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The French wine industry’s attempts to be more sustainable are hit by infighting and legal action.
The French wine industry’s efforts to be more environmentally friendly are backfiring, with organic viticulture actually going backwards as a result.
Bordeaux’s Château Malescasse had wanted to adopt organic certification, but “difficulties selling wine” prompted the Haut-Médoc producer to end its conversion to organic viticulture, head of viticulture Nicolas Dubedout told Wine-Searcher.
Château Malescasse, a 40-hectare estate, is one of only 14 estates that had obtained the highest Cru Bourgeois ranking in 2020 – Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel – but tough commercial times have taken their toll. Dubedout says organic conversion trials had increased operational costs by more than 20 percent over the past three years – an unmanageable amount considering the size of the estate.
Dubedout speaks in a disappointed tone: it is organic certification rather than France’s contested Haute Valeur Environmentale, (HVE) high environmental value label, that the estate values most. “We only got HVE certification as we were obliged to as a Cru Bourgeois estate,” he says.
Speaking on sales, he says that “it is only once you are a certified organic producer that sales can really pick up. During the conversion to organics, there is no impact and costs are very expensive in the current climate,” Dubedout explains.
Malescasse did not provide details of a fall in sales in 2022 and in 2023, but Dubedout said that that difficulties in selling wine had prompted the producer to end organic conversion trials
Malescasse’s commercial predicament comes during what French organic associations are now calling “the organic crisis” in France.
The number of wine producers deciding to convert to organic viticulture is falling – and then there are estates like Malescasse who have abandoned conversion. Other Médoc producers will soon follow suit, Dubedout predicts.
Organic decline
According to France’s organic agency, Agence Bio (AB), 448 French growers stopped being certified organic in 2022, whereas 188 growers had stopped in 2020. The number of growers who started conversion to organic certification plunged from 1510 in 2021 to 222 last year.
“Organics is in crisis,” says Loïc Madeline, general secretary of Fnab, France’s Organic Agriculture Association.
Together with inflation, organic associations like Fnab blame the demise of organic sales on the rise of rival HVE wine producers using the label sell their wines at lower prices. Some 69 percent of businesses who use HVE are wine companies. They also say intermediaries are increasing organic prices in retail.
“HVE has become a direct competitor to certified organic produce; HVE wines sold at cheaper prices are replacing certified organic references on shelves,” Madeline says.
If sales of organic wine are falling in supermarkets and hypermarkets and being replaced by cheaper HVE bottles, organic food and wine shops are steadily closing in number in France.
HVE does help generate direct-to-consumer sales Dubedout says. According to Agence Bio, direct-to-consumer sales accounted for three in every 10 organic wines bottles sold last year.
Relatively few organic wines are sold in French hyper and supermarkets (GMS), with two-thirds sold directly or through wine merchants and other stores. That said GMS sales are tumbling.
“Organic wine sales fell by 8.9 percent in volume and 6.9 percent in value in 2022,” a spokesman at AB said. It declined to provide further sales details for 2022. However, producer concerns over the decline of sales comes after sales of organic wine in France had increased by 9 percent to €1.26 billion ($1.33b) in 2021.
Closedown call
The Fnab is part of a collective of organic agriculture organizations calling for France to close down HVE. Created by the French state in 2012, the growth recent years has prompted a bitter rivalry, with organic associations accusing the label of greenwashing.
Over the past four years, the number of HVE-certified holding has increased by 30, to about 29,898 of which 69 percent are viticulture properties. In contrast to the view of the French government, organic producers and agriculture organizations claim that HVE is no longer what the state intended the label to be: a midway environmental path to take after “conventional” and before obtaining certified organic production. Producers and companies are increasingly staying with HVE or moving to it and staying put.
The Fnab says that the €30 per hectare difference in the amount of CAP (the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy) funding that certified organic farmers can claim, compared to what HVE producers can claim, is “risible”, and insufficient to ensure more growth in organically farmed land in France.
Greenwashing claims
In January this year, the Fnab and several organic organizations partners including ONG Generation Futures, launched an unprecedented legal challenge against HVE at the Conseil d’Etat, France’s High Court.
They accuse HVE and the French state of misleading consumers by falsely claiming that certification meets “high” levels in environmental standards.
Fnab says its legal team has made a 20-page legal analysis of the HVE’s specifications, Cahiers des Charges, which it says shows how HVE only meets minimally environmental standards required by French law and “certainly below level that would be considered ‘high’.”
In November 2022, the French government adopted changes to HVE certification specifications after a report just a month earlier from the state-run biodiversity office, L’Office Français de la Biodiversité (OFB), had revealed that that effect of HVE certification had a “overall a limited impact”, in terms of environmental benefit.
The OFB report concluded: “The majority of holdings can easily obtain the HVE certification, as the nature of changes required to do so remain very weak.”
The government’s adoption of stricter measures to HVE specifications since then has done little to appease its opposing organic associations.
In an earlier, separate, ruling in January this year the Conseil d’Etat ordered the government to adopt further minimum distances between pesticide spraying and French homes. Pesticides classed as CMR1 are, according to the French government, known, in sufficient quantities, to cause cancer, genetic mutations or damage to the reproductive process.
Pesticides in the CMR2 category, are only “suspected” of having these effects.
Under new HVE specifications, CMR1 can only be used under approval by the agriculture ministry, but pesticides classed as CMR2 are permitted.
“Certified organic producers do use products classified as pesticides including copper, zinc and boron, all of which have little impact in terms of danger to health and to the environment,” says Madeline.
“However, we do not use CMR pesticides, which are highly dangerous,” he says.
“If the current industrial agriculture model, in use since the 1970s, had been the right one, we would not have a massive loss of biodiversity, increasingly lower water quality, five illnesses linked to the usage of pesticides, eroded and polluted soils, farmer deaths, and calls from the WHO for the greater consumption of organic fruit and vegetables.”
Back in Bordeaux, at Malescasse Nicolas Dubedout says he always uses non-CMR pesticides and never uses herbicides. Commenting on the HVE and organic viticulture he concludes: “HVE does restrict what quantities and product type is used in the vineyard, not the number of sprays. We are regularly inspected, but the real game changer in terms of mentality in recent years has been organic viticulture. Organic viticulture has changed habits in Bordeaux. It has made us truly reflect upon what we do and how we manage the vineyard environmentally.”
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