Cant beat a bit protectionism when your product is crap 🙂
Lots of huge co-operative wine producers in Languedoc banging out oceans of sub-mediocre, non-AOC, wine. The Spanish wine is no better, but neither deserve protecting. Many of the cooperatives are still bound to the idea of paying x cents per litre of juice, regardless of the quality, and so encouraging the farmers (they are not Wine makers/vignerons) to produce as much as possible. Yield is almost invariably inversely proportional to quality in wine.
Some of the more enlightened cooperatives (thinking Mont Tauch here) have tasting colleges that rank member’s wines by quality. Competition winners receive substantial bounty rates per litre that more than compensate for the lower yields necessary to produce it. It also emphasises the use of the right land/terroir for the production. Ultimately this has raised the overall quality and therefore total revenue that the cooperative achieve for their members.
Acres of poor quality vineyards need to be grubbed up in SW France (and other areas too) and returned to other forms of agriculture. French wine consumption isnt what it once was and the old EU wine lake approach to funding over-production is long gone too thank goodness.
