Essay by Eric Worrall
Remember all those times you’ve been told wine is facing a climate crisis?
France blames climate change for ‘deteriorating’ wine industry. But is uprooting vines the solution?
By Liam Gilliver
Published on 29/11/2025 – 8:00 GMT+1France says it is ‘determined’ to rescue the wine industry from a crisis, but could its plan backfire?
France has turned to the European Union for help after announcing additional funds to help rescue its “deteriorating” wine industry.
Earlier this week, the French Agriculture Ministry confirmed it has allocated €130 million to finance a new, permanent vine-pulling plan to “rebalance supply” and “restore the viability” of struggling farms in the most vulnerable regions.
This process involves severing and lifting the vines and their roots from the soil, usually using specialised equipment like a deep plough, and can cost around €1,000 per hectare.
Minister Annie Genevard has also asked the European Commissioner for Agriculture and Food, Chrisophe Hansen, to finance the crisis distillation of non-marketable overstocks. This is where excess supply is turned into alcohol used for industrial purposes rather than consumption.
…
It comes after Donald Trump threatened to impose a 200 per cent tariff on European alcohol earlier this year, a move which was quickly rescinded. However, a 15 per cent tariff on exports to the US, a crucial market for the French wine industry, was announced several months later.
…To top it all off, Genevard argued the sector’s suffering has been compounded byclimate change, which has “repeatedly impacted harvests” for several years.
Read more: https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/11/29/france-blames-climate-change-for-deteriorating-wine-industry-but-is-uprooting-vines-the-so
…
It’s all President Trump’s fault of course.
Can you imagine some government official coming onto a US farmer’s land, and telling them they have to uproot some of their crops, to help the farmer next door avoid bankruptcy?
What really strikes me about this story is the problem is overproduction – yet we are continuously told the wine industry is suffering a climate crisis.
Clearly that climate crisis is creating too much wine, so much so the French government wants to kill lots of grape vines. Not exactly the narrative we have all been given by our lapdog mainstream media.
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Everything is due to climate change.
Even my pet rock’s loss of hair is due to climate change.
It’s the Great Satan- cause of all problems. 🙂
Not to worry, AI will help grow it back.
Not everything – in the UK it’s BREXIT (nice if we really had it), and the Russians, and in the US it’s Trump, the Russians and the Chinese.
Climate change’s star really is failing.
I’d like to see the model that proves BREXIT, Russia, Trump, and the Chinese are not due to climate change.
/s
The French wine Industry IS suffering a Climate Crisis.
Though not weather related.
It’s a Political Climate Crisis that’s affecting their industries.
Bryan:
Correct. The yearly grape output for France, EU and, just for fun, USA is ~flat 1961-2023.
No obvious climate signal
https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields [choose your nations, product (grapes) and Line Graph]
[I would have attached the resulting graph but there is no “attach graph buttton” on this comment window. Anyone care to enlighten me? Thx!]
California is also having a wine industry problem. Sales are down.
Could it be that Chile and Australia are wrecking the market with their imports?
A few years ago, these wines were not available. Now, they are everywhere.
In a climate crisis overproduction would be an impossibility for any kind of “food”
and especially stuff that is complicated to cultivate and especially drinkable stuff that is so much needed in a warming thirsty climate ridden world.
“Due to climate change” has become a joke punchline.
Sounds like a winner: Who can come up with the best “Due to climate change la la la”? Example: Due to climate change my beer goes flat before I can even drink it.
Er, but with all the extra CO2 in the air (which Greta can SEE!), wouldn’t the CO2 losses from your foaming glass of beer be quickly replaced by the surplus in the air?
If Greta sees Co2, does this mean that her eyesight decreases slightly every day as result of increasing Co2.
While I dont doubt that she can see molecules way smaller than wavelength of light bumping around dozens of times a second with a remarkable speed I’m pretty sure that they blur and darken her vision significantly.
Yeah! That’s the ticket. My flat beer recarbonates itself due to climate change.
I thought my pet rock hair loss was a contender. 🙂
yes!
People drink less wine, that’s what I read in summer.
Yes, that’s been reported widely. Not aware that there are tariffs on wine at this time. If there are, my purveyor seems to be absorbing them. Demand is down because tastes are changing, especially younger consumers. (got any munchies?)
Lots of the younger generation do not drink alcohol at all. Just wait until they get into middle age and find how much it helps block out stupid things.
These two sentences expose the futility of renewable bio fuel for the confidence job lie that it really is.
I predict that the €1000 per hectare cost of removing vine root stock is mostly fuel, and that the biomass is not used as fuel, but is disposed of in the least environmentally sound, but most expensive way.
This smacks of USSR’s genocide of the Kulacks.
It’s the “Non Marketable Overstocks” that make the difference. A glut of Wine on the market equates to Lower Prices on the shelf as there’s more potential competition for those vino€€€
Wine is not an easily perishable product. Most sorts only get more expensive when stored for a little while. And France is not Luxembourg, it has lots of space for storage.
If a good chunk of this market trivially converts overstock (within reasonable limits) into investments, we can reasonably guess it should automatically balance gluts away. If so, a short-term glut should not be a big issue. Unless the suppliers are already too strained for other reasons (maybe they need to sell now because of raising expenses or being taxed into oblivion).
A long-term glut should not be a thing… pretty much anywhere, because investment in production obviously becomes less attractive as prices drop. Unless the market is very distorted.
