EU decision spells doom for small wine producers

Jacques makes wine in the village in France where I live. His product, as far as I’m concerned, is unbeatable, making it easy for me to live up to the most important of all ‘green consumer’ principles: whatever you need, buy it from as close to home as possible. Jacques’ vineyards are just a few hundred yards from my house, through woods, fields, and more vineyards. By buying his wine I not only get to enjoy top quality sauvignon blanc, sparkling chardonnay, and rich, full-bodied côt and cabernet – at a price of between $4 and $7 a bottle – I help to maintain the beauty of my village, its biodiversity, and its atmosphere, all of which help to attract tourists whose euros keep the place alive.

When I visited Jacques a few nights ago with a friend from England, he told me the news. We had loaded my friend’s car with three cases of wine, and, as usual, Jacques wanted to share something a little different with us before we left. It was a superb 2004 sauvignon, which he has just begun to sell, the 2003 being exhausted.  The 2006, Jacques said, would be the last. A year or so short of his sixtieth birthday, Jacques is selling up.

We will lose more than his experience and skill, however. It is highly unlikely that anyone will buy his land for any other purpose than to tear up the vines and plant some easy, subsidized cash crop of sunflowers, canola or corn.  Less and less wine is being consumed, and local loyalty is fading. French consumers buy cheap wine from the south. The British see no connection between the fact (which must be obvious to at least some of the more observant) that the French countryside is dying, and their preference for cheap wines from Eastern Europe (made possible by cheap labour) and the ‘New World’ of the US, New Zealand and Australia (cheap because of corporate economies of scale). They are told that they prefer the latter because they are ‘fruity’, that New World wines are chic and ‘modern’, that French wines are ‘overpriced’.  All of this is either untrue or irrelevant, but the corporate propaganda machine has transformed it into ‘common knowledge’.

The European Commission, the unelected bureaucracy which exists to do the corporate will, has refused to help. Surplus wine could have been bought up for distillation, putting some sparkle back into a market which has been severely hit by falling prices, but this has been refused. Instead, almost a million acres of European vineyard will be torn up. The industry, at both the ‘quality’ and ‘popular’ ends, will be devastated, and large areas of the countryside in France, Italy and other wine-producing nations will be transformed into a desert of non-productive land or given over to corporate arable farming. With an election coming up the French government would probably be inclined to be generous, but without the Commission’s approval its hands are tied by EU rules on state subsidies.

Winemakers will be offered grants to uproot vines. These will be available for a limited period, being reduced in value each year for five years in order to encourage vignerons (artisanal wine producers) not to delay. Whether Jacques will apply for one I don’t know. In some ways he would be a fool not to, but if he tears up his vines a small piece of what makes our village and my adopted country beautiful will be gone for ever.

A permanent scheme for distillation would make a great deal of sense, enabling winemakers to survive the vagaries of the weather and the market. Vignerons such as Jacques, who lives entirely on direct sales, and those who produce for local cooperatives, would be kept in business by the guarantees that a well-organised scheme to produce industrial grade alcohol from surplus wine would offer.

Unfortunately, the free market extremists of the European Commission  have no interest in keeping such people in business. Instead, they want to see the industry ‘restructured’, placed more fully into the hands of multinational corporations with vineyards throughout the world. Not only do they want to see vine acreage hugely reduced, but they are also seeking to undermine the traditional AOC system, by which wines, having met certain conditions relating to quality and to production methods, are labeled with their place of origin. Under the new proposal, only the very ‘best’ wines would be so labeled, a ‘simplification’ sought by big corporations looking to replace the huge variety of wines with a number of standardized products which would be easier to market, and which, no doubt, millions of people would quickly come to believe they preferred, having read about the ‘advantages’ of the new system in the Guardian or the New York Times.

If you want to see France looking something like it probably does in your imagination, come soon. After all, you can look at fields of canola at home.

Steve McGiffen mostly manages to stay sober enough to edit http://www.spectrezine.org.  Jacques (not his real name) expects to be able to sell him wine from stocks for another couple of years after he stops producing it. Steve lives in Bourré in the Touraine –  not a made up name, despite the fact that ‘Bourré’  is a popular colloquialism meaning (to put it politely) ‘drunk’.

This article first appeared in the Chicago Socialist webzine Strikeonline