France's changing wine industry

Recently, Robert Joseph contemplated the reduction in French cafes (a.k.a. bars), boulangeries (artisan bakeries) and wine producers over recent years (As France’s wine industry contracts, an incalculable cultural loss). I will miss the boulangeries, but as an elderly over-weight man with diabetes, I can no longer safely enter them. The wineries and grape-growers are, however, another matter. After all, they are part of the subject of this blog.

The numbers quoted are quite startling. We are not talking about a small change — we are talking about a serious contraction in the number of producers. As I have noted before, I prefer pictures to numbers, even sad numbers; and a picture of a set of numbers is a graph. So, let's look at some graphs based on the Agrimer report cited in Robert Joseph's article (Les chiffres-clés de la filière Viti-Vinicole: Données statistiques 2008/2018).

We can start with the big view, covering all of France from 1995 to 2018. This first graph shows the number of producers who reported grape harvests (vertically) in each year (horizontally). It indicates a pretty serious contraction over 24 years, both commercial and non-commercial.

There are two topics that we could now pursue:

1. What has this contraction done to French wine production?
2. How has the contraction applied across the different wine-making regions?

Let's take them in order.

Wine production

Has the reduction in the number of producers simply resulted in consolidation of a larger number of small businesses into fewer but larger producers? The answer to this question is shown in the next two graphs, the first for grape-growing area, and the second for wine production. These show that, even though there has been a 50% reduction in the number of commercial producers, there has been only a 10-15% reduction in grape-growing area and wine production.

As Robert Joseph noted, this is a big cultural change, as family businesses get absorbed into bigger concerns. However, it is a not a particularly big change in France's role as a wine producer. That is, France's wine industry has changed a lot, but not contracted by much.

In many ways, the reduction in producers is sad, because artisanal production creates diversity, and this has been an increasing trend in the wine production of the so-called New World, over the past few decades. However, in the modern world, this approach requires extensive direct-to-consumer relationships, and this has not been a big part of wine production in the Old World (yet?).

Boulangeries, on the other hand, have always sold directly to their customers, as I can attest many times.

Wine regions

In order to look at the wine-making regions separately, the Agrimer report provides data for 2008-2018 only, and groups the numbers into the standard governmental administrative regions. As above, these next three graphs show the number of producers who reported grape harvests (vertically) in each year (horizontally), but thus time for each of the 12 French regions with notable wine production. [Note the change in the vertical scale.]

So, the only two regions without notable reductions in producers are Champagne and Corsica. Otherwise, the reductions vary from 29% (Burgundy) to 86% (Lower Loire). The Upper Loire (71%) has not done much better than the Lower Loire; and both Midi-Pyrénées (76%) and Poitou-Charentes (72%) are in the same boat. Aquitane (52%), which includes Bordeaux, and Auvergne Rhône-Alpes (55%) have not fared a great deal better.

The reductions are mostly quite continuous through time in each region, indicating a widespread gradual reduction over the 11 years. That is, these are long-term trends, rather than very recent or sudden phenomena. This adds to their cultural significance, as a progressive change in French society.

Presumably, the reductions will all flatten out at some future time, when the minimum number of producers is reached. There is not a strong relationship between reductions and the number of producers, so it is not those areas with the largest numbers that have the largest reductions. Nor, apparently, does international fame have much to do with it — Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne have all fared very differently.

Anyway, the reductions in the number of producers have been a widespread phenomenon — the national trend is repeated within most regions.

Outlook

Changes of ownership, which is basically what we are discussing here, have other social dimensions, as well. For example, it is reported that recently “out of 8,000 vineyards and chateaux in Bordeaux, the Chinese have bought about 170 estates, representing about 3% of the wine region’s overall ownership” (China’s global ‘colonization’ of vineyards). This sort of activity can be just as big a cultural change as the actual reductions in numbers of producers.

Finally, recent events may drastically change the trends discussed here, so that the data for 2020 could be quite different. French wine-makers have been faced with steep drops in sales, first due to U.S. tariffs curbing exports, and then the national lockdown closing restaurants and bars. The government has had to step in, to the tune of €250 million so far (France pours more aid as wine sector faces ‘major difficulties’); but this year may encourage even more grape-growers to sell-up and find alternative ways to make a living.