Lhe French wine market is currently facing a clear imbalance between supply and demand, to the point that the sector is considering massive uprooting of certain vineyards. The phenomenon would result from “deconsumption” with a continuous decline for more than sixty years due to profound changes in behavior, and a daily consumption which hardly concerns more than 10% of the population.
The opening of new foreign markets is also running out of steam and global consumption is declining. This sudden development acts as a double sword in a context of economic crisis, which has become unbearable for many operators in the sector.
The threat weighs on some of the 440,000 jobs generated in France, on its contribution to the trade balance and on the cultural model associated with it. So rather than hoping for a great evening of the relaunch of national consumption, with questionable consequences on public health, let’s build a new system for promoting wine using an approach that is both global, historical and prospective.
Several revolutions
A holistic approach is to avoid believing in miracles. The massive recourse to exports to China ultimately offered a limited horizon, masking deeper malaise. This crisis does not result from a single cause, nor does it resemble those, violent but temporary, faced in the past.
We see that it is becoming more and more difficult to adapt to climatic conditions, which are increasingly erratic and have locally devastating and unpredictable effects. At the same time, society rightly expects practices that are more favorable to the environment and the health of vineyard workers, consumers and those living near vineyards.
A historical look reminds us that wine, an ancient product, has already experienced several revolutions.
The current cycle began around 1870 following a massive destruction of the vineyard by phylloxera: generalization of grafting and replanting in fertile areas, massive production intended for cities and industrial regions, structuring of cooperatives from 1901, setting of a original definition of wine from 1889 and applied as a response to the crisis of 1907, solution to fungal diseases in agrochemistry from 1945, economic regulation by yield and the appellations contrôlées regime. So many elements of a coherent complex system, adapted to the last hundred and fifty years, but to be rebuilt at least in part.
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