This article is adapted from the business magazine Capital and is available here for ten days. Afterwards it will only be available to read at www.capital.de. Like stern, Capital belongs to RTL Deutschland.
Germans don’t drink enough wine – at least according to the country’s winegrowers. Although wine tastes good, it has become too expensive for many customers in recent years. It is consumed less than before, especially by low-income households and in restaurants.
After the difficult Corona years, the next crises in the wine industry are now becoming noticeable. Winegrowers complain about historically poor sales and turnover figures and have to destroy excess wine. In order to ensure their survival, the supply of wine must become smaller, they say. But what if vineyards are usually designed to last for decades? The winegrowers themselves are now making a radical suggestion: clearing entire vineyards could be the solution.
Several German wine growing associations are now demanding money from the European Union (EU). Marian Kopp thinks the demand is only fair. He is the managing director of the Lauffener Weingärtner cooperative in the Heilbronn district. In wine-growing cooperatives, the people of Wenger in an area come together, press their wine and then market it under a common name. That’s why they call themselves a “multi-family business”. In the popular wine region on the Neckar, the member companies cultivate almost 900 hectares of vineyards.
For Kopp there is no question that vineyards have to be cleared. In order to be able to work profitably, the current oversupply of wine must be reduced – in other words, fewer grapes must be produced. “In France, where the crisis is much worse than here, there are already a lot of deforestation bonuses,” says Kopp in an interview with Capital. “We demand that these programs, which already exist in other countries, also be granted for Germany.”
Because an oversupply of wine threatens to destabilize the market in Europe. Wine consumption is declining worldwide because food has become more expensive due to inflation and at the same time the harvests have recently been good, contrary to expectations. In 2022, France even produced 21 percent more wine than in the previous year. Germany achieved an increase of six percent, according to the international state organization for wine and vines OIV.
Armin Gemmrich, board member of the German Institute for Sustainable Development, which is a member of the German Viticulture Association, also believes that financial support for clearing is the right thing to do. Otherwise many winegrowers would probably go bankrupt. “This will be one of the important solutions for the future,” Gemmrich tells Capital. “Hardly anything is done voluntarily in agriculture. But if there is financial support and the farmers are compensated for their losses, something can happen.”
The clearing itself can be criticized for sustainability reasons, but the development of the areas afterwards certainly offers opportunities. Photovoltaic systems on the sunny steep slopes, which would even generate income, are being discussed. However, their installation is subject to regulations, which is why they are more suitable for very large wineries than for small family businesses.
The German Winegrowers Association also considers photovoltaics to be a relevant topic, but does not yet have exact figures available. In 2022, the area under vines in Germany fell slightly for the first time since 2016 and amounted to almost 104,000 hectares, the association said in response to a query from Capital. Over the past ten years, however, there has been a slight growth of 1.2 percent overall.
An alternative use for the vineyards would be fallow land – “just like in times before winegrowing,” says Gemmrich. “Nature then reclaims the vineyard, but of course that’s bad for the winegrowers.”
Kopp, from Hölderlin’s birthplace Lauffen am Neckar, does not believe that many areas will remain fallow. The so-called conversion of areas, i.e. their reallocation, is quite common in agriculture, and the same applies to wine grapes. Several of the cooperative’s member companies already grow other products in addition to wine, such as potatoes, grain or fruit. In response to the crisis, this could be further diversified.
The Lauffen wine growers have recently tried above all to assert themselves in the highly competitive German market with higher quality and more expensive wines and yet the numbers are historically bad. “We sold seven