by Hervé Lalau
France’s parliament, the Assemblée Nationale, has passed a resolution about the EU wine organisation reform, accepting the uprooting of 200,000 ha of vines. This is half the original proposal for
400,000ha. But the French MP's also insisted on the necessity to finance a wine promotion campaign, inside the EU as well as internationally. They also rejected the proposal to end chaptalisation, or sugar enrichment, and the liberalisation of new plantings.
Last year, French members of Parliament said the French wine crisis was not due to a production problem, but to a commercial problem. It’s therefore difficult to reconcile a ban on new plantings with no ban on chaptalisation, a practice that inevitably leads to higher volumes. To go on producing bad wine that nobody needs, with or without an AOC, is unlikely to help the situation.
