French Wine and French Identity before 1967

The French connection to wine is deeply engrained in the popular sense of self for many French people. Both because wine is a differentiated product, with regional character, and because it is produced in many regions across France, and drunk by inhabitants in all, wine has played a part in bringing together a country composed of distinct pays; it was ‘one of the elements that helped to form the French nation on the foundations of its regional diversity’.Footnote ⁴ In Roland Barthes's Mythologies, he presents a series of essays on the myths informing contemporary French identity.Footnote ⁵ His work provides examples and a kind of theoretical framework for how the French use, interpret, develop and ingest (in some cases – as with steak, milk or wine – literally) their modern mythologies. He argues that wine was foundational to French identity and that ‘the universality principle fully applies here, inasmuch as [French] society calls anyone who does not believe in wine by names such as sick, disabled or depraved: it does not comprehend him (in both senses, intellectual and spatial, of the word)’. By contrast, a French person who had ‘the know-how of drinking’ (savoir boire) would be seen as a good and trustworthy citizen, and a known entity. To Barthes, waxing romantic about the importance of wine to the French had been done ‘a thousand times in folklore, proverbs, conversations and Literature’ and ‘this very universality implies a kind of conformism: to believe in wine is a coercive collective act’.

Barthes's evaluations about the importance of this mythology to the French seems borne out by French self-evaluation of their own identity. In a modern study commissioned by the French government as to the components of French identity, which spawned a seven volume publication, the top three were, first, having France as one's birthplace, second, the defence of liberty and, third, speaking French; in close fourth place was being knowledgeable about and drinking wine. To explain what to some readers would have been an unusually high ranking for one specific food product – and given the more universally apparent gravity of the first three, a more superficial indicator of identity to some – the survey's unsurprised authors stated ‘wine is a part of our history; it's what defines us’.Footnote ⁶ While the French are very attached to their agricultural roots and many different agricultural products, as well as to the way of life that is connected to them, their most emotional attachment is to wine. That the French government relinquished control over it at all showed the intensity of the domestic political disputes that drove their decisions.

If the identity of French people in general was heavily tied up with wine, this was nowhere more intense than the attachment of certain vignerons to their farms, vines and wines, particularly small family farm owners. After all, one might very well wonder why wine has remained the dominant economic force in the Languedoc region, which in the mid-twentieth century was a leading producer of table wine. For this, there are ‘social and psychological as well as economic factors. The Mediterranean vigneron places a high value on viticulture. His ancestors cultivated grapes and made wine centuries before the unprecedented spread of vines in the nineteenth century, and much of his cultural life and his festivities were and still are integrated with the annual routine of the vineyard. There is an attachment to the soil that is deeply embedded in the vigneron's psyche which helps explain why so many of them, despite their impecunious condition, remain on the land.’Footnote ⁷

The French nation's love of wine sat well alongside state control of agriculture. The French management of wine in the twentieth century was based on a foundation of agricultural exceptionalism and characterised by heavy state control.Footnote ⁸ The state believed French farms served broader national interests and, as such, should be subject to heavy state intervention if necessary.Footnote ⁹ The origins of the structure of French government intervention in the twentieth century lay in organising the wartime economy. Intervention subsided for other sectors after 1920 but increased for agriculture with the expansion of ‘legislation on agricultural credit, farm reorganisation, new forms of property rights, agricultural education and the provision of technical and advisory services’.Footnote ¹⁰ Through the 1920s and 1930s this state involvement continued apace, and from 1945 onward it expanded considerably. Western European governments began to favour modernisation and technocratic decision making, and growth and investment characterised the years from 1945 until the early 1970s.Footnote ¹¹

The French government's interest in voluntarily and strategically decreasing its role in its domestic wine industry was primarily because subsidies to wine growers were expensive,Footnote ¹² and they wanted to relieve themselves of a historically ingrained system which had propped up key national industries at all costs. The French government has had a long history of ‘explicit, assertive, continuous, and comprehensive’Footnote ¹³ state intervention, particularly with its post-war dirigiste economic policies, reaching its zenith in the late 1960s with the Fifth Plan, whose main objective was assuring the international competitiveness of French firms via government support. In the first few decades of their operation, the Chambers of Agriculture, for which legislation was enacted in 1920, were an advisory and consultative body in the regions; however, their role increased considerably beginning in the 1950s, when they became the ‘prime agencies of state intervention in agriculture, acting as coordinating bodies for structural reform programmes’.Footnote ¹⁴ At the end of the 1960s they were responsible for continuing to support the costs and structures of programmes which were ever increasing.

More broadly speaking, costs across the different agricultural sectors – not only in the wine industry – needed to be scaled down. By the 1970s they were becoming prohibitive: the French Ministry of Agriculture's expenditure increased tenfold from 1950 to 1979 with massive spending on rural structural and social programmes.Footnote ¹⁵ The wine industry had in many ways been treated by the French national government in the same way as their other national ‘industry champions’. Political scientist Jack Hayward's assertions about the changing pressure and operation of French national industries are reflected in the wine industry: national firms were increasingly losing their market monopoly and national protection; when in deficit, firms that used to have recourse to overt or covert subsidisation were now required to be self-sustaining; and these firms were being pushed to adopt more international strategies by contracting transnational alliances. However, there are two vital differences between the industries Hayward uses to exemplify these trends and the wine industry: first, French wine groups largely had no recourse to international capital markets if the government or national banks were unwilling or unable to help, and, second, whereas other industrial firms were ‘no longer the . . . projections of national identity, so that the sometime national champions of the 1960s have perforce tended to acquire a transnational identity’, the wine industry remained – necessarily, and by choice – rooted in France.Footnote ¹⁶

