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BRUSSELS — Winemakers raised a glass to the European Union after it published a long-awaited plan Friday to rescue the industry from ebbing demand, elevated input costs and irksome bureaucracy.
The EU makes 60 percent of the world’s wine, with Italy, France and Spain representing the top three global producers. The sector employs 1.4 percent of the bloc’s workers and contributes 0.8 percent of its GDP, according to industry figures.
That’s on par with the steel industry, and grants winemakers serious clout in Brussels. When EU countries asked the European Commission for emergency aid in late 2023, officials started a wine market observatory, issued a report last July on the sector’s troubles, and started a High-Level Group on EU Wine Policy, which presented recommendations in December.
“Beyond the economic weight of the sector and the savoir-faire of our wine producers, vineyards are part of our landscapes and cultural heritage,” wrote Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen. “This is why I am now presenting this package of measures … [which] will help stabilise the market.”
But what can the Commission actually do?
Here are the five key takeaways from the EU’s plan to save vino.
- Reducing the river of supply
An infamous consequence of the early Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) were the “wine lakes” of yesteryear, as the subsidy program’s fixed prices incentivized farmers to produce more wine than customers could drink. This were either poured down the drain or offloaded abroad; until the EU decoupled output from income support in the 1980s.
Today, Europe faces a similar problem of oversupply, bottling some 150 million hectoliters in 2024 even as consumption slumped to 95 million hectoliters. The bar-closing, wallet-squeezing Covid-19 pandemic left farmers with crate-packed cellars and, while there are EU limits on the amount of new vineyard plantings, that 1 percent ceiling is high enough to saturate the market.
The Commission is therefore allowing countries to halt new plantings in regions of excess output; scrapping penalties for farmers who don’t use planting permits; and making it easier for capitals pay producers to destroy vines (known as “grubbing up”) and young grapes (“green harvesting”), both of which could previously only be done in emergencies.
This still requires Commission approval — and there is no EU money for these schemes, as requested by hopeful winemakers. Nor has there been action on converting excess booze into industrial alcohol (“emergency distillation”), which countries can do with Commission approval.
- Opening new markets
By volume, wine consumption has nearly halved in Europe since 2010, as health-conscious millennials and Gen Xers drink less alcohol — especially less wine, which is seen as old-fashioned compared to the trendy cocktail or casual beer. It’s also much harder to make tasty wine that is low- or no-alcohol, in contrast to spirits and beer.
“It was only introduced in 2021 and, given the technology is pretty complex, they need a few years to apply the technology, to reach a certain standard and produce at quality,” said a Commission official during a media briefing.
The Commission is therefore proposing to harmonize names for “low and no” wines to appeal more to consumers. These are “Alcohol Light” for those below 2.8 percent alcohol (regular wine has a minimum of 8.5 percent in the EU) and “Alcohol Zero” for those containing less than 0.5 percent.
The package would also extend EU-funded promotions outside Europe (to attract more foreign consumers), expand access to EU support for so-called “oeno-tourism” (from the Greek oinos for “wine”) and simplify rules for aromatized wines such as vermouth, sangria and Glühwein.
- Pushing friendlier labeling
Winemakers complain that bureaucracy is adding to their troubles — with different countries having different rules for labeling ingredients on a wine bottle. This forces those who want to export to another country within the EU to either run parallel packaging lines or risk having a shipment stopped and relabeled at exorbitant cost near its destination.
The Commission wants to resolve that problem with a common, bloc-wide label in the form of a QR code.
The package ignores the idea of cancer warnings on wine, which DG SANTE had planned to propose during the last Commission mandate, but dropped due to anger from wine-producing countries like Italy, France and Spain. Ireland on its own eventually adopted the law, which takes effect next year.
- Fighting climate change
Extreme weather is decimating harvests, whether through floods, droughts or sudden and unseasonal shifts in temperature. This attracts grape moths, mites and mealybugs that spread plant diseases like downy and powdery mildew. The damage is eye-watering, with several countries last year suffering their worst output since 2017 (Belgium’s dropped 64 percent).
Meanwhile, many viticultural regions guzzle scarce water and spray ample doses of pesticides made of fossil fuels. In light of this, Brussels wants to strengthen the sector’s resilience to climate change and boost its role for mitigation as well.
It’ll primarily do that by hiking its investment support, so that countries can go from recouping 50 percent of their climate-friendly wine investments to 80 percent.
- For winemakers, it’s a drop in the ocean
Drafted in double time, the package has been received well by associations, although they have identified shortcomings.
“We greatly appreciate the responsive approach” but “the proposal can be improved on a number of points,” declared Riccardo Ricci Curbastro, president of the European Federation of Origin Wines.
Ignacio Sánchez Recarte, secretary general of the Comité Européen des Entreprises Vins, called it “a good legal package,” yet said it would “fall short if a trade war involving wine erupts between the EU and the U.S.,” noting that Donald Trump’s threat to impose 200 percent tariffs on EU wine was already “costing EU wine companies €100 million per week.”
