An entire street, cellars of apartment blocks and underground car parks have been flooded with wine in a southern French town after a suspected act of sabotage by a shadowy group of "wine terrorists," reports The Telegraph.
Thousands of litres of the tipple poured out of five giant vats of a wine merchant late on Tuesday evening in the Mediterranean port of Sète.
The wine flooded the avenue Maréchal-Juin, the street in front of the wine merchant’s premises, and was several inches deep along a stretch of the road.
It also found its way into the cellars and underground car parks of nearby apartment blocks, and the smell of wine filled the entire district.
It took firefighters half an hour to drain the liquid away.
Police did not comment on what had caused the massive leak, but the local press was quick to speculate that it was the work of saboteurs such as the Comité d'Action Viticole (Wine Action Committee), a shadowy group of "wine terrorists" bent on militant action to protect local produce from foreign imports.
The group, which previously went under the name CRAV, has been active since 1970 in France's biggest wine growing region, now called Languedoc-Roussillon-Midi- Pyrénées, where Sète is located.
It has in recent years hijacked tankers of foreign wine and dynamited government buildings or supermarkets.