AHC: The Blackcurrant War

Over on anther board, the rather delicious typo of Cassis belli was made.

Cassis is the name of a place in southern France (and a shortened version of crème de cassis, the name of a blackcurrant liqueur.

so Cassis belli would translate as The Blackcurrant War which is too good a name to just leave lying there!


The challenge: Come up with the history of such a war. Posting in Pre 1900 because it sounds like something from the 1100s through 1700s rather than something more modern.

any takers?
 
During the Peace of Amiens, a British shore party gets out of control, looting a couple of warehouses in ?StMalo?, only discovering that instead of chests of silk or gold, they had seized chests of Thé de Cassis (yummy stuff, btw), and this is used by the French to restart the war.

Hows that?

Ooc: contrary to all the rules of French pronunciation you ever learned in school, the final 's' in cassis IS pronounced.
 
Apparently the overwhelming majority of blackcurrants are grown in Russia and Eastern Europe. Not pre-1900 but what about during the collapse of the Soviet Union, shifting borders leads to local militias battling over a particularly profitable collective blackcurrant farm that straddles the border, almost leading to all out war fueled by new nationalism.

OR

Blackcurrant cultivation was banned in America due to related diseases affecting the logging industry in the very early 1900s. Mostly due to disinterest it only started to be legalised quite recently.

Not a real war but how about the ban is lifted in the 1920s/30s, leading to Ribena (or a home grown alternative) pushing aggressively against Coke and Pepsi for soft drink dominance. Thanks to cheapness, health benefits and say a scandal or two for the Colas (Coca-Cola linked to the Nazis in the build up to war?) *Ribena becomes a serious threat. Industrial espionage, market manipulation, spin, and maybe Coke produced its own fruit rival etc. are all used to undermine the interloper. Finally by the 1950s, the Colas are seen as young and cool while *Ribena is seen as the budget brand, a drink of the Great Depression and it falls into obscurity, save being seen as an old fogie drink or maybe becoming ghettoised as a drink for poor people and in particular African-Americans (Ribena and fried chicken?).

The battle for market control is remembered as the Blackcurrant War, seen either as the fight that made Coke the drink of America or as the fight that revealed the shady depths corporations will go to to win, depending on your point of view.
 

SunDeep

Banned
OK; WI blackcurrant cultivation becomes an element of the USA's criminal underground in the same manner as the production of moonshine during the Prohibition Era, with the banned blackcurrants being bootlegged by organised crime groups in the same way as alcohol? ITTL, a special unit in the Bureau of Prohibition, akin to The Untouchables, is created specifically to tackle the illicit trade in blackcurrants, with their crackdown later becoming dubbed as 'The Blackcurrant War' ITTL's popular culture.
 
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