At a time when U.S. vineyards routinely charge $15 per person to sample their wines, French vintners often are happy to let you taste their creations at no charge.

And if you cannot summon the energy to go the few miles to the nearest caveau, here in the south of France … they very likely will come to you.

Or to your small town, anyway.

Tonight, representatives from eight (!) local vintners came to the Salle des Fetes (festival hall) in our village and invited the villagers to have a taste of as many as four varieties of their products — red, white, rose.

At no charge to the residents.

This is not news, but the French have a closer yet less formal relationship with wine.

Wine here is often less expensive than an equivalent amount of soft drinks.

And in the Languedoc, and much of the south of France, consumers expect to pay no more than seven euros (about $7.75) for a nice bottle of local wine.

Often it costs less. A particularly popular rose, Listel, typically is about $3.40 per bottle.

The high number of producers in France — 110,000, at last count — creates a highly competitive market, and local guys are usually keen to create and maintain a good relationship with the towns close to where they grow grapes.

Which is how a town of 600 residents was able to get eight vintners, three of them based in or near the town and all of them with vines in the village boundaries, to set up a tasting station for the 70 or so residents who turned out.

It included two all-bio vintners who have won regional prizes in recent years. One of them brought along several bottles of one of their upper-end reds, a Carignan-Grenache, which retails for a shocking (around here) 26 euros. Everybody who attended the event was talking about it. How good it was … and how much it cost.

Another producer had a very nice Pinot Noir. A third brought a red (Syrah-Carignan-Mourvedre) that we will be buying in the near future.

That is the point of the event. The producers whose caveaux are minutes away from where we live, by foot, making a connection, giving a taste, creating customers.

The event’s name is the Fete du Vin, and it no doubt is very much like the other wine parties put on at the other small towns in the area.

The village added some nice touches: nibbles (chips, peanuts, saucisson) placed at each producer’s table, for purposes of palate cleansing.

Meantime, villagers caught up with each other, or met new arrivals in town, and gave their opinions on what they tasted.

The village also paid for the sausage-and-baguette sandwiches at the end of the two-hour event, and all the citizens who came to the event and never touched their wallets … well, presumably they all left happy, as did the producers who made a few new local customers.