Yet we are told there is glut. So, what really causes the problem?
Just which politically unconnected wine growers will be required to supplement the profits of the connected?
I have a feeling that Ukrainians wine growers will benefit somehow.
Oversupply has a cure; price. Therein lies the conundrum. The wine industry has changed entirely several times over since the first California wines matched French appellations in quality at a much lower price point and higher yield.
Restricting supply is a last desperate act of noncompetitive bastions.
“France has turned to the European Union for help….”
Why should a great nation have to go begging to the EU for help for something as minor as pulling grape vines?
If you could convince the EU to give you money to do something you were going to do anyway, wouldn’t you? They’ve twisted and turned to spin the whole thing to give them access to climate change funds.
I used to say the 3 most worthless organizations in the world were the UN, our federal legislatures (both houses) and the NCAA. The EU has now pushed the NCAA out of the picture.
NFL referees?
Maybe they need migrant farm labor?
Because EU ministers meet in secret … and EU minister’s families own vast vineyards.
Why don’t they just let the market place deal with any over production of wine?
Pulling up vines to reduce supply is a perfect example of a market response.
My biological nightmare for this policy is many fold. Spreading nascent virus through insect vectors even with “proper” disposal is inevitable. Changing the surface mix of plants regionally will undoubtably affect the surrounding fields they presume to protect. In practice this progrom will serve to reduce biodiversity. You can bet the root stock will be smuggled internationally.
Surely, they can sue someone. America has an oversupply of law school grads.
“I’m sorry Mrs.Twombly, but Climate Change ate my homework”.
Wine grapes growers all over the world produce more stock than they can sell every year.
Entrepreneurs in Australia used to buy up excess supplies, bottle and label such products as “Cleanskins”, and sell shedloads of the stuff.
Some of it “top-shelf” quaffing too 🙂
The best wine in California is the gallon Burgundy from the large wine makers. These guys have the best wine blender staff in the state, and have the greatest selection of grapes to choose from.
Pour someone a glass, and they’ll claim its the best wine they’ve ever had. Show them the bottle and they’ll gag.
The only crisis in France is the crisis created by the EU.
Make raisins instead of wine. It’s the obvious solution to overproduction of grapes. And very cool.
Wrong grapes. Wine grapes have seeds.
A fair point. But in any case, this story reminded me of the marketing use of the “heard it through the grapevine” promotion from the ’80’s.
This is in the same league as the climate alarmists telling us that the excess use of fossil fuels will lead to reduced agricultural output, lower food production, increasing degrees of global famine, and a gradual acceleration of population decline. In fact, the opposite has been occurring including increasing life expectancies and lower infant mortality rates. So this business about wine production is just another example of the climate crisis advocates getting things dead wrong again.
Clearly that climate crisis is creating too much wine, so much so the French government wants to kill lots of grape vines.
On its surface, this story would make a rational mind conclude that French Canadians were planting grapes in Vinland again. Which, even if it were true, would be declared absolutely 100% unprecedented. Grapes have never, ever grown in cold climates before…
Sounds like a good deal for other wine producing countries, France is going to give up a portion of their market share thinking they will get more for their product. Worse yet they are so inept they need the government to help them do it. What the hell has become of the Europeans? California alone could makeup any shortfall not to mention the the other US states and the dozens and dozens of other wine producing countries.
Maybe flood the fields of the Donbas with wine to stop the Russian invasion. At least it will count toward NATO defense spending commitment.
Where is the apology from the WSJ for reporting the opposite last year?
Impacted by climate change!?
The weather is so bad there’s a bumper crop of grapes!
Short sighted of them though – do they think they are the only growers on the planet? Argentina and Australia and so on are ready to fill in the gap left by France.
Try a nice Ice Wine from Ontario Canada to celebrate the climate crisis.
Standing between French people and good cuisine: widely considered very dangerous.
French people around a winery: petite waitress starts wrangling land crocs as if they were misbehaving small dogs.
Considering unrest already waxing and waning for years… are they baiting torch-and-pitchforks crowds on purpose?
In France, a significant amount of wine production is on scraps of land here and there, small producers who farm other things, often sold via co-ops and for very local production.
France and other European Countries have been producing far too much, poor quality wine for decades, sold at too high prices. This is largely the result of EEC/EU Customs Union protectionism keeping out foreign competition. Even within the EU, trucks shipping wine and other agricultural produce from Spain or Italy into France have been attacked by French farmers and their contents destroyed.
France is what it has made itself to be – charming countryside and an economic mess.
Other policies included subsidies and “intervention” where the CAP bought up over-production of agricultural products to keep prices up. That created milk and wine lakes, butter, cheese and meat mountains, which after a few years were dumped in the sea to make way for more. This latter practice has stopped, but subsidies have not. However protectionist tariffs and non-tariffs have been reduced.
UK, a big market for French wine-make, having left the EU is no longer restricted to quotas and tariffs on non-EU imports of wine, so French wines now face much stiffer competition on quantity and price – for the first time – from wines from the antipodes, and North & South America.
Hence French wine-makers in distress.
“Can you imagine some government official coming onto a US farmer’s land, and telling them they have to uproot some of their crops, to help the farmer next door avoid bankruptcy?”
FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Act essentially did just that during the Great Depression to prevent overproduction and low prices.