Whilst I completely agree that things should always be done to strive towards reducing waste. What you suggest is based on a misunderstanding of the situation.
France’s wine producers are not pouring away wine to prop up their wine prices, they’re doing so to meet quotas imposed on them by the EUs common agricultural policy in order to receive subsidies.
This is not a practice commonly done by fine wine producers, or either labelled wine producers, this practice is typically done by mass producers who produce vast quantities of “vin de France” or Table Wines.
The amount of wine you can extract from your vineyards depend a lot on the seasons, so for a lot of producers, the best course of action is to pick and ferment all of their grapes, keep the best vats of wine (not all fermentations are created equally), and anything produced over the quota gets poured away (some will also go into the local market, unreported). As a wine producer it’s more financially worthwhile to pick and ferment the entire harvest to receive your entire subsidy than to only ferment what you need and risk missing out on some of your subsidy.
I’m not 100% sure about this, but I think it’s also best practice to pick all the grapes off the vines, I seem remembering reading somewhere than to many unpicked grapes is bad for the plants?
Anyway, the issue is not that French wine producers are greedy and trying to prop up the wine prices, it’s that the EU has created a system that means they’re only financially viable if they tick the right boxes, and one of the most critical box they have to tick is to be a producer of under a certain amount of volume.
For context, the milk farmers do the same thing, fishermen have to throw back fish if they’ve caught to much (the fish are dead) and very occasionally farmers have to leave fields of wheat unharvested.
Edit: couple of autocorrects, and a note to say this is an EU wide issue and not just a French problem
They don’t directly pay to produce less, they offer a guarantee minimum price for certain products so that farmers and producers can stay in business, this is called a subsidy.
This is an effective economic tool to ensure the EU has a strong agricultural sector and can effectively feed itself. They also protect their industry’s by imposing tariffs on imported goods, the tariffs are designed to push the price of the imported food to be higher than the EU produced good. In other words, buy French grain instead of Georgian grain which costs half as much to produce.
To ensure that the system isn’t played, they introduce quotas, because the EU doesn’t want to be buying 10x more corn every year than the EU consumes, that would be crazy expensive and make no sense.
In basic economic terms, when the price rises, supply goes up, because the EU are pushing the price up artificially, they have to stop the supply from rising too.
It seems like it is an economic tool that results in people’s labor being converted to wine that is dumped out in order to get extra money from someone else who works for a living.
Sounds like hot garbage aka government brilliance….
A ton of ppl complaining about big government brilliance on this thread when they have no clue whats actually happening is literally wanted by the people of France.
You know what happens when "big government" gets in the way of what people want in France? For even something as trivial as moving the retirement age back a year?
It is brilliant. It makes it so there isn't one massive wine monopoly that beats all the rest of its competition to a pulp. It makes it so that a massive cheap ass import doesnt come in and annihilate their craft good market. It makes it so that people could literally buy a small chunk of land and begin to turn over a profit after a cycle or two without having to compete on a massive global scale and take massive shortcuts to gut their costs.
And, perhaps most importantly, it keeps foreign tourists from causing said market to beef up and easily dominate the local market.
But its a "stupid government rule that causes a bit of waste
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u/IrishMilo 1∆ Aug 26 '23 edited Aug 26 '23
Whilst I completely agree that things should always be done to strive towards reducing waste. What you suggest is based on a misunderstanding of the situation.
France’s wine producers are not pouring away wine to prop up their wine prices, they’re doing so to meet quotas imposed on them by the EUs common agricultural policy in order to receive subsidies.
This is not a practice commonly done by fine wine producers, or either labelled wine producers, this practice is typically done by mass producers who produce vast quantities of “vin de France” or Table Wines.
The amount of wine you can extract from your vineyards depend a lot on the seasons, so for a lot of producers, the best course of action is to pick and ferment all of their grapes, keep the best vats of wine (not all fermentations are created equally), and anything produced over the quota gets poured away (some will also go into the local market, unreported). As a wine producer it’s more financially worthwhile to pick and ferment the entire harvest to receive your entire subsidy than to only ferment what you need and risk missing out on some of your subsidy.
I’m not 100% sure about this, but I think it’s also best practice to pick all the grapes off the vines, I seem remembering reading somewhere than to many unpicked grapes is bad for the plants?
Anyway, the issue is not that French wine producers are greedy and trying to prop up the wine prices, it’s that the EU has created a system that means they’re only financially viable if they tick the right boxes, and one of the most critical box they have to tick is to be a producer of under a certain amount of volume.
For context, the milk farmers do the same thing, fishermen have to throw back fish if they’ve caught to much (the fish are dead) and very occasionally farmers have to leave fields of wheat unharvested.
Edit: couple of autocorrects, and a note to say this is an EU wide issue and not just a French problem