Goodbye, French wine…

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This is wine crisis: France submits €120 million grubbing-up plan to Brussels, reveals the La Revue du vin de France.

The French government submitted a campaign to grub up vines to reduce the overproduction of wine in France, financed by an envelope of €120 million, the Ministry of Agriculture announced.

"France has today notified the Commission of a mechanism for the definitive reduction of wine-growing potential," the ministry wrote in a press release, describing this plan as "the first part of responses to the structural difficulties encountered by the sector," affected in particular by the drop in consumption.

"The notified mechanism proposes to finance the grubbing up of vines in order to perpetuate the activity of wine-growing operations, with an amount of up to €4,000 per hectare, for a provisional envelope of €120 million," the ministry continued in its press release.

This average amount would therefore make it possible to compensate for the uprooting of at least 30,000 hectares (out of nearly 800,000 hectares of vines recorded in France in 2020). At the end of January, a budget of 150 million euros over two years, which could concern "up to 100,000 hectares", had been mentioned by the Minister of Agriculture Marc Fesneau. At the same time, the government increased the "emergency fund" for winegrowers in regions "in crisis", from Bordeaux to the south of the Rhône Valley, to 80 million euros. The new uprooting plan must now be validated by the European Commission before the funds can be released by the public institution FranceAgriMer.

"The aid would be granted to farmers who abandon, on the areas thus uprooted, the production of replanting authorization, and who also renounce mobilizing or requesting, during the six wine-growing seasons 2024 to 2029 inclusive, authorizations for new plantings", according to the press release.

Between the growing disenchantment with red wine, the difficulties of exporting to China and the United States, Covid and inflation, economic difficulties have piled up in certain wine production areas.

France, currently the world's leading wine producer (48 million hectoliters in 2023), is experiencing an imbalance between supply and demand. For Bordeaux, the leading AOC (controlled designation of origin) vineyard in France with 103,000 hectares, the European Commission has already validated in November 2023 a "sanitary" uprooting plan of 8,000 hectares, which could include an additional 1,500 hectares by next winter.

…We are facing one of the unexpected manifestations of the economic crisis in Europe. The citizens of the European Union have less and less money even to buy excellent French wine. Therefore, the wine industry in France is becoming unprofitable, and the government, in order not to pay compensation and subsidies to farmers, is simply destroying French winemaking. The government has no money, since the French budget has long been unprofitable.

Chapeau, Macron!

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