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Donald Trump threatened to impose a 200 per cent tariff on European alcohol earlier this year, a move which was quickly rescinded.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.
Is this the return of the Great EU Wine Lake when encouraging wine production produced more than could be drunk? Or is France suffering from non-drinking islamification?
Ah, a salient point. Although that should not impact total consumption, I know the little freaks to go whole hog on any bottle around without witnesses…
They like being seen doing charity, but servicing little boys is thirsty work, and of no one sees, you did no wrong.
The best way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large one.
Might wine consumption be down because of an increase in the number of Muslims in Europe???
Production is flat but consumption per capita is down.
I don’t have to imagine it; I just have to read history. This is exactly what was done in the US in 1933-35 under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Farmers were paid to not produce food. In some cases already harvested food was destroyed to achieve higher prices.
US agricultural over-production was a problem created by the US government which encouraged maximum output during WWI. Farmers expanded acreage under cultivation and invested in tractors and other machinery, borrowing money to do so. With the end of the war there was no need to export large amounts of food to Europe so demand dropped. Meanwhile farmers had continuing debt service costs. When the depression hit and so many people were unemployed, the farmers got squeezed between the higher costs and the reduced ability of people to pay. By some estimates 750,000 farms ceased operation in the years 1930-1935 through bankruptcy or foreclosure.
From Wikipedia: