French viticulture, in crisis, must be reformed by associating more closely producers and traders in a common strategy, but also the regions between them, recommends on Wednesday a senatorial report on the future of the sector, also recommending conditioning aid.
The transpartisan report prepared by three winegrower senators asks the State to organize a “meeting” in early 2026 that brings together all parties.
Objective: establish “a trust pact” aimed at involving the processing sector more in production guidelines, in exchange for commitments to guarantee producers’ income.
The speakers propose that any new aid for distillation or startup “be conditional on the success of these meetings and, therefore, the agreement between upstream and downstream,” added Daniel Laurent, seeing in this meeting “the place where everyone faces their responsibilities”: banks, large distribution, etc.
In a restricted budgetary context, they also propose “moving towards abandoning financial support for individual grubbing-up plans and moving towards collective grubbing-up plans with a strategy built on the scale of wine-growing areas”, explained socialist Sébastien Pla.
Viticulture suffers from both the climate crisis and a change in consumer preferences, to which has recently been added the danger of Chinese and then American customs tariffs.
The report calls on wine regions to unite under the French flag to strengthen their exports, where France remains first in value but behind Italy and Spain in volume: 12 million hectoliters compared to 22 and 20, stressed RDSE senator Henri Cabanel.
It recommends “rationalizing” its large number of organizations and interprofessional organizations. He also prefers policies of temporary rather than permanent uprooting, while France cultivated 850,000 hectares 30 years ago, 750,000 today and “is surely heading towards 700,000.”
Source: BFM TV
