Brussels and the EU Wine Lake Posted by Andrew Barrow, 9:54am 11/07/2007.  Anyone who has driven through France or toured Spain or Italy will realise just how extensive wine as an agricultural product is. Across Europe the industry employs 1.5 million people and covers a mammoth 3.6 million hectares of land.
But increasingly we are drinking wines from outside Europe - the delights of Australia, New Zealand, Chile and elsewhere are still on the rise. We actually consume 60% of the world's wine production.
But European production is too high with the surplus wine lake amounting to a whole years production. Obviously such waste cannot continue and efforts are underway in Brussels for the wine lake to be drained and more effort put into producing wines people actually want to drink!
Proposals under debate include the idea of paying producers of unsaleable wines to "grub up" their old vines. From 2013 restrictions on the planting of different varieties of vines would be lifted to "encourage 'competitive' growers to shift to types of wine more in demand from consumers".
The "grubbing-up" proposal would mean producers will be paid to give-up wine production or reduce their acreage of vines. To encourage early adopters payment s will be 30 per cent higher in the first year of the five-year scheme than the next year.
There are many detractors of course but this should be good news for the consumer, you and I, as wine quality should rise.
Image used with permission.
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