Grapes of wrath: Why French winemakers are protesting a new proposal

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Thousands of winemakers gathered in Narbonne, southern France, on 25 November to protest falling incomes and a government proposal for minimum pricing on alcohol. 

Tensions have been running high across France’s vineyards in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, with a drop in demand for French wines and rising costs linked to the war in Ukraine.

Now a new concern has arisen, with a cross-party group of senators hoping to amend the government’s finance bill with a legal minimum price of roughly 50 cents per unit of pure alcohol. This would take, for example, a €2.49 bottle of Les Talandières to roughly €4.69. 

The proposal is inspired by a similar initiative in Scotland, which introduced a minimum unit pricing on alcoholic drinks in 2018, subsequently resulting in a reduction of alcohol-related deaths. 

Senator Véronique Guillotin has said that a move to increase the price of alcohol would help encourage people to cut down their intake, tackling the estimated 42,000 alcohol-related deaths in France a year. 

However, winemakers say that a minimum price would lead to less sales and cause their income to decrease even further, with French senator Sébastien Pla accusing minimum price supporters of “taking the wine sector hostage”. 

This most recent protest, led by Aude winemakers’ union, follows another in October 2023, during which winemakers smashed dozens of bottles of Freixenet and attacked shipment lorries, spilling streams of wine into the streets at the Le Bolou tollbooth near the Spanish border to demonstrate against Spanish wine imports. 

In November, France’s agriculture ministry stated it would open a €20m emergency support fund for struggling winemakers across the country, acknowledging the ever-tightening squeeze of economic and environmental impacts on the industry.  

The French government has also set aside €200m to help deal with surplus wine, turning it into industrial alcohol for non-food products.