Grape expectations as bid launched to save European wine
AS A ten-year-old, Mariann Fischer Boel would watch her father bring out a fine bottle of Burgundy, then rest it until the wine reached room temperature, before ceremoniously uncorking for the family Christmas dinner.
“I remember the solemn atmosphere,” she said, reminiscing about those glowing moments at the family farm in rural Denmark. “Drinking wine was something very special.”
Now, 54 years later, as the European Union’s agriculture commissioner, she is seeking to drag the continent’s wine industry into the 21st century so it can compete with the mass- marketed New World brands that are increasingly capturing European markets.
A five-year plan due to start in August 2008, authored by Ms Boel and announced today, calls for the ploughing up 200,000 hectares of excess vines, pushing subsidies toward marketing instead of price guarantees, and changing traditions that go back generations.
EU agriculture ministers will now spend several months debating the proposals. Europe’s unreformed wine sector - still the world’s largest - produces a wine lake big enough to consume a huge part of the EU’s annual wine-subsidy budget of 1.3 billion, used to distill unwanted alcohol into industrial products such as cleaning fluid.
France, Spain and Italy are the main targets. As the world’s largest three wine-makers by volume, these countries together account for 80 per cent of the EU vine area, which currently totals around 3.4 million hectares.
“We need to look at the market. We need to look at what consumers want and why they are buying more of the imported wines than the excellent European wines,” she said .
Outside her office yesterday, the EU’s main farming organisation was already explaining why it opposed the major outlines of her project, claiming she was caving in to commercial practices of the New World.
“The core of Fischer Boel’s proposal is to introduce the New World model which does not put the farmer, the vintner or mankind at the centre of things - but the company instead,” said Jean-Luis Piton of the COPA farmers’ union.
European tradition, though, has already been under pressure for over a decade as increasing imports, over-production and decreasing consumption increasingly put Euro vintners in trouble.
Around 1995, over nine out of ten bottles Willy Goorden sold in his shop outside Brussels carried French labels. But prices went ever higher, without quality necessarily following suit.
“When the 1995 Bordeaux came on to the market two years later, it was very expensive, often double in price. People were shocked looking at the price tag,” said Mr Goorden. “It was a turning point. People started thinking differently and, as prices remained high, they were ready for alternatives.”.
While top-class wines are often still Europe’s domain, it is in the less-expensive sector that the New World wines have made their biggest impact. Imports into the EU have risen by 10 per cent each year since 1996. Countries like Chile and Australia have more than doubled their exports this decade.
At Colruyt NV, one of Belgium’s major supermarkets, it is easy to see why.
Freddy Steens, Colruyt’s wine buyer, has seen the New World wines take over the under-5 bracket in the past dozen years, to account now for 90 per cent of volume. “People, especially the young, were looking for something different, something else than what their parents were drinking.” The Europeans had no answer at first, cocooned in complacency. Mr Steens said: “The French attitude just was, ‘Why would I go out into the world when the whole world can come to me?’”
French exports slumped from about 14.5 million hectolitres in 1999, to some 13 million in 2004. For Italy it slumped from about 17.5 million hectolitres to under 12 million hectolitres over the same period, when Chilean and Australian exports doubled
Even in France, there is a realisation business must change. But how the famously militant French farmers will react to the proposals remains to be seen.
ANOTHER controversial element in the plan that has already annoyed several non-Mediterranean wine-producing countries is a proposal to ban the use of sugar in wine manufacture.
In many cooler areas of Europe, it has been standard practice for centuries to increase the alcoholic strength of local wines by adding sucrose from beet or cane sugar.
Ms Fischer Boel’s plan would force sugar-using winemakers to use unfermented grape juice instead.
Enriching wine with sugar costs about a third as much as using concentrated grape musts and is a traditional winemaking method in much of north-central and eastern Europe, in countries such as Austria, Germany, Luxembourg and several of the ex-communist states that joined the EU in 2004, like Hungary.
But a sugar ban might be a problem for France, the world’s largest winemaker. Champagne producers, based in France’s most northerly Appellation Controle area, have a long tradition of adding sugar, for example, although famous red and white wines from the country’s warmer southern regions are sugar-free.
The European Union’s wine policy was last reformed in 1999.