the restaurant owners who do a good job.”
Parisians enjoy afterwork drinks at a bar in the touristic Montmartre district of Paris.
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Staff at brasseries and cafes in Paris confirmed the findings of the investigation, saying the practice is often encouraged by their bosses as a way to maximise profits.
Sarah, a waitress with 30 years of experience in the restaurant industry, told Le Parisien: “I might put leftover wine in a single bottle for happy hour, or replace Bardolino with Chianti, which is much cheaper and tastes completely different.”
This technique of ‘repotting’ wine sees waiters switch out the wine customers ordered for the contents of a more budget bottle.
Tristan, who used to work at a brasserie in the tourist area of Montmartre, said the staff were “told off by the owner if the most expensive bottle went down too quickly”.
He said that a sommelier customer only discovered the ruse once.
The trend is widespread, according to the hospitality worker, and only French customers were spared as “all other customers were getting ripped off”.
He said: “When I saw American tourists arriving on the terrace, I knew they were going to be had.”
Experts have told Le Parisien that customers can insist on having wine poured in front of them, with the label of the bottle they ordered visible, according to French law.
Jérôme Bauer, Alsace winemaker and head of the National Confederation of AOC (appellation contrôlée), told the outlet: “Cheating the customer rebounds on us, the producers, because a customer who has ordered a Côte du Rhône and gets served a Bordeaux wine will probably be disappointed and can turn away from that wine in the future.”