Drink: New World order

In the 20-odd years since the New World first flirted with our palates, its emerging wine countries have ambushed the traditional winegrowing countries of Europe. The latest report from Nielsen shows that the wine market, 4 per cent up from last year, has been buoyed by the New World's astonishing success.

It will give cold comfort to Europe's wine growers to learn that Australia now sells one in four bottles of the wine we drink, way ahead of France; California beats Italy into third place with South Africa and Chile ahead of Spain; Germany is in danger of being overtaken by tiny New Zealand's latest Great Leap Forward. Nor will it exactly thrill them to see that of the top 50 UK wine brands, 34 hail from Australia, California, Chile, South Africa and New Zealand, and only 13 from the world's three biggest wine producers, France, Spain and Italy.

t was a shame in that context, then, that predictable howls of outrage met the latest proposals put forward by the EU's agriculture minister, the Danish Mariann Fischer-Boel, to drain the wine lake and make European wine more competitive. With an annual surplus equal to a year and half's supply of wine to the UK, aggravated by falling consumption, the glut is pushing wine growers out of business. Although the lower reaches of European wine have been stagnating for some time, the objectors' atavistic attachment to the land blinds them. Instead of seeing change as an opportunity to help them compete better, they see it as a way of undermining their long-held traditions and their rural way of life. Yet when tradition translates as resting on one's laurels and way of life as going to the wall, sitting on your hands is not much of a solution.

After announcing her plans to shake up the moribund European market, Fischer-Boel embarked on a tour of the wine regions this year "to understand better everyone's very individual concerns". She reported to the European Parliament last month with an unchanged central thesis: if stagnation is to be avoided and Europe be fit to compete, strong medicine is needed. This will include the uprooting of 200,000 hectares of uncompetitive vineyards (half the original estimate), ending distillation, using the £550m saved for promotion and compensating growers for grubbing up their vines. The EU would also adopt practices to bring Europe into line with the more competitive New World – like allowing producers to use oak chips, to put the name of the grape variety on the label, to blend wines across larger areas (as the Australians do), and to vintage date all wine labels including those for vin de table (currently not allowed). Restrictions on new plantings will be lifted in six years' time.

The formidable Danish minister not only enjoys wine, but as a farmer herself has some understanding of the problems facing producers. The idea that wanting to make European wine more competitive is a "betrayal of tradition to capitalism", shows just how deeply embedded in the sand some people's heads are. All grubbing up of vines, as she's pointed out, is to be voluntary and will be compensated at around £5,000 per hectare, falling to £2,000 over five years. At the same time, dropping planting restrictions will hardly lead to a new explosion in wine production as some have suggested. As she has pointed out, "the [current ] planting rights system ... keeps things static in a dynamic world. There must be room for energetic new entrants, and for existing competitive producers to do more. Producers will plant more vines only if they think the market will reward them for doing so." If France and her European wine companions mean business, wine business, that is, it might pay them to listen to Fischer-Boel before it's too late.