The twentieth century was a time of transformation and upheaval for not only wine growers but for French farmers in general. There were attempts by the Vichy government, and indeed successive French governments, to protect the component of ‘rural idyll’ in the French identity. Mark Cleary's work Peasants, Politicians, and Producers, in its attempts to trace the development of peasants and in particular their organisations relative to the state and capitalism in twentieth-century France, dissolves the myth, stemming from economic generalisation, of ‘rural France . . . as unified [or] monolithic’.Footnote ¹⁷ Instead, he contends there were ‘huge spatial and social contrasts’ before the First World War which were widened by both the shifting priorities of the French government and then the European Community.Footnote ¹⁸ It is on the topic of the Community that Cleary's otherwise excellent book gives little illumination – despite his repeated suggestions that the Community was important, his discussion of the Community or the Community's impacts, direct or otherwise, on French farmers is limited.

The desire, however, to alleviate the increasing costs and support structures in the wine industry, as in other agricultural industries, ran against several other French ideals that made dismantling or even reducing the state apparatuses that supported table wine a difficult and delicate task. The French government's policy of aménagement du territoire was created to manage French national territory through spatial planning taking into account community, landscape and identity. An essential piece of this work involves preserving ‘a network of agriculturally-oriented villages throughout much of [France]’.Footnote ¹⁹ This rather uniquely French state mission was called upon to justify the continuation of state aide for agriculture, and, in particular, for small farmers, which the Midi table wine growers largely were. In this conception of the role of farmers – against the broader imperatives of aménagement – they were not only producing food for the state and playing a role in its economic machinery but were also a part of the fabric of the nation, by being keepers of the rural and traditional ways of life and the guardians and tenders of the landscape. Michel Débatisse, who was president of the National Federation of Agricultural Holders’ Unions (Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d'Exploitants d'Agricoles; FNSEA) from 1971 to 1978, expressed this very sentiment by saying that the role of the farmer needed to be protected by the state for it went beyond food production and security – it was also about ‘the working of the land, the presence of farmers in all regions, a certain conception of the relationship of man to his work, the mixture of the economic and the social . . . which, in my opinion, is a guarantee of not merely economic gain but of continuing to have a certain social fabric’.Footnote ²⁰

Finding a Basis for a Unified European Wine Policy, 1961–7

While there was plenty of earnest talk about the necessity of wine's inclusion in any integrated European agricultural policy in the years following the Stresa Conference in 1958,Footnote ²¹ serious discussions on how to integrate national wine markets would not occur for many years. However, the Stresa Conference introduced an important mandate which would later require wine policy negotiators to grapple with a moral imperative: the Stresa resolution introduced crucial new concepts such as ‘the importance of the family farm’.Footnote ²² Quick progress on other common markets in the early 1960s left the one for wine quite behind. On 31 May1961 a proposal for a common cereals market was put forward by the European Commission to the European Council, as was one for milk and pig meat. A few months later, in July, there were formal proposals for markets in fruits and vegetables, eggs and poultry meat. But wine policy proposals were delayed, with the European Commission citing concerns over the availability of statistical evidence to understand the scope of what they were dealing with.

Three major events in 1962 changed the course of wine regulations in Europe. First, on 14 January 1962, after the 140-hour ‘agricultural marathon’ of negotiations over the propositions for various integrated markets, the decision to create six agricultural markets was approved. This was an enormous undertaking. European Commissioner for Agriculture Sicco Mansholt and Commission President Walter Hallstein envisioned at this landmark juncture that an eventual wine policy would fall under a lower level of protection relative to the other common market organisations (CMOs), which would see it mostly subject to customs duties and levies on imports. Second, as a preliminary step, European policy makers created regulation with four major provisions, mainly administrative, to lay the foundations for the eventual creation of a common wine policy. Regulation 24/62Footnote ²³ established that, first, each country was to create a vineyard register, second, a central authority was to keep track of annual production levels, third, strict rules were to be set regarding quality wines produced in specified regions and, fourth, future estimates of resources and requirements were to be compiled annually. In contrast to this rather minimalist series of measures, the other markets had preparatory arrangements for their upcoming market organisations which were considerably more wide-ranging. For instance, the creation of the milk market was first addressed after Stresa in 1964 with the establishment of Regulation 13/64. This preliminary text already contained detailed plans for a price levy system for imports, as well as pricing mechanisms for the Community support structures, such as how often a threshold price would be established, and even included a timeframe for the abolishment of intra-community tariffs on milk and milk products. Four years later the common market organisation for milk was rendered in full.Footnote ²⁴ There was not a similar trajectory for the wine policy. Third, with the passing of the Evian Accords, Algeria gained independence from France in 1962, resulting in a transition from a France situated in its empire to a France situated in an integrating Europe.Footnote ²⁵ This gave France license to more aggressively try to reduce its intake of Algerian wine.Footnote ²⁶

