On November 13, the definitive grubbing-up system negotiated by France with the European Commission will close, allocating at best €4,000/ha, up to a maximum of €120 million. According to the first intermediate data from FranceAgriMer, Languedoc-Roussillon and its four wine-growing departments, which represent around a quarter of the national vineyard, concentrate more than half of the requests. And for good reason. In the Pyrénées-Orientales, dry for 30 months, plots did not yield more than 500kg/ha of grapes, the equivalent of 3 to 4 hectoliters of wine, so much so that here and there, the harvest did not didn't pay for the simple passage of the harvesting machine.
The aridity of the grubbing-up premium
In this department, wasteland is on the way to becoming, after meadows, the No. 1 crop in the SAU. The most pessimistic fear that the arid uprooting premium will encourage wine growers to erect piles of stumps, stakes and wire at the end of the plot, scarring the landscape. In a department where one in three farmers is over 60 years old and where difficulties in accessing water resources dry up any hope of diversification, it is not certain that the uprooting measures, permanent or temporary, demanded by part of the profession, act as a firewall, figuratively and literally, the fire risk being more and more significant. What is surer, at a time when climate change continues to worsen, is that exhausted farms ignore insurance tools.
The price of wine, the great abstainer
Of course, the South is not wine-producing France. But when France burns (distills) 10% of its 2023 harvest, when bad weather generates more damage than the frost of 2021, when Bordeaux wipes out 8,000ha of vines, when champagne shipments shrink by 15% in the first half, when the profession anticipates a 20% drop in domestic wine consumption in the coming decade (which provides 50% of sales), when cognac is subject to Chinese retaliatory measures, and while avoiding a trial of Intention to the future Trump 2 administration, with Trump 1 still remembered, it's hard not to see the bottle three-quarters empty. “ The container has become more expensive than the content », summarized Guilhem Vigroux, winegrower in Villeveyrac (Hérault) and secretary general of the Hérault Chamber of Agriculture, during a round table in Dionysud. Climate, deconsumption, geopolitics…: the price of wine is paradoxically the great absentee, not to say the great abstainer, from the current debates. And yet, according to professionals, it would only take around ten cents more per glass, and paid in full to the producers, to get out of the slump. In other words, a tear, to avoid bleeding.
