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Winemakers get boost from EU

Reforms cause a case of sour grapes among old and new member states

By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 10th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Sochorová says EU funds revived the 14th-century vineyard.
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VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Helena Sochorová, 67, measures the sugar content of grapes in the Máchalka vineyard in Prague-Liben.
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On the morning of Oct. 8, 67-year-old Helena Sochorová, chairwoman of the St. Václav Winegrowers’ Cooperative, bustles through a sunlit row of grapevines in Máchalka, a small, award-winning vineyard in Prague’s Libeň district.
Pausing in front of a plot whose vines still bear fruit despite the lateness of the season, Sochorová picks a single grape and peers into the reflectometer — a flashlightlike device used to measure a grape’s sugar content. After a moment’s scrutiny, she looks up with a wide smile. “It’s higher than I expected,” she says.
With increasing access to European subsidies, local winegrowers like Sochorová may soon reap the benefits of a plan presented by the European Commission (EC) earlier this year to reform the European Union’s ailing wine sector.
In an effort to redistribute resources more evenly among wine-producing member states, the EC granted the Czech Republic 309,000 euros ($439,000/8.5 million Kč) Sept. 24 to increase the competitiveness of its wine. The money, awarded after the country demonstrated effective use of previous grants, brought the average funding of Czech vineyards to 166 euros per hectare, higher than any other member state.
“The allocated funds will help increase the competency of Czech and Moravian wines, which is in line with the much-discussed [EU] wine reforms,” says Agriculture Ministry spokeswoman Ilona Chalupská.
According to EU agricultural spokesman Michael Mann, the EU wine sector is struggling with surplus wine production, a falling consumer market and “losing out to the New World.”
The crux of the problem is caused by traditional wine-producing EU countries such as France, Spain and Italy, where disproportional access to EU funding leads to the mass production of “plain table wine that is often barely potable,” says Martin Půček, secretary of the Czech Winegrowers Association (SVČR). “On the other hand, wine from northern [wine-producing] states does not even meet the demand,” he adds. “Clearly, the problem isn’t in the northern states, but somewhere else.”
While the EC stops short of criticizing the practices of southern European countries, the redistribution of subsidies is one of the planned wine reform’s primary goals.
“Instead of spending half a billion euros on surplus wine that ends up getting burned up for ethanol, we want to free up money to help Czech wine producers with things like marketing and environmental protection,” Mann says.
A slew of regulations
While they agree that reform is inevitable, both SVČR and the Agriculture Ministry criticize the latest version of the EC’s proposal.
“If [it] gets accepted in its current form — and I believe it won’t — our producers will see less money from EU wine funds,” Půček says. “Unlike the southern states, where the impact won’t be so profound, they will be disadvantaged by a slew of regulations that will lead to the degradation of European wine.”
Aside from equal distribution of funds, winegrowers are concerned about the reform’s stance on the elimination of surplus wine. In a July 4 speech to the EC, Mariann Fischer Boel, the European commissioner for agriculture and rural development, said the European Union needed to eliminate 200,000 hectares (494,211 acres) to rebalance the market.
Instead of continuing to fund the elimination of excess grapes through distillation, or conversion to ethanol, Boel proposed a scheme to allow wine producers to reorient to other types of farming by receiving reimbursement for every hectare of vines dug up.
Since the money formerly spent on distillation would be reinvested into surplus elimination, Půček says northern wine-producing countries that do not produce excess wine have nothing to gain from the proposal.
The SVČR and the Agriculture Ministry also oppose Boel’s plan to increase the overall quality of EU wine by prohibiting the use of beet sugar to increase a wine’s sugar content, a common practice in northern EU countries where harsher climates decrease grapes’ natural sugar content. If implemented, the reform would force local winemakers to replace beet sugar with unsubsidized grape musk, resulting in “a threefold increase in expenditures for wine enrichment,” says Agriculture Minister Petr Gandalovič.
In response to these concerns, Mann says the proposed sugar ban is a necessary step toward the elimination of low-quality surplus wine, which often contains sugar additives.
“[Boel] is aware that sugar is a controversial subject,” Mann says. “She has said she would be flexible on this matter in regards to smaller winegrowers whose wine is in market demand.”
Despite this, Půček remains skeptical of the EC’s approach.
“All we want from the EC is to stop dividing the EU into new and old members and treat every state the same,” he says. “Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet.”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com


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