The French intake of Algerian wine is the result of the success story of the rescue of European vineyards from phylloxera, a parasite that attacked Vitis vinisfera, the European vine species. Phylloxera wiped out an estimated half of the vineyards across the continent and reduced French wine production by three-quarters between 1875 and 1889.Footnote ²⁷ The French government then intensively imported wine from its then-colony Algeria, as well as Spain and Italy, while various cures for the parasite were investigated. The introduction of these imported wines, however, caused a decrease in the price of local wines as a result of cheaper foreign winesFootnote ²⁸ and also added to existing wine quality problems – resulting in the main from issues of adulteration and fraudulent wines – in European wine markets.Footnote ²⁹ In the years after the Second World War, with the phylloxera problem by then well under control and the southern French vineyards recovered, the continued requirement of importing wine from Algeria due to French–Algerian treaties, together with the surplus production of French wine growers, exacerbated the problem of an already saturated French market.Footnote ³⁰ Despite Algeria no longer receiving favoured trade status, Algerian arguments that they had largely planted vineyards to help France were so strongFootnote ³¹ as to force the French in 1964 to commit to purchasing 39 million hectolitres of wine from 1964 to 1968 to prevent a sudden collapse of the livelihoods of Algerian wine growers.Footnote ³² This was a significant volume given the average total domestic French production of wine through the 1960s was 63 million hectolitres a year.Footnote ³³

France was further facing problems of a decrease in wine consumption. According to statistics the United Nations’ FAO had compiled from the beginning of the century, it was clear that in France ‘consumption has constantly decreased’.Footnote ³⁴ Further, the FAO criticised the wine market as a whole in France, using it as a prime example of a country that had still not produced proper ‘control measures and limitation of production’.Footnote ³⁵ It charged France with chronic overproduction and the steady decline in the quality of vineyards in southern France.Footnote ³⁶ The French themselves certainly knew that overproduction was serious and systemic – and this was clear during the CWP negotiations.

France turned to the European Economic Community for a solution, but this was not so easy. The negotiations for the cereals sector took much of the attention of the Commission and Council after the 1962 wine provisions were created – after the May 1961 proposal, discussions progressed quickly, and the Council agreed unanimously with the Commission's proposal on cereals. But while the Council expected to have the market running in July 1962, the inability of Germany to come to an agreement by 1964 with the other members over the fixing of wheat prices meant a long delay on the matter. An unsatisfied President Charles de Gaulle prompted the 1965 ‘Empty Chair Crisis’, which then loomed large over the wine negotiations. In the meantime, France struggled to balance domestic production and consumption, and began to renege on accepting Algerian wine imports.Footnote ³⁷ It was fearful, too, that the process of harmonising wine production practices would threaten ‘the French state's ability to create and safeguard production’.Footnote ³⁸ After a lag of five years, negotiations for a common wine market finally began in earnest in 1967.

Negotiating a Common Wine Market Organisation from 1967

After the establishment of the provisions in 1962, there would not be another major movement towards a unified wine policy until a meeting of the Wine Working Group (Groupe de travail ‘vins’), the Council's group of wine experts which reported to the Special Committee on Agriculture (Comité Spécial Agriculture; CSA). The Group was composed of key decision makers for the Common Agricultural Policy.Footnote ³⁹ The CSA announced that in February 1967 the upcoming Council of Europe meeting would include the first meeting of the Committee of Senior Officials (Comité de Hauts Fonctionnaires)'s sub-committee on wines, at which the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Comité des représentants permanents; COREPER) and the Council wanted to present a unified, coordinated attitude.Footnote ⁴⁰ This was noteworthy, as the Council was a body with no agricultural remit and yet it was this group that was in part responsible for triggering a new move forward in European agricultural policy. These kinds of external pressures would prove to be vital for keeping up the momentum of the discussions on a unified wine policy.

In June 1967, triggered by the Council of Europe meeting a few months prior, the Commission finally returned to the 1962 regulations that laid down the basic administrative foundations for a common wine market (marché commun viti-vinicole), recalling its propositions for a common wine policy in 1960 based on its belief that a general common market could not work without an integrated wine policy. The Commission admitted that, because of the lack of action since 1962 on a common wine policy, the situation in the Community continued to be characterised by very strong protectionism and divisions between the different national viticultural policies, due to ‘natural and historical’ reasons.Footnote ⁴¹ External pressure compelled action: the Council and Commission wanted an agreement before the meeting on 11 December 1967 of the European Council's Committee of Senior Officials for Wine and Spirits (Comité des Hauts Fonctionnaires sur les vins et spiritueux du Conseil de l'Europe).Footnote ⁴²

Similarly, at a Council meeting on 16 July 1969 the German delegation drew attention to the fact that the Six (the term referring to the original EEC member states Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) would each be required to give their definitions on oenological methods at the upcoming meetings on 13 and 19 October 1969 of the International Organisation of Wine and Vine (Organisation internationale de la vigne et du vin; OIV). The OIV was an international intergovernmental organisation dedicated to dealing with scientific and technical aspects of viticulture and viniculture (where viticulture refers to the growing of grape vines and viniculture to that of the knowledge of making wine). The Germans pressed the Council for a resolution, pointing out that the issue that needed to be decided at the OIV meetings corresponded precisely with the decisions that needed to be taken on the Community's proposed wine policy, and that this would be an ideal time to move forward with the latter. At this same meeting, the Groupe de travail vins called to the attention of COREPER the necessity of coordinating the attitude of the Six ahead of the meeting of the Wine Committee of the FAO.Footnote ⁴³

These international meetings were important political chances to demonstrate a consolidated communitarian stance; the members knew that if they could not they would face further threats to their ability to create a unified market. Decisions made at other non-Community organisations that were binding – such as those at OIV, where changes had to be ratified by all its members and all six member states were members – could potentially place unwanted restrictions on decision makers in the Community.

