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Eurotrash, the tacky fashion sensibility of jet-setting poseurs in counterfeit Gucci sunglasses, may soon have its counterpart in wine. Get ready for Europlonk.

That's what British newspapers have waggishly dubbed a new category of generic vin ordinaire that could reach North American shelves if radical proposals unveiled earlier this month by the European Commission get the go-ahead.

Under the plans, producers would be able to mix wine from different member countries and label the result "product of Europe."

A thin red wine from a rainy year in Bordeaux, for example, could be spiked with a fuller bodied, higher alcohol wine from sunny Sicily or Portugal. And for winemakers in less illustrious regions, such as Bulgaria, there would be the advantage of basking in the halo of a "European" label while conveniently omitting the finer details of the blend's origin. Currently, it's illegal to blend wines from EU members.

The goal is to help thousands of ailing grape farmers compete against the onslaught of inexpensive, crowd-pleasing blends from such New World countries as Australia and Chile, where sunnier weather and liberal blending laws yield more consistent quality at the low end of the price spectrum.

The Europlonk measure would, incidentally, also bring Europe more into line with Canada, where - unbeknown to many consumers - wineries frequently blend in large quantities of foreign juice and still are permitted to stock their products in the domestic aisles of liquor stores.

For a European industry that has thrived on the mystique of wine as a reflection of place - encapsulated in the French mantra of terroir - it would be a drastic change. But drastic times have come to the European wine business.

Mariann Fischer Boel, European commissioner for agriculture and rural development, minced no words in announcing the proposals, promising they would "boost competition, drain the infamous wine lakes and make things more simple."

Lakes indeed. Each year, unsold European wine is estimated to exceed 13 million hectolitres, equivalent to about 1.7 billion regular-size bottles. That's enough to slake the thirst of every wine drinker in Ontario more than 20 times over based on last year's provincial wine consumption of about 83 million bottles.

The generic European appellation is just one of many drastic proposals aimed at helping ailing low-end producers.

Brussels would pay uncompetitive farmers to voluntarily switch to some other crop.

From 2013 onward, member countries could no longer restrict what vine varieties could be grown, a development already evolving in some regions within EU countries. This would presumably encourage enterprising growers to shift to more globally fashionable varieties, such as chardonnay and shiraz.

Most unsettling to some producers is a suggested ban on adding sugar during fermentation as a way to boost alcohol and, thus, body.

The easy wine-enhancing trick, known as chaptalization, is common in many parts of France, notably in the more marginal vineyards of Bordeaux, where a shortage of sunshine most years yields lean, acidic wines that were considered world class decades ago but now are about as emblematic of quality as a Chrysler K-Car.

"I realize that the wine sector is very emotional and that many will have objections to these ideas," Ms. Fischer Boel said in announcing the plans. "But if we sit on our hands and do nothing, the sector will face real difficulties."

Producers of fine wine have already scorned the initiatives, arguing they will dumb down the market and lead to Coca-Cola-style products that always taste the same and have no regional identity.

But those critics probably don't buy European plonk pawned off with meaningless designations like "superieur" and "grand vin." At least Coke doesn't deliver a rude surprise.

Pessimists and wine snobs have railed against multiregional blends and the "globalization" of the wine industry for years. One thing they conveniently fail to note is that most consumers today have more flavours and styles to choose from than ever before.

They also have access to better-quality wines, thanks to advances in hygiene and cold-fermentation technology pioneered, not in Europe, but in Australia and the United States.

Besides, there isn't just one wine market. There are at least two - premium wines and "Coca-Cola" wines. And the former is in no danger of crumbling because of rules governing the latter.

The issue flares up from time to time in Canada, too, though we sensible Canucks don't get so hotheaded about it.

Some people here become scandalized when they learn many wines on Canadian shelves are blends made mostly from foreign grapes. In Ontario, wines can contain up to 70-per-cent foreign content and still be labelled "cellared in Ontario."

Wines labelled "product of Canada" can contain up to 25-per-cent imported juice. (If you've been buying wines labelled with the Vintners Quality Alliance seal, don't worry; VQA wines are 100-per-cent Canadian.)

A small stink was raised in 2005 when Ontario vintners won a temporary concession to increase the foreign-content limit for "cellared in Ontario" wines to a whopping 99 per cent because of a massive grape shortage resulting from bad weather. The irony was that many producers of quality VQA wines favoured relaxing the rules because it freed up more domestic fruit for their VQA products.

I'm not afraid of cellared-in-Ontario wines. Consumers who buy them generally aren't looking for "an emotionally thrilling experience," says Greg Berti, vice-president of estate wineries and global markets with Niagara-based Andrew Peller Ltd., which makes a variety of VQA and foreign-content wines.

Mr. Berti, who studied consumer buying cues as part of his master of business administration degree, says "at the lower price points, consumers really aren't interested in the origin."

That is particularly true of Canadian consumers, he says, whose first consideration when shopping for wine is price. In Australia, consumers are more likely to stress brand. It's the Europeans who tend to be more fixated on origin, he says.

Should there be truth in labelling? Of course. But that doesn't mean makers of inexpensive wine should be prevented from sourcing and blending juice from wherever they like. Why hold plonk producers to a different standard than makers of other commodities, such as cars or even food?

That dried "Italian" pasta in your pantry? There's a good chance it was made entirely from Prairie wheat, yet the word Canada appears nowhere on the package.

The nerve of those terroir-obsessed Europeans.