France's grapes of wrath
Farmers may have won their battle with Macron for now - but in the Languedoc the crisis goes deeper. Plus: what I've been drinking this week.
SAY what you like about French farmers but they know how to protest. Last week Prime Minister Gabriel Attal rowed back on most of the raft of measures that had angered the sector, while the agriculture minister offered more money to help farmers. Two big farming unions ended their tractor blockades of Paris - part of demonstrations across Europe by farmers angry about changes to EU environmental rules. Now EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has backed down on plans to cut pesticide use. Unfortunately, such concessions are unlikely to placate southern French wine growers for long.
Even before the recent EU row, Languedoc and Bordeaux vignerons’ anger was near boiling point, their ire provoked mainly by high costs and low prices. Hérault Chamber of Agriculture President Jérôme Despey told French wine website Vitisphere, “We’re just sick of it [“C’est un ras-le-bol”]. We want action, we want to be able to make a living from our products.”
Thus in late January farmers blockaded bottling plants near Béziers belonging to wine giants Castel and Grands Chais de France (GCF) with burning pallets. Outside purchasing centres for supermarkets Lidl and Intermarché in the southern town, they dumped grape waste and set tyres on fire; in Bordeaux they spread manure in front of government offices.
Discontent has been smouldering for months. Two days before Christmas, dozens of vignerons stormed checkouts at the Auchan and Leclerc hypermarkets in Béziers in a “free trolleys action”, letting shoppers leave without paying, before police regained control. And last October, up to 400 growers hijacked trucks of Spanish wine at the frontier, strewing broken bottles across the highway.
Worse, in the small hours of 19 January in Carcassonne, a bomb damaged the regional offices of the ministry charged with environmental change. Militant group the Comité d’action viticole (Wine Action Committee, CAV or CRAV) claimed responsibility.
CAV/CRAV has a long record of arson, vandalism and hijackings dating back to the 1970s. Further back still, in 1907, an overproduction crisis provoked vast demonstrations and violence in the Languedoc: the French army were sent to quell the revolt.
Then as now, Béziers was the epicentre. Today it’s a blue-collar town with a rough reputation and simmering communal tensions: riots erupted there last June. Robert Ménard, a stalwart of Marine Le Pen’s extreme-right Rassemblement National party (RN), formerly the National Front, has been Mayor for the past ten years.
But the most recent unrest has been driven by a set of conditions which say much about the reality of the French wine industry outside the top producers in regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Aside from rising production costs thanks to inflation, small producers are also enraged over the fees they pay to regional bodies, known with bureaucratic irony as Compulsory Voluntary Contributions (Cotisations Volontaires Obligatoires.) Smaller producers feel, with some justice, that the bigger companies get the lion’s share of the benefits, for example in fees paid to big supermarkets for promotional space and to fund discounts.
The underlying problem, however, is a shrinking domestic market. Wine consumption in France has dropped steadily in recent decades, and that of red wine – the mainstay of the Languedoc – by even more: French annual per capita consumption of red is now only around a quarter of what it was in 1960. Those that do still drink wine – beer and cocktails are far more popular among the under-35s – are tending to drink less but better.
“It’s a huge issue in regions which sell vast volumes of entry-level wines, namely Bordeaux and the Languedoc,” says Anglo-French wine consultant Anne Burchett.
Going up market and exporting, as indeed plenty of producers have, might seem the obvious solution. But, says Burchett, “that’s not an option for a lot of producers in these regions where cooperatives and large négociants [wholesalers] have traditionally ruled the roost. It is near impossible for a lot of growers to break free from the system and reinvent themselves.”
Marketing and distribution of mass-produced wine is dominated by a small group of big négociants such as the huge Castel and GCF groups. Castel produce by far France’s biggest-selling brand, Roche Mazet, sourced from hundreds of Languedoc growers; GCF do the same for their international JP Chenet brand. They can dictate the prices they pay producers in much the same way that British supermarkets do for dairy farmers’ milk.
Producers of cheaper wine are also up against one of the dirtiest secrets of the French wine industry: its use of bulk imports from Italy and above all, Spain. More than two thirds of Spanish imports are tankers of bulk, undesignated wine: in 2022, 380 million litres, the biggest bulk wine route in the world. On average, its French importers pay barely €1/litre.
So where does it end up? Rarely in bottles labelled as Spanish, vanishingly rare in France in all but discount supermarkets. Yet legally, it cannot be included in any wine labelled as French. Some industry observers are sceptical.
“All I can say is that on a regular basis, I see Spanish-registered tankers outside co-ops up and down the A9 [motorway],” says one British importer based in the Languedoc. “They’re either dropping off or picking up – and you don’t see French wine in Spanish supermarkets.”
Where Spanish wine certainly does end up is in some of France’s top mass-market wine brands, labelled as “Vin de l’Union Européenne”.
Castel owns six of the top ten wine brands in France: of those, Vieux Papes (the third-biggest in 2022) and La Villageoise (eighth) are both labelled as EU-origin. Despite Vieux Papes’s name evoking illustrious Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and its slogan, “Le goût du vrai” (“The taste of authenticity”) it’s safe to bet that a proportion of both wines is in fact Spanish. Castel did not respond to requests for comment.
President Macron may have seen off this crisis for the moment; von der Leyen will hope that her concessions stem a revolt now spreading to Spain and Greece too. But nothing is likely to satisfy French wine producers buffeted as much by changing tastes as by economic conditions. Vincent Brunet, a vigneron from north of Béziers, attended a demonstration in Montpellier at the end of January. He told the Midi Libre daily of his son, Silvio: “He’s 17, he starts work at four in the morning, he’s one of the last young people doing that [on the land]. But what am I going to leave my children?”
What I’ve been drinking this week - in Barcelona
For the past few days I’ve been in Barcelona for the city’s Wine Week, taking the opportunity to seek out new places and visit old favourites in this amazing city. These are some of the wines I’ve enjoyed.
Vinyes del Terrer, Blanc del Terrer 2016, Catalunya - I drank this wine in the seriously good Besta restaurant, which boasts a fine list of Galician and Catalan wines. This white is 100 per cent Macabeo and not, on the face of it, that out of the ordinary. It’s just beautifully made and with added depth and complexity from an unusual length of time in bottle, and en magnum at that: bright notes and creamy fruit, just beautifully balanced (N/A UK.)
Envínate “Lousas” Viñas de Aldea 2022, Ribeira Sacra - Envínate is a project of four Spanish friends whose wine consultancy turned into a project working with local growers in various places, aiming to create the perfect expression of the terroir. I’d say that’s worked brilliantly here, working with Galician growers using mostly the main local red grape, Mencía, but with small quantities of obscure local varieties Merenzao, Souson and Caiño. It’s fresh, packed with bramble fruit but quite complex, with a nice savoury edge. I drank this in the brilliant Vinya del Senyor wine bar - probably Barcelona’s best (Hedonism Wines, £37.80, elsewhere in bond.)
Cara Nord Celler, Mineral de Montsant 2021 - a pretty typical blend for this Catalan appellation - two thirds Cariñena and the balance Garnacha - but fresher and more mineral than some, with attractive herbal notes. I drank this in Bar Mut - one of the best wine bar wine lists I’ve come across here (Blas ar Fwyd Wines, Bentley’s Wine Merchants , from £16.15.)
Thanks Fiona!
Thanks Ben