Béziers: Growers across the Hérault have spent two years asking Europe for permission to pull vines out of the ground. The wine package now gives it to them, and the arguments move to who pays and how fast.
The Council adopted the regulation on 23 February, less than a year after the Commission proposed it, and the text entered into force in March. It rewrites the common market organisation rules for wine, amends the CAP strategic plans regulation and updates the aromatised wine products regulation in a single instrument.
The centrepiece addresses oversupply. Member states may now fund green harvesting and the grubbing-up of excess vines, including permanent removal of productive vineyards. Reporting on the file indicates a 70% share from CAP funds against a 30% national contribution for permanent grubbing-up, which turns an EU permission into a national budget decision. Capitals with strained agriculture ministries will find that split decisive.
Planting rights changed shape too. The scheme had carried an end date. The regulation removes it and substitutes a ten-year revision cycle, giving growers a longer horizon while handing future Commissions a recurring political fight rather than a cliff edge.
Climate provisions raise the EU contribution for adaptation and mitigation investments to as much as 80% of eligible costs. That rate matters in Languedoc, where rising temperatures push harvest dates earlier each decade and where replanting to heat-tolerant varieties costs more than most family holdings can carry alone.
Labelling absorbed much of the negotiation. The regulation harmonises rules across the internal market and opens the door to digital labels and pictograms. It fixes the vocabulary for lower-alcohol products, reserving alcohol-free for anything below 0.5% and 0.0% for anything below 0.05%. Wines at least 30% below their standard strength now carry the term reduced-alcohol, replacing the alcohol-light wording floated earlier in the talks.
Exporters gained a carve-out. Wine destined for markets outside the Union escapes the ingredient list and nutrition declaration required for internal sales, which removes a labelling cost that bottlers had flagged since the 2021 reform.
Plant health received attention that rarely makes headlines. The package funds monitoring, diagnostics, training and research against flavescence dorée, the phytoplasma disease that forces mandatory insecticide treatment across large parts of southern France and northern Italy. Producers there consider it the most immediate threat on the list.
The economics justify the attention. EU producers account for 60% of global wine output, the sector ranks third among EU agrifood exports, and 88% of Union vineyards carry a geographical indication. Rural employment in several regions depends on holdings too small to survive a sustained price collapse.
None of it operates yet at farm level. The Commission must still amend the secondary legislation that carries the operational detail, and member states must fold the new measures into their CAP strategic plans before a single euro reaches a grower. Growers who read the February announcement as an immediate payment will wait through at least one more campaign.
Critics inside the sector make a fair point. Paying producers to remove vines treats the symptom of falling consumption rather than the cause, and wine tourism support, also in the package, will not absorb the volume that younger European drinkers no longer buy. The Council statement sets out the full list of measures.
