EU:European governments will pay winemakers to rip out vines and put quality over quantity, in a push to make wines from Chianti to Bordeaux more competitive with bigger New World producers.
EU farm ministers agreed yesterday on the wine market overhaul, centring on a three-year programme that would pay growers to tear out 175,000 hectares, or five per cent, of vines yielding low-quality grapes.
"We can now concentrate on taking on our competitors and winning back market share," EU agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said.
Aided by the euro's increased buying power, mass-produced wines from California, Australia and South Africa are flooding Europe, putting a tradition of smaller, often family-run wineries at risk. About 71 per cent of European wine producers cultivate fields smaller than five hectares, a tenth the size of the average plot in Australia, according to the European farmers' union.
Overproduction plagues the EU, which bottles and drinks three-fifths of the world's wine. Competition from the New World and the euro's rise against the dollar have kept exports stagnant.
France and Italy led the opposition to the EU Commission's original proposals, forcing Ms Fischer Boel to scale back an earlier call for 200,000 hectares of vines to be ripped up. "We didn't get everything we wanted, but we have ended up with a well-balanced agreement," Ms Fischer Boel said.
Yesterday's decision also lets more winemakers put grape varieties on the label, amending current rules that keep names such as Chardonnay off the labels of less-expensive table wines.
The package also phases out subsidies for distilling unsold wine into industrial alcohol, ends planting restrictions by 2018 and gives governments more latitude in spending their share of the bloc's €1.3 billion wine-support budget. - (Bloomberg)