European wine producers have failed to take advantage of funding to promote their wines overseas, according to the EU commissioner for wine.
The European Commission has provided 'national envelopes' to each wine-producing member state to help fund measures including marketing, restructuring vineyards and green harvesting.
However, Mariann Fischer Boel, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, told the Comité Européen des Entreprises Vin (CEEV) the uptake had been disappointing.
'By the end of May this year, with more than half the financial year over, on average member states had spent only about 20% of their national envelopes. Some had spent nothing at all,' she said.
The total 'envelope' budget for 2009 is €634m, which must be spent before 15 October.
If not, 'it will simply disappear', Fischer Boel said. 'That would be a small tragedy for a sector which certainly needs to invest in the future.'
She called on the wine sector to devise projects to use the funding, in particular for promotional purposes, without further delay. 'To those member states which haven't yet got out of the starting-blocks, I say: Lace up your running shoes quickly and get going'
The call to action comes ahead of the European wine reform, which will be come into force on August 1. The reform includes a vine-grubbing scheme and the phasing out of distillation subsidies.
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With competition getting more fierce in the global wine marketplace, it's amazing that any European wine producers would allow promotional funding to languish without taking full advantage of the opportunity. Part of this may be due to the fact that many producers may not be fully aware of the range in opportunities available in which to promote their wines on a national basis to key accounts. We would be happy to help make recommendations rather than risk allowing a promotional budget to “simply disappear”, as Mariann Fischer Boel warns in the article. The best way to generate international sales is to inform and educate the target market, and with interest in wine from the U.S. consumer market at an all-time high, this seems like a positive situation if the producers take advantage of the opportunities available to them.
Robert Cavanaugh, USA
It's not as simple as it seems
The reason producers are not using up all the money the EU has
suddenly decided to throw at them, is that the deadlines set by the
commission are ridiculously short. Although the Commission itself took
all the time it needed to come up with its definitive "OCM" project,
when it came to doling out the promotion money, potential candidates
for funds were requested to submit detailed projects for a 3-year
period almost right away (about a 2 month deadline). And these are
projects concerning many different countries such as Russia, China and
the States where you have to say in detail exactly what you will be
doing the next three years. Most growers will be teaming up with their
importers to do your basic, I've-done-it-a-hundred-thousand-times
tasting ritual.
I really don't understand why the Commission insists
on spending literally billions of euros in such a short time span
(within the next 5 years) instead of letting the industry come to
grips with the whole idea and then doing something really useful and
perhaps coordinated with this money. The Commission's idea is to open
up non-european markets, so what in real fact we are going to see is
hundreds of small European growers alone or in groups, doing exactly
the same things (tastings, advertisements, in-store-promotions etc
etc) in more or less the same target areas (major north American
cities + Moscow + some China), ad nauseam. Marvin Shanken will end up
commissioning a statute of Marian Fischer-Boel.
We are talking about 5 billion euros, why the rush?
Constantine Stergides
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