The Commission's proposal for the development of a common wine policy was initially a result of three major lines of thought – that any policy produced should address ‘the adjustment of production and consumption’, that it should undertake to improve the quality of Community wine and that it should harmonise the divergent national legislation. The most serious obstacle to integration was the profound difference between the French and the Italian wine production systems, which became a centrepiece of the Council and Commission negotiations. The French wine system had been strictly organised since the Wine Code (Code du Vin) was adopted in 1936. Through this the French state maintained stringent regulations on planting and regulations aimed at reducing the production of poor quality wines, as well as regularly intervening in the case of pricing issues due to harvest fluctuations. The French also had a rich heritage of agricultural cooperatives, which were significant around this time as they accounted for 42 per cent of total production in France, and 70 per cent of production in the Midi, the largest wine growing region by volume in the world at the time.

The Italian system, in contrast, was ‘marked by a very great liberalism; moreover, the vine being there considered as a colonising plant, its cultivation is largely encouraged, under certain conditions at least’,Footnote ⁴⁴ as the Italians encouraged the planting of vines and the development of vineyards as a way to improve the living conditions for farmers in poor rural areas. Their wine market produced a large amount, comparable in the 1960s and 1970s to France, but was in its infancy as far as having a modern, national and regulated market was concerned. Most wine produced was consumed in the country and was of table wine quality. In 1963 the Italians developed the Controlled Designation of Origin (Denominazione di Origine Controllata; DOC), in response to the reorganisation required by the Council regulation of the previous year. In 1965, in part due to trade pressure from the French, the Italians enacted policies to counter fraud. But their principal policy aim was to encourage the spread of wine growing as a national economic and social development tool. Both France and Italy wanted to reproduce their national models at the European level, and it would be necessary for decision makers in Brussels to find a compromise between the two different approaches of the Community's two largest wine producers.

By July 1968, a year after negotiations had begun, the fixing of prices had been established for the common markets of milk, beef and veal, sugar, rice, oilseeds, olive oil and cereals, but not for wine. The French complained about the lack of progress, but the gridlock was largely due to their own lack of agreement with many aspects of the proposal. In a detailed special report to the CSA,Footnote ⁴⁵ the primary argument of the French delegation was this: to maintain balance in the wine market, one ought to control the level of production and the level of imports, which the French insisted could only be effective if at the same time there was a determined push to eliminate and discourage the production of poor quality wines.

The French worried that the Commission's rather open attitude towards the use of distillation in the case of high yields (which is itself an expensive measure) would encourage an ‘intensive production of mediocre wine’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The French claimed that without efforts to curb the large surpluses sure to rise from new plantings, without certain rules regarding quality standards and limitations around planting, and without sufficient protection of the market and pricing, the result would be disastrous for the Community. The French were concerned for the possible consequences of a liberal policy for the Community as a whole, but this worry also stemmed from an issue closer to home. A policy with no restrictions on planting would have been great trouble for them further down the line with the production trends in France's southern vineyards; even the inclusion of some sort of built-in price support system of a future CWP, which would mean subsidies for the country's farmers, would have been unlikely to adequately abet the situation of further projected rises in production.

The increase of production in both France and Italy over the previous decade was symptomatic of systemic overproduction as a result of domestic welfare policies within both Italy and France, with Italian encouragement of the development of rural areas and the continued French protection of wine growers in the Midi, who produced a great deal of the poor quality table wines against which the French themselves were arguing. (It was, interestingly enough, the Germans who through 1968 and 1969 repeatedly tried to argue that this was the case, and who were rebuffed by the other two.) The French government intentionally wanted to develop a more restrictive policy on planting at Brussels and not in Paris so as to avert in part potential blame from vignerons; the effort of the French government to ‘discourage the cultivation of inferior grapes was a political and not a scientific one: [it was] the need to curb the subsidies that drained the budget of the Ministry of Agriculture’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Further, pro-Europeanist French Minister of Agriculture Edgard Pisani maintained for his tenure from 1961 to 1966 his desire for the ministry to help ‘integrate agriculture into European and global markets, and champion appellation wine’.Footnote ⁴⁸ On this last point he was joined by a group of influential ‘appellation leaders, technocrats and public health activists’ who shared a common interest in organising the wine market, promoting geographically indicated wines (very generally, higher quality wines) and reducing the perceived threat of alcoholism. They thereby came together at key junctures of the negotiation process to pressure both the ministry and Eurocrats to create a unified policy that would favour quality wines and reduce overall production.Footnote ⁴⁹

In response to continued problems with negotiations, a series of CSA meetings in November 1968 were reserved for the wine policy negotiations,Footnote ⁵⁰ at which the frustrated Germans suggested a simple, basic coordination of national legislation, akin to a customs union (much as Mansholt and Hallstein had originally envisioned in 1962), as a first step for the wine market. Both France and Italy were committed to the process of creating a full, proper CMO; they refused a partial integration, citing the relative importance of wine to their countries and to Community integration as a whole. Domestically, the French faced pressure from wine cooperatives, which had started to become relatively well-organised through the 1960s, and who would have been displeased with a loose, unstructured policy at a time when prices and consumption of table wine were falling. The suggestion by the Commission representative at the meeting that it might become necessary to simply copy and paste the more technocratic models from the organisation of the markets of other major agricultural sectors was ignored by other representatives. Despite the many pressing difficulties, the central line was still that ‘organisation of a common market for wine is indispensable for completing the integration of the agricultural economies of the Six’.Footnote ⁵¹

