We saw an odd road sign the other day at one of the entrances entering a nearby town.

“! Chausee Glissant Vendange”.

An exclamation point on any sign in France means “attention”! or “watch out”!

And the three-word message below the exclamation?

It means, the road ahead is slippery because of the grape harvest.

That is one way to be sure you are driving in a wine-producing area — so many loads of grapes are being trucked around, from vineyards to vats, that the juice is leaking onto the road, creating slippery conditions.

The sign pictured (above) is the same sort you would see ahead of a potentially icy stretch of road, showing a car appearing to skid. The fact the triangular sign has a red outline also means “be careful!”

In this case, the explanation is even more direct. It reads: “Jus de raisin”.

Which translates simply as “grape juice”.

(The French call a grape a raisin. In English, a raisin is a dried grape. French doesn’t really have a standalone word for a “dried grape”, so they call it a “raisin sec” — grape dry. Kinda weird. “Raisin” has to do double duty, in French. It would be as if the Inuit had fewer words for ice than you could find in English.)

Is this a France-only thing, these “beware, juice on the road things”? Or do other wine-producing regions of any size have the same sorts of signs? Do they have them in Napa? Sonoma?

Could make a case that this part of France, the Languedoc, has two industries that really matter — tourism and agriculture, and the latter is based particularly on grapes and wine-production.

Anyway, I am not sure the juice of the grape is all that slippery. If you leave it alone, grape juice gets sticky, right?

I’m thinking it is the grape skins that can make a road slippery. Pick up a ripe grape, suck out the juice/pulp, and rub one inside of a grape against the other inside … and there’s something truly slippery. Like the inside of a banana peel.

These signs are not up year-round. They go up in September, which is when most of the grapes are harvested, and should be down by mid-October, when the harvest is in.

Anyway, we are being careful going through areas where picked grapes being transported might be leaking juice (or shedding skins) on the road.

Be a bit awkward explaining a grape-induced traffic accident to the folks back home, one that did not include consuming the fermented product.