Basing their decision on studies showing that happy animals produce meat that has a better taste, Languedoc-Roussillon winemaker Jean-Charles Tastavy partnered with farmer Claude Chaballier to experiment. Originally, they fed the cows the remainders of pressed grapes combined with water but have since moved on to straight up giving them wine. Somewhat impressively, each cow imbibes up to two bottles per day.
There’s no word yet as to what kind of shenanigans the drunk cows might have gotten up to or if they even managed to get plastered at all. Tastavy and Chaballier based their cows’ consumption on the general guideline of two to three glasses of wine per day. This calculation, likely based on the average mass of a person versus the mass of a cow, found the two feeding the three cows 1 to 1.5 liters a day each.
Unfortunately, even cheap wine can be expensive when you’re pouring them out at that pace. The average daily cost tripled from 5 euros to 15. To put it another way, each cow drank around 10 euros worth of wine a day. A single kilogram of the meat — or 2.2 pounds — is likely to be sold for around 100 euros. After conversion, it comes out to somewhere near $122.
The meat is supposedly delicious thus vindicating the decision. They’ve even created their own “Vinbovin” meat label which is essentially the French words for “wine” and “cattle” crushed together. Perhaps their motto should be, “If you ain’t drunk, it ain’t Vinbovin.”
(Le Point via TIME, image credit via Max and Dee)
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