Focus on France Ian Sparks reports from Paris

EURO-REPORT

FOCUS ON... France

Ian Sparks reports from Paris on French moves to help China to produce quality wines.

While French winemakers continue to battle against the glut of foreign imports, three of the industry’s most prestigious brands are heading abroad to help China put its own wines on the world map.

Dom Perignon, MoÎt-Hennessy and Chateau Lafite-Rothschild are all investing millions of euros in a bid to produce high-end vintages for China’s increasingly discerning drinkers fed up with overpriced and mediocre domestic wines.

But the move has sparked criticism in France that teaching the Chinese to make quality wine now could pose another threat to sales of French wine in years to come.

Christophe Navarre, chief executive of MoÎt-Hennessy – which is planting 30 hectares of grapes in the Shangri-La region of Yunnan province – even remarked provocatively: “I dream one day of going back to France with a bottle of Shangri-La red wine and saying it’s the best wine in the world.”

Christophe Salin, president of Domaines Barons de Rothschild (DBR), which owns the vaunted Château Lafite, said his company was investing 12.3 million euros with Chinese state-investment partner CITIC to develop 25 hectares of vineyards in eastern Shandong province to produce top quality red wine. He said: “China deserves the production of great wines. But we don’t want to create another Château Lafite, we wish to produce a great wine on Chinese soil.”

China is the world’s fifth-largest wine consumer, but their wine industry is dominated by a few large local producers that make midpriced wine mostly considered to be far inferior to imported French and New World wines.

But Chinese wine expert Jim Boyce, who runs the website ‘Grape wall of China’ said he believed the country had the potential to compete with all the most highly-regarded wine producing countries in the world.

He said: “The potential is there to make something very, very good. There are a lot of people who’ve been telling me for years that Yunnan is where it’s going to happen.”

But back in France, a recent study found that 60 per cent of French vineyards are now struggling to break even as exports are undermined by wines mainly from the USA, Chile, Argentina, Australia and South Africa.

A spokesman for the Federation of French Wine and Spirits Exporters said: “Here in France, wine drinkers tend to stay loyal to French made wine which dominates the marketplace.

“But our exports are suffering from competition with foreign winemakers, and the last thing we need is an enormous country like China flooding the market with their own wines – let alone decent wines made with the help of French wine producers.” “We don’t want to create another Château Lafite, we wish to produce a great wine on Chinese soil.”

Egg crisis

French egg producers have also threatened more direct – and very messy – protests throughout the autumn in anger at low prices which they blame on the European Union.

Furious poultry farmers smashed hundreds of thousands of eggs outside tax offices and supermarkets in August, insisting their profits had been slashed following an EU directive in January aimed at protecting the well-being of hens, and setting minimum cage sizes with extra space for birds to ‘nest, scratch and roost’.

The rules have sent production costs soaring, but the price of eggs has not risen as a result, farmers claim.

The first protests erupted in Brittany among a collective of 20 egg producers who hurled crates of eggs from the backs of trucks in night-time rampages throughout the region. They claimed it was a ‘symbolic gesture’ in their demand for the government to order the destruction of five per cent of France’s entire egg production to reduce supply.

Poultry farmers currently get paid 63 pence per kilo of eggs, but the new EU directive means they cost 80 pence per kilo to produce, according to Yves-Marie Beaudet, the head of the egg section of the Brittany dairy farmers union.

The European Union had 15 to 20 million excess laying hens out of a total of around 350 million, Mr Beaudet said, adding: “Our livelihoods are threatened. We are ready to give these eggs we are destroying to developing countries, but they cannot stay on French territory.

“It seems that it takes a bunch of 20 farmers to chuck eggs for the government to grasp the issue. We need France’s entire egg production to be reduced by five per cent, and our protests will continue and escalate throughout the autumn until that happens.”

Agriculture minister Stèphane Le Foll has blamed the crisis on supermarkets seeking higher profit margins and told the French media that ‘better regulation of production’ and not ‘wanton destruction’ was the solution.

France’s largest farming union, the FNSEA, also said it did not back militant action, with a spokesman saying: “You don’t solve this crisis by smashing eggs.”

The left-wing Confèdèration Paysanne was even more critical, saying ‘greedy farmers’ had first increased the number of hens and were now complaining there were too many.

The union’s spokesman Laurent Pinatel said: “Egg producers have often taken advantage of European norms to increase the size of their coops by 30–50 per cent. Some egglaying farms have 100,000 birds, and it is this unbridled industrialisation that has wreaked damage. Today, we have no choice but to cut the number of hens.” n