It’s a sad day when wine-makers go rogue.

That’s exactly what is happening in France’s southern Languedoc region. The CRAV, or Comité régional d’action viticole has bombed grocery stores, a winery, and two agricultural ministry offices among other targets.

Before you start thinking this is a Boston Tea Party style action for freedom and liberty, think again. These wine producers are finding it difficult to compete with lower priced imported wines from Spain and Italy, and want the French government to place high tariffs on these imports to make their own high-priced wines less sour to consumers.

The British wine magazine Decanter reported in May that:

The activist wine group CRAV has issued a one-month ultimatum to Nicolas Sarkozy threatening ‘action’, and possibly deaths, if the new premier does not help the struggling southern French wine industry.

In what may well be the precursor to the most violent period of its recent history, the Regional Committee for Viticultural Action (CRAV) told Sarkozy he had one month to honour his electoral promises of supporting the wine industry or ‘the whole industry will be targeted’.

On a pre-recorded cassette delivered to TV channel France 3 on Wednesday evening, five balaclava-clad men – ’somewhere in the Languedoc hinterland’, according to the report – read out a statement addressed to the new president.

They said that if in one month nothing has changed and that wine prices have not gone up, they will go into action.

‘If Sarkozy does not support the interests of the wine industry, he will be entirely responsible for what happens,’ said their spokesman. ‘We are at the point of no return.’

You can watch the video of winemakers gone mad at the BBC.