Forbes: Corking Europe's Socialist "Wine Lake"

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.

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.

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.

Perverse. They don't have this problem in California or Maryland, where undrinkable plonk dies a natural market death.

Washington Post: Maryland Wineries Rising in Number, Geographical Spread

Washington Post, June 3, 2007:

Let's be honest: The state is more associated with crabs and beer than wine and cheese. Its winemakers can't compete with the big-time producers on the West Coast, or even the medium-size guys one state to the south. According to 2006 figures from WineAmerica, the national association of American wineries, Maryland churned out fewer gallons of wine (230,163) than New Mexico (535,376) and not much more than Colorado (206,497) or Tennessee (204,607). And don't expect to find any Gallo malls here: Most of the state's operations are small-scale and family-run. Staffs of two to four, plus the neighbor's kid, are common. But that doesn't seem to faze Maryland's ardent wine operators, or dampen their passion.

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The state has 25 licensed wineries concentrated in four growing regions (Central Maryland's Piedmont Plateau, the Eastern Shore, the Southern Plain and the Western Mountain). Atticks expects at least eight more wineries to be licensed within the year, five of which will be open to visitors. (So far, 20 are.) In addition, five new wineries near Ocean City plan to welcome guests within the next 15 months.

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Add to that spurt the Frederick Wine Trail, which debuts this weekend. (The state's other organized route, the Mason-Dixon Wine Trail, links eight wineries, but half are in Pennsylvania.) The Frederick trail, which mixes roller-coaster country roads with fast interstates, extends 30 miles from end to end and wraps around five wineries. A sixth, Black Ankle Vineyards, will join next year.

HAT TIP and a raised glass in good health to Isaac Smith of Free State Politics for this optimistic catch on a day when I needed some good news. This reflects the good news of another recent post about Maryland wineries.

I recall when the Maryland Wine Festival boasted a total of 12 wineries. Glad to see the growth and diversity, including wineries near Ocean City, which climate would not have struck me as ideal It's warmer, wetter and flatter than Western Maryland, and grapes usually love slightly cooler, dryer weather and a south-facing hill on which to maximize sunlight and minimize shadows. Not that most wine is grown on hills, but that's how a lot of wine in northern latitudes (Germany, for example) is grown to compensate for short summers and cloud cover.

I am not an economist or wine marketing person but the wine world is driven by appellation and region in most of the world, less so here. But even here, the recognition of Maryland as a growing, not shrinking, wine region with internal geographic diversity will probably help all Maryland wine sell more, in a marketing psychological sort of the same way that car dealerships often aim to be right across the street physically from their competition in a "dealer zone." Even plonk from a known plonk region with many other plonkeries will move better than isolated plonk without heritage or appellation.