Sacrebleu! It comes with a straw?

However, it's the use of screw-tops for quality wines that have come to symbolize the changes taking place in the ultra-conservative world of French wines.

Michel Laroche, whose family has been tending Chablis vineyards for five generations, began experimenting with them in 2001 after a harvest of bad quality corks. A year later he became the first French producer to offer screw tops on grand cru wines — a label reserved for the best vineyards.

He says screw tops are a better solution than synthetic corks, which sometimes leave air pockets or gaps and can be hard to remove.

As well as cutting out returns of corked wine, the switch has been good for business, he said. In Quebec, Laroche introduced screw tops in 2004 and boosted sales by 15 percent in one year.

Wine lovers were won over when they saw quality wines being sold with a screw top.

"If you want people to believe you then you have to start with the prestige products," Laroche said.

The oenologue-turned-entrepreneur, who has added vineyards in southern France, South Africa and Chile to the family acreage, now sells 62 percent of his wines with screw tops. But in France, only 14 percent of Laroche wines don't have corks.

Other winemakers are following, Gaillard says, particularly with wines destined for export.

In Britain, where he says consumers lack a "cultural predisposition to wine" and are fond of wine "novelties," supermarket giant Tesco PLC now sells 50 percent of its wines with a screw top, including a third of its French offerings.

French consumers are more resistant.

"Screw tops are extremely suspect," said theater director Jean Manifacher, 44, as he shopped in Paris wine store Cave des Cascades.

"It's fast food wine. I'm in no rush to open the bottle. I like to take my time, savor the experience, enjoy the sound of the removing of the cork from the bottle."

Laroche said he knew there "would be a lot of resistance in France." As he watched green bottles full of white wine line up to be fitted with a black cap, he sighed: "It's a problem of culture and tradition."

Yet in France, tradition is not usually regarded as a problem. Winemakers have long relied on it to sell their wines, particularly in regions widely recognized and popular overseas such as Champagne and Bordeaux.

Conde says the younger generation of winemakers in lesser known regions are starting to shake things up a little — because they have no option.

Barbara Glunz, proprietor of the 120-year-old House of Glunz, Chicago's oldest continuing wine-seller which has been in her family for five generations, said the French wine industry — which provides the bulk of her stocks — has made great strides in recent years.

Glunz sells no box wine, but says she's definitely a fan of screw-top bottles because they prevent the spoilage of wine.

Bob Prewitt, a 60-year-old advertising executive from Pennington, N.J., agrees.

"I actually once opened a $2,000 bottle of wine that was corked," he said. "Now I'm a huge fan of screw caps."

Laroche's wife, Gwenael, is taking the French wine revolution to the new frontiers of the business, like Vietnam, where she has recently been preaching the screw top's virtues.

"If you over-intellectualize the wine, you scare people off," she said, at a trendy wine bar in Chablis, which she designed with her husband.

Gesturing to a 1,000-year-old grain mill opposite, she said: "Here you can't get away from the 12th century — when the monks planted the first Chablis vines. You can't escape history, but you don't have to live in the past."

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