The French Beaujolais article strengthened my stereotypical image of the French and particularly French farmers. They're immoral creeps, they are! And by that, I don't just mean that pouring good booze down the drain is immoral, even though a good number of my fellow countrymen would consider it so.

What particularly struck me about the article was that nowhere did it question whether or not there might be something even slightly irresponsible about pouring good wine down the drain - and this is me thinking of wine as a foodstuff now, not as an alcoholic beverage.
The job of a farmer is to produce food. Without food we die, so this is not an entirely unimportant issue under scrutiny here. And there's more to it than that, since you could argue that the point of working is to produce wellbeing - food, health, security, entertainment, and so on.

"Yeah, yeah,' I can hear you thinking, "but wine is not food. The point of wine is to be rare and expensive, a treat. Otherwise there'd be no snob value! And snob value is half the fun of drinking wine. It's not as if they're pouring milk and potatoes down the drain.'
Maybe so. I've lost my faith in French farmers, but you might be right. Because nobody would actually throw away real food - would they?

They most certainly would, and do. I claim that, like everything else we're doing these days, the actions of farmers and governments are all too often based on a mean-spirited logic.