EU Planting Ban is "Madness" According to French

Filed in archive French Wines , Italian Wines , Spanish Wines , Vineyards , Wine Laws , Wine News on July 18, 2007

New World wines, with their lower prices and decent quality, have been threatening countries like Italy, France, and Spain that have been producing amazing wines for centuries. More people, even in Europe, are purchasing wines from elsewhere and it has started to create a surplus of European wines. The European Union has been taking some contraversial steps as part of a package that will reform Europe's wine industry, and the lastest proposal to incense people is the suggestion to ban planting vineyards. Opposers argue that this will threaten the ability of small producers to thrive and will compromise the integrity of winemaking traditions that go back centuries.

From NDTVProfit.com:

The reform proposal, authored by EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel, offers the EU's least competitive vineyards cash subsidies to uproot vines and leave the sector...

"It's madness. It's liberal ideology - we have to preserve the quality of our products against liberal temptation," French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier told a news conference.

Under a scheme to start in August 2008, if EU agriculture ministers agree, subsidies to uproot vineyards - or "GRUB up", in EU parlance - would fall gradually each year in a carrot-and-stick approach to promote early "take-up".

Fischer Boel wants 200,000 hectares as the target vine area to be uprooted, although there would be no obligation to do so.

She also wants to extend an existing ban in new vine plantings until 2013, but then abolish it altogether. Vine planting is strictly controlled in the EU and new plantings are not allowed until mid-2010 except under particular conditions.