The Politics of Agreeing on Pricing and Production

The problem of reaching agreement on pricing was the major sticking point from November 1968 onward. At the beginning of 1969 an agreement on pricing mechanisms for wine seemed to be out of reach. The model proposed by the Commission at the time was a loose price support system complemented with supplementary price supports, safeguard clauses and a Community tariff. The Germans, along with the Belgian and Dutch representatives, found even this basic system to be too much – they expressed their ‘deep reserve on the mechanisms’ and went on to state they were ‘not convinced of the necessity of taking these measures’.Footnote ⁵² To the Germans, the measures taken for the wine policy ought to be more ‘of a precautionary character’Footnote ⁵³ than the current Commission proposals. This was at stark odds with the French position: they thought that the system in its current conception was not nearly wide-ranging or incisive enough, was as yet ‘insufficient to achieve the objectives of a common wine-growing policy’,Footnote ⁵⁴ and further did not contain any steps in the direction of the promotion of quality in the wine industry.

On 15 January 1969 the Secretariat General prepared a summary of the major points of contention amongst delegates regarding the wine negotiations.Footnote ⁵⁵ The four key issues still requiring resolution were, first, what the guiding objective or objectives of the wine policy ought to be (would it be balancing production and demand, following a policy of quality, or administratively directing production policy?); second, what the links should be between the market organisation, the harmonisation of existing legislation, the regulation of quality wines and the organisation of a market for alcohol more broadly speaking; third, how to arrange the trade regime with non-Community countries; and, fourth, what legal form the market organisation for wine should take (should it be a common market organisation, or, as the Germans continued to suggest, a ‘simple coordination of national bodies’Footnote ⁵⁶). In addition to this list of difficult conceptual problems, at the top of the fifth year of negotiations was the complex technical problem of how to manage the ‘regularisation of the Community market’, for while all delegations agreed in principle with interventions of some sort, ‘profound differences have however emerged regarding the extent, nature and the character of the anticipated mechanisms’.Footnote ⁵⁷

At this meeting, the matter of whether overproduction was a potential future problem was heavily debated. The French delegation, supported on this point by the Germans, argued that overproduction was a great possibility and could only be averted with strict Community control emphasising quality of vines and terroirs – this uniquely French word, when applied to wine, encompassed such diverse aspects as geology and climate, such as sun, slope, soil composition and precipitation, and is tied together in a specific locality which gives it a sense of ‘place’. This word is usually used in the context of quality wines. The French were adamant that a system not be designed in which there was ‘an under-protection of quality wines and an over-protection of mediocre wines’.Footnote ⁵⁸

The French were insistent on this point, as they had been since the beginning of negotiations, for the national mandate issued to them had itself been resolute on the same issue. The French stance during all negotiations was set by the Secretariat General of the Interministerial Committee for European Economic Cooperation Questions (Secrétariat général du comité interministériel pour les questions de coopération économique européenne; SGCI), the Paris based national governmental body that liaised with different relevant French ministries to coordinate the official French line in Community institutions. Even if its detractors claimed it was not particularly transparent – one commentator quipped it was ‘an administrative agency with an unknown role and considerable importance’Footnote ⁵⁹ – the SGCI, staffed predominantly by those from the Ministry of Finance, was the reason why French coordination and consistency of goals in the European Commission was widely considered the most efficient of the member states.Footnote ⁶⁰ In fact, it was the strict rule that ‘French ministries were not allowed to accept agendas of meetings in Brussels without the agreement of the SGCI’,Footnote ⁶¹ despite the fact that it did not have official decision making powers. The SGCI had most recently set the formal agenda on wine negotiations by stating that delegates were to make three points clear: first, that, given the French overview of their own domestic situation, overproduction was likely and the situation could degenerate quickly – but delegates were instructed to make this point about the Community situation in general (that is to say, they should also argue that this could happen in Italy); second, that production had to be limited at all costs, but this point might have to be made in a nuanced way because the Commission had taken the line along with the Italians that planting should be allowed to continue freely; and, third, that the French delegates were to counter any continued German demands against comprehensive, built-in Community intervention measures in wine with the line that these needed to be ‘Community-wide and obligatory’.Footnote ⁶²

The document urgently noted that ‘the German delegation maintains, on the other hand, that the Council decided, when the Financial Regulation was amended in May 1966, that the common organisation of the wine market would not be financed by the Community’.Footnote ⁶³ This was unacceptable for the French, for their aim was to transfer policy making power, and in particular the hefty and difficult financing of their national wine industry, to the Community institutions. The document pressed delegates to make the point that the May 1966 resolution ‘leaves . . . fully open the possibility of Community funding’.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Italians argued instead that reaching equilibrium between production and consumption was possible, and that the other delegations were setting a dangerous precedent by trying to limit planting rights, declaring that this would be an attack on Italy's cultural, economic and social sensibilities.Footnote ⁶⁵ In response, the Commission representative stated that the Commission was not unwilling to adopt temporary ‘binding measures’ to help alleviate an imbalance, but stated that the position of the Commission was that ‘it considered that such a situation of imbalance did not yet exist’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Finally, the solution the frustrated parties found was to intervene on a case by case basis; this mechanism was unique to the wine market as other similar common markets had automatic interventions.

