France currently has 800,000ha of vineyards. How many will it have at the end of the decade? Will there be 762,500, 750,000 or maybe 650,000 – a reduction of 19%.
These figures are all being widely discussed, following the arrival of Annie Genevard as the freshly-appointed minister of agriculture under the new prime minister, Michel Barnier. Following the uprooting of almost 9,000ha in Bordeaux, plans have been submitted to the EU for the grubbing up of a further 37,500ha, as part of a €150m programme to support businesses affected by the war in Ukraine, and using funds that have to be accessed before the end of the year
The reference to the European conflict is simply a device; these vines would almost certainly have had to be sacrificed if Putin’s tanks had remained on Russian soil.
French wine industry observers will also have noted that the programme is significantly larger than the 30,000ha, €120m, plan that was originally envisaged by Ms Genevard’s predecessor Marc Fresnau.
Need to move quickly
In any case, both figures are dwarfed by other estimates. Jean-Marie Fabre, president of the Association of Independent Vintners (syndicat des vignerons indépendants), was quoted by the French publication, Vitisphere, as saying “we'll have to grub up all the vines that require it as quickly as possible. Whether [that will be] less than 37,500 ha or more than 50,000 ha. We need to do this to have the strongest, most effective and quickest possible effect.”
Other estimates have suggested that even this higher figure might not be enough. When the official French agricultural statistical organisation, FranceAgrimer sent a questionnaire to over 44,000 growers, last spring, just over 11% responded. Of these nearly a third – 32% - said they did not want to uproot any vines, with a slightly higher proportion – 35% - declaring a preference for their permanent removal.
Of the remainder, nearly a fifth, – 19% - opted for temporary uprooting and the replacement of current grape varieties with more commercially attractive alternatives, while 14% wanted a mixture of removal and replacement. Looking at these numbers, Jérôme Despey, president of FranceAgriMer told Vitisphere, that the area of vines to be removed might be “between 50 and 60,000ha”. This was substantially less than the 100,000-150,000ha that Bernard Farges, president of the CNIV, the organisation representing France’s AOC regions described in a speech on October 18, last year said would need to go “if we don’t work on new product profiles and finding new consumers.” This 100,000ha was also used by Fesneau, the former minister and Jérome Despey earlier this year, but in the context of replanting in six to eight years. Samuel Montgermont, head of yet another organisation, called Vin et Société – Wine and Society – however, preferred a still-substantial 70,000ha.
Many variables
For anyone trying to establish precisely how far France’s vineyards are going to shrink over the next few years, there are a number of variables that have to be considered. Bernard Farges’s at-least-100,000ha estimate is based on payment to the growers of €2-2,500 per hectare – the figure for temporary uprooting, around half of the €4,000/ha ‘permanent uprooting’ figure allocated for the 37,500ha in the current exercise. Would that be enough?
It is also reasonable to question how representative the one-in-nine respondents to the FranceAgrimer survey are of the industry as a whole. And, given the challenges most winegrowers have faced during the 2024 growing season, and the limited size and likely variability of this year’s wines, might there be an (even) higher level of demoralisation?
The other unknowable factor is of course, the state of the market. Sales in French supermarkets where most wine is purchased in that country, fell by 5% over the first half of this year. Exports dropped by 9.5%. Are these temporary blips or part of a steady trend? If the latter were true and the reductions proved to be cumulative over a few years, even slashing production by 12.5% would not be sufficient. This is the scenario in which global production will have to be cut by 15-20%.
Which French regions and varieties would see the greatest reductions? Despey notes that 85% of the FranceAgrimer survey respondents calling for permanent uprooting wanted it to apply to red wine varieties. Nearly half of the process – 45.5% - would be in Languedoc Roussillon, with around 38% jointly shared between Bordeaux and the Rhone. This leaves 14% for the South West and less than 3% for ‘other regions’. This last figure illustrates the dangers of treating the FranceAgrimer data as representing the whole of France.
Improving the offer
On the other hand, the wine industry, globally and in France, may, by changing its offer and improving its marketing, slow and possibly reverse the decline in consumption. At present, that appears to involve a switch from red to white and rosé and possibly sparkling, all of which are more competitive with other forms of casually-consumed alcoholic beverages.
What, too, will be the impact of zero-alcohol, and the more recent ‘mid-strength’ (7-9%), wine-based drinks. Will these cannibalise existing wines, as many seem to fear, or might they appeal to new drinkers.
Recent Wine Market Council research reported by Wine Business magazine shows that ‘young adult/multicultural shoppers’ in the US find wine ‘too complicated’. This is almost certainly true in France too, where 18-35 year-olds are drinking far less of it than their parents would have done.
Will French retailers introduce initiatives like the US grocery store’s ‘Simplified Reds’ sign that ‘explained what [a customer] could expect from different red wine varieties’?
These aspects may be of less immediate concern to the new minister than the conversations she is going to be having with the growers and industry organisations over the next few months. As she said "I want to listen, to see, to take stock, before talking and above all acting, because as the Prime Minister said, talking is not acting. And our mission in this government is to act quickly when urgency dictates, and to act correctly."
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