France’s winemakers held emergency talks with Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin this week to demand urgent government action amid warnings that the country’s most emblematic industry is plunging into crisis.
The delegation of growers and merchants from France’s major wine-producing areas told Raffarin that French wine exports plummeted by nearly 10% last year, while domestic sales fell by almost 5%.
The average French adult drank 58 litres of wine last year, according to figures released recently by the trade association Onivins, compared with more than 100 litres throughout the 1960s. Only 37% of the French now consider themselves regular consumers, against 61% in 1980.
Wine consumption in French restaurants has slumped by 15% to 20% in less than a year, according to a survey by the Côtes-du-Rhone wine board.
So concerned is the Bordeaux board by the trend that it is providing restaurateurs with ”doggy boxes” so that diners can take unfinished bottles home.
Industry insiders say that between 600 and 1 000 mainly small, independent Bordeaux producers are on the verge of bankruptcy.
France’s wine industry is more than symbolic: it employs 300 000 people and in 2002 contributed â,¬5,7-billion to the balance of payments.
But experts say sales abroad (about 25% of production is exported) have been hit by quality wines from Australia, California and Chile. French exporters are also finding it hard to compete against global brands with big marketing budgets and low prices.
In France the fall in consumption is accelerating due mainly, producers say, to recent government health and safety campaigns.
If the French are drinking less in restaurants, they argue, it is largely because the police have begun to treat drunk-driving as a serious offence.
The growers also complain that strict advertising laws in force since 1991 prevent them doing much to reverse the trend.
The Bordeaux and Burgundy wine boards have recently been taken to court by the National Association for the Prevention of Alcoholism for advertising campaigns whose slogans included ”Let’s drink less, but let’s drink better”.
”We’re not against fighting alcoholism,” said Xavier Carreau, head of the Great Wines of Bordeaux Federation. ”But we ask the authorities to target people’s behaviour, not products. How can we be expected to do anything about this decline if we are not allowed to promote the quality of our products?” — Â