The negotiations for pricing on the cereals market were infamously complicated as well, and negotiators did not arrive at case by case pricing. Why did this happen in the wine market? There was in part considerable pressure to arrive at a solution quickly and, thereby, more pressure to relinquish national goals in favour of compromise, because the wine market was the last of the original markets left to be unified. The free circulation of wine within the Six was meant to be in effect from November 1969; further to this, earnest and intensive enlargement negotiations were planned for the 1970s, and it was incumbent to have all the markets running before then. This also made the eventual CWP more prone to criticism and open attack because it required incisive ‘hands-on’ action each time pricing became problematic as it could not depend on automatic intervention like other markets.

In early 1969 the situation looked bleak. The Commission and Council sustained a long discussion on the definition of the word ‘wine’. The FAO remarked that the Community's common wine policy as it stood ‘has indeed made very little progress and that major problems remain still to be resolved’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Council continued to express doubts about the Commission's proposal, citing problems with the application of appropriate measures for production policy, the character of protectionist import measures and the measures to balance a common wine market. In the midst of these challenges, greater clarity was achieved by splitting issues of concern into general problems and technical problems, which allowed the delegation of in-depth and now extensive technical matters to the Commission and Council's own individual expert wine groups, which had been confusing and laborious for non-specialists to discuss. At the tail end of the previous year, this mandate had been explicitly conferred to the Wine Working Group by the Special Committee for Agriculture at the Group's 25 November 1968 meeting for the purposes of allowing the latter to take charge of making ‘a thorough study of the technical aspects’Footnote ⁶⁸ of the wine policy proposals. But the real breakthrough, though it came reluctantly, was when Germany helped France and Italy take steps towards a compromise on pricing mechanisms and financial aspects of the CWP in early 1970.

It was not until February 1970 that the Council approved the Commission proposal, announcing that after negotiations which were ‘wearisome, often profitless and largely dominated by a clash of national interests’, they were reaching the end and that the implementation of what would be regulation 816/70 was close at hand. But this they did without particularly satisfying anyone, least of all France, whose desire to keep the Community's vineyard to its current size had been quashed. To get Italian agreement on financing meant France made greater concessions, resulting in a much more liberal regime that allowed both free trade and free production of wine. In mid-April 1970 the process looked like it would fall apart again, during a very stormy meeting in which the Italian proposals to ban the addition of sugar to grape to increase alcoholic content was met with fierce resistance by both the French and Germans, who both used a sugaring process called chaptalisation with some of their bestselling wines.

In the end, five major agreement areas were in regulation 816/70 which set down common rules for the organisation in the Community's market in wine. The first was prices and intervention – it was agreed that price fixing would only be done for table wines, and that quality wines would not be subjected to such a process. Rules concerning production and control of planting enshrined the freedom to plant. High import rates were imposed on trade with non-EC countries, as well as more stringent regulations on the type of wine that could be imported. Further to this, blending of EC wines with non-EC wines was strictly banned. The final two rules were about oenological processes and general provisions, such as definitions. One important arrangement was the division of Europe's vineyards into five geographical categories, as outlined in the following table.

Table 1:

European Community wine growing zones as set out by Regulation 816/70

The Commission welcomed the birth of the CWP in April 1970 with this announcement: ‘given these different [national] interests, often diametrically opposed, a single approach to the wine market problem was only possible because all sides made considerable concessions. Growers in Italy, France and Germany are bitterly critical of the Council's resolution: they all feel that their own Government has given too much ground. It might be said indeed that everyone is equally dissatisfied, which proves that the agreement by the Ministers is a genuine compromise.’Footnote ⁶⁹

The Belief in Wine as Part of the European Integration Project

Tracing the arc of the negotiations over the Common Wine Policy reveals both that the pressure to complete the agricultural project brought the French and Italians to a disgruntled compromise on the issue of wine as well as the persistence of parties in seeking a common market structure, despite repeated setbacks and suggestions of a simpler customs union, which was based on the unqualified but largely unchallenged belief that wine was integral to the Community agricultural project. Further, what had significant bearing on the tone of the wine negotiations was a series of decisions taken many years earlier, while the Common Agricultural Policy's structure was being established. Earlier discussions from 1957 to 1962 on the Common Agricultural Policy eventually came to centre around ‘prevent[ing] farm incomes from falling more and more behind incomes in other sectors’ and addressing the ‘disequilibrium between production and consumption . . . problems which have become almost insoluble within the frontiers of a single state’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Likewise, as Member of Belgian Parliament Maurice Van Hemelrijck from the Belgian Christian Social Party stated, in attempting to explain the principles underpinning discussions on the future European agricultural project,

The language used and ideas generated during this earlier time set into motion the increasing legitimacy of a discourse that was based on ensuring that farmers’ incomes did not fall further behind those in other sectors. The discourse included the need for the preservation of the family farm to be recognised as an essential component of any European agricultural order that was to be established, which was to be pursued through various measures like price support and balancing consumption and production. These early ideas pushed a social policy agenda onto the stage, and by the time serious discussions began on the creation of a common wine policy, the environment created by these prior discussions added pressure to the course of the wine negotiations, while also limiting their scope.Footnote ⁷² This, for instance, was why the technocratic ‘copy and paste’ offered by the Commission was unacceptable. It would not have addressed the social policy aspect as it related to the wine industry, for the industry operated in a more complicated fashion than the other sectors. This also explains the unique mechanisms within the Community market for wine. For example, the automatic pricing and intervention schemes, which were an essential and basic part of the milk and cereals markets, were not used in the wine market. Wine was far more subject to variations in both annual harvest sizes and in market fluctuations, which taken together made it a more volatile agricultural market than its comparable cousins.

