After the election of French President Nicolas Sarkozy in May, five masked members of the guerrilla wine-growers' group known as CRAV, famous for dynamiting groceries and burning cars in the name of French agriculture, issued a call to action. "If in one month, nothing has changed and the price of wine has not increased, the vintners will come out of hiding," their leader said, warning Sarkozy that he would be held entirely responsible.I guess it's politically easier to slash the vines themselves than to slash the subsidies that caused this perverse glut of apparently undrinkable plonk, wine so bad that it is being reduced to industrial solvents. Why do wineries produce at unprofitable levels and unprofitable quality? Because it is profitable to do so with perverse subsidies. Having paid wineries to overproduce, the EU will them pay them more to kill their productive capacity.
One month later, action is being taken, but not in the way the ultra-protectionists would like. Mariann Fischer Boel, Agriculture Commissioner for the European Union, last week unveiled a plan for complete reform of the wine-growing trade, from vineyard arrangements to bottle-labeling. The aim? To pull the plug on Europe's 1.3 billion liter "wine lake" surplus, deepened by subsidies and awkward regulatory measures.
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In a bid to reduce production, Boel's five-year plan calls for the destruction of 200,000 hectares' worth of vineyards, known as "grubbing up." Growers will be encouraged to quit their trade thanks to a "grubbing-up premium," initially 7,714 euros ($10,488) per hectare but gradually decreasing to 2,938 euros ($3,995) per hectare.
Perverse. They don't have this problem in California or Maryland, where undrinkable plonk dies a natural market death.
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