PARIS: Flicking open a tap on a Spanish lorry, a French winemaker lets red wine gush onto a motorway as the trade war between producers in the two countries intensifies.
French producers are furious that their traditional rivals in Spain – and also Italy – are exporting hundreds of millions of litres of cut-price wine that threaten their livelihoods.
Dozens took to the roads yesterday, stopping Spanish tankers and then emptying their wine on to the roads.
Frederic Rouanet, president of the wine producers in the south-west Aude department, confirmed that four tankers were emptied, with 70,000 litres of wine wasted.
His fellow protesters scrawled graffiti on the side of the Spanish trucks, with slogans including ‘wine not compliant’ – they believe the Spanish wine is sub-standard and not produced in accordance with European regulations.
Mr Rouanet said: ‘We’ve been checking the wine coming in for a month, but nobody cares. Today we got tough.’
The protest comes after industry figures showed that France is now the biggest buyer of Spanish wine – purchasing 580million litres in 2014, a 40 per cent rise on 2013.
France has also lost its status as the world’s biggest wine producer. Last year Italy produced 4,900million litres compared with 4,700million litres in France.
And French wine is more expensive. France sells its wine at a minimum £3.90 a litre abroad, compared with £1.95 for Italian wine and 91p for Spanish wine.
French police said there were ‘no immediate arrests’ associated with yesterday’s action, but the incidents were being investigated.
But Mr Rouanet said the Spanish wine was sub-standard: ‘If a French vineyard produced wine using the Spanish regulations, he quite simply couldn’t sell it.
‘I want Europe to work, but with the same laws for everyone,’ said Mr Rouanet, adding that 28,000 trucks filled with wine had arrived in France from Spain in 2015.
Despite Spain’s success as an exporter, its profits are in fact falling – not just because of low prices, but because it sells ‘in bulk’, which means un-bottled.
This has led to countries like France buying wine in bulk in Spain, and then bottling and labelling it themselves as their own, with an EU denomination saying the drink is ‘of Spanish origin’.
It is often more economic for France to export wine in bulk from Spain and then label it, rather than growing the grapes and making the wine themselves.
The French got through an average of 100 litres of wine per person in 1960, but the figure was only 42 litres in 2015.
