French wine makers are planning a new protest in Narbonne, the
centre of violent scenes earlier this year, in answer to the
continuing low prices on the market and poor government support.
An EU Commission committee has promised extra money to help French
wine makers distil more than a million hectolitres of quality wine
into undrinkable industrial alcohol after the French government
promised to rip up vines and make...
The French authorities have come up with a €70 million rescue
package for ailing wine producers, but as Kim Hunter Gordon and
Chris Jones report, they have once again failed to tackle the
principal problem - massive overproduction...
A shift towards lower priced table wines helped lift Spanish wine
exports in the first quarter of the year, but the lower revenues
mean that double-digit volume gains were rather more modest when
converted into value figures.
Export sales of Spanish wine grew by 5.8 per cent in the first nine
months of the year to just over €1 billion, but a steady fall in
prices meant that this fell far short of the 26.9 per cent increase
in volumes to 917.4 million litres...
Spanish wine producers posted an impressive rise in export volumes
in the first eight months of the year, but an inexplicable 14 per
cent drop in the average price per litre meant that revenues were a
mere 4 per cent higher.
Speakers at a recent conference on the draft wine law currently
going through the Spanish parliament have stressed the beneficial
effects the law is likely to have on improving quality and reducing
over-production.