Wine's Fit within the Common Agricultural Policy

The European Economic Community was aware that bringing Europe's vineyards under a common aegis would be testing. The EEC recognised from 1961 that because wine in Europe had been ‘organised on a national basis, in accordance with the specific situation of each country, [as a result] the viticultural economies of the Member States are significantly different from one another', but believed that ‘the creation of the single wine market . . . will be able to mitigate these difficulties’.Footnote ⁷³ However, they did not anticipate how strenuous this task would be. The Common Wine Policy was difficult to negotiate because of three major reasons – first, wine was not a good fit with the rest of the products for which common markets were being created, second, agreed best practices for wines in Europe were lacking, making compromise difficult, and, third, tension existed between economic and political imperatives, which exposed broader uncertainties about the goals of the Common Agricultural Policy.

Wine's difference to the other agricultural products which were to have analogous markets to it is most obvious when looking at its most closely related agricultural markets, which were those for milk and cereal, the former of which suffered through the milk lake and butter mountain, akin to the wine lake of the late 1970s and 1980s. Even then, there were important differences. While milk and cereals are base agricultural products, wine is not; rather, it is a processed product. Grapes that were to be converted to wine could simply have remained with their grapes-for-eating brethren under the fruit and legumes market. In contrast, milk has a common market, but its derivatives cheese or butter do not.Footnote ⁷⁴ One particularly compelling reason to believe that the wine industry was accorded a special kind of place in the pantheon of Europe's agricultural products because of its identity was that a market was created for it amongst these other base agricultural products and to the exclusion of one or several alcohol markets.

One commonality to most wine growing in Western Europe is the practice of monoculturalism, which made those in the wine growing profession vulnerable. A bad harvest would represent a devastating loss of revenue for those who had no other sources of income or had not diversified with other crops. This was acute in the region of Languedoc, where a large percentage of the region's economy was tied up with the wine industry. Most other farming sectors were hybrids, and those who had such operations were sometimes derogatorily termed ‘polyculturists’ by Midi vignerons. As M. Soulié, a vigneron in the south of France commented,

A frequent occurrence was that those who produced milk, even chiefly, would do so often in combination with something else, such as raising pigs or poultry (with the notable exception of dairying in mountainous regions, which tended to be small-scale monoculturalist pursuits yielding low income). These polyculturists also tended to join and be represented by general agricultural groups, like the powerful National Federation of Agricultural Holders’ Unions (Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d'Exploitants d'Agricoles; FNSEA), which the Midi vignerons decidedly eschewed. In fact, in spite of FNSEA's considerable status and growth during the 1960s and 1970s, ‘the wine growers [of the Languedoc] did not feel as if they belonged to this organisation and participated little in its initiatives’.Footnote ⁷⁶

The different measures taken for the milk and cereals markets did not politicise them to the same degree as similar measures for the wine market. Part of the reason for this was that the introduction of quotas had a fairly immediate effect in the intended direction: the quotas halted what had been a continuous increase in milk deliveries but without effecting a dramatic decline, thereby averting a potential backlash from dairy farmers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, the wine market was more exposed than the other agricultural markets (perhaps except for fruits, especially in the Mediterranean). Wine as a whole was more exposed to global processes and pricing than any other sector with a common agricultural market. Table wine and quality wine alike were more subject to international pressures and determinants impacting the end price of their product,Footnote ⁷⁸ while the same was not true for milk, meats or cereals. The lack of consistency in pricing or of the stability of markets in wine, which was more readily achieved in those former markets, perpetuated the ‘feast and famine’Footnote ⁷⁹ cycle of wine.

Another major reason why agreeing on a wine policy was so difficult was that there were no established best practices in wine. To observers from non-wine producing countries, such a statement would probably seem like common sense. But to those from countries with strong wine producing backgrounds, there was rightness or wrongness in wine growing traditions which meant that, without objective standards by which to measure these, compromise was difficult to reach, because compromise entailed ‘giving in’ to another country's ways of doing things. Another impediment to dealing with this issue more openly was the seeming inability of countries to simply say that there were different cultures of wine growing – in the technocratic environment of the European institutions of the time, the currency in Brussels was not in sentimental idealism or in explicitly raising identity issues in negotiations. Even in those negotiations that merited discussions on culture and tradition, in a post-war context of creating a new European order, they were not very welcome.

This was not an area where one could uncover an agreed-upon set of best practices. Wine in the member states was about tradition, heritage, organic processes of development and culture. A good example was the acceptance of the practice of chaptalisation, the process of adding sugar to unfermented grape mustFootnote ⁸⁰ in order to increase the alcohol content after fermentation. There is no particular rightness or wrongness to this process, but the Italians disliked it and the French and Germans had permitted this in certain wines for many generations. Chaptalisation is used traditionally in cooler areas where white wine grapes are grown to improve the final taste and reduce acidity. This climate related tradition did not arise in Italy, for Italians did not encounter the issue for which it was a solution, whereas it was a useful way to improve taste in certain German and French regions. Likewise, different opinions about edulcoration, the addition of concentrated grape must to sweeten a wine which is otherwise finalised, were presented as technical facts by Italy and France during a CSA meeting in July 1969, with the resultant ‘solutions’ each party gave to the problems simply being references to what was done at home; a standstill was then hardly a surprise. The process of negotiating wine was essentially more akin to negotiating over value and dominance of cultural practices in a final European wine policy. The creation of the other markets, such as those for cereals, were, if still difficult, more straightforward, more technocratic and less imbued with symbolic value, identity and culture than the one for wine.

Economic vs. Political Imperatives in Negotiating Wine

The tension between economic and political imperatives facing the European Community institutions was a significant problem impeding progress during negotiations over the Common Wine Policy. The question ‘whither the CAP?’ loomed uncomfortably over the discussion, to which the answer in the early 1960s had been to prioritise political and welfarist imperatives over economic ones. Ann-Christina Knudsen's arguments about the moral economy of the Common Agricultural PolicyFootnote ⁸¹ are apt in this discussion: the value of maintaining parity in farmers’ incomes and of supporting the continuation of the family farm were part of the design of the fabric of the nascent CAP. By the time the CWP negotiations began, the direction of the overall agricultural project was set, and within its structure was a moral compass that harboured difficulties the wine policy negotiations exposed.

The difference between quality wine and table wine is crucial to understanding the course of the CWP in the policy's first decade. Much as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, wine desirability is in the subjective tastes of the drinker. Undoubtedly there is some truth to the idea that ascertaining the value and quality of wine – if otherwise free from faults like being corked – is inherently a subjective analysis. Some would go so far as to say that ‘the quality of any wine is socially and politically constructed’.Footnote ⁸² Certainly, in the process of even claiming there ought to be one category for wines considered to be high quality and one category of wine considered to be low quality – euphemistically ‘table wine’, and previously in France also known as ‘bulk wine’ (vin de consommation courante) – signalled a process of political construction.

This political construction was partly a response to changing social constructions of wine, where alongside the decline in wine consumed per capita in Mediterranean countriesFootnote ⁸³ came ‘the development of a new wine drinking culture in France’ in the 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁴ The change was propelled by the tastes of the growing middle classes, who drank less wine and furthermore did so, and also selectively chose their wines, to ‘[enable] them to differentiate themselves from other social groups by adopting the ways of drinking that were once the preserve of the haute bourgeoisie’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Relatedly, this growing middle-class voter base was becoming less enamoured of the idea of tax dollars propping up ailing industries that produced goods which now seemed outmoded. The criteria that was used to develop the two different wine categories used a combination of alcohol percentageFootnote ⁸⁶ and geographic localeFootnote ⁸⁷ to designate a wine as being in a better category: even the nomenclature itself – assigning one category as ‘quality’ surely suggests the other is not, regardless of cosmetic euphemistic attempts to avoid this – was evidence of construction. Yet this political construction was also partly in response to another imperative: table wine and quality wine were operating as different economic goods in the market.

The CWP negotiations, already beset by disagreement on best practices in production and as well as wine's poor fit with the other agricultural products under the purview of a European policy, were hampered by the difficulty of dealing with wine as an economic good. Table wine and quality wine operated under different economic pressures, yet the two were subject to the same policy. Quality wine increasingly behaved as a luxury economic good, for which demand increases more than would be proportional as incomes increase; by contrast, table wine began to shift from being a normal good to being an inferior economic good, for which demand decreases as incomes increase.

The CWP did not reconcile this growing economic difference between table and quality wines. It would have made sense for there to be two sets of economic policies. From a political point of view, it would have been tremendously difficult, not to mention unpopular, to institute two policies for wine grape growers, whose products were ostensibly the same, even when the products were subject to different kinds of economic pressure in markets. A small effort made to differentiate the two was taken with the establishment of regulation 817/70, which complemented 816/70, the principal body of the CWP. While 816/70 was the focus of the Community's efforts to intervene in the European wine industry and is what is largely being referred to when discussing the CWP, the Commission created 817/70 to lay down additional provisions for quality wines. This regulation was largely a formal exercise, for 817/70 straightened some administrative lines in quality wine labelling and naming as in article 12,Footnote ⁸⁸ which regulated the use of ‘quality wine produced in a specified region’, or VPQRD, but had little other impact on quality wine growers.

Overproduction of wine was a serious concern to many parties, but most especially to the French, whose insight was informed by their own saturated wine market – even despite aggressive and successful efforts to curb and then cut off their Algeria imports – and increasing farm support payments. Despite confusing and conflicting statistics suggesting it was permanent, temporary or even no longer an issue, the Council of Ministers had formally stated as early as 1961 that ‘permanent surpluses are the cause of serious difficulties in the wine economy’.Footnote ⁸⁹ With lower quality wine, the route that would have made most economic sense was to forcibly cut down on wine production through methods like grubbing up vines or allowing those wines to bear the brunt of the market, which would have forced producers of these wines to find other employment. But, coupled with statistical and informational problems, the political problem of buttressing farmers’ incomes was given more weight. The policy went through, even though the mechanisms of this policy encouraged further production of wine, with the promise of Community support in the case of poor sales or overproduction through price fixing for income support and costly measures like distillation and storage. This was clear to the French throughout negotiations. Reviewing the agreement reached by the Six EC member states on the wine policy, François Seydoux, the French Ambassador to Germany, commented, ‘and is the European Community to drown in a sea of wine?’Footnote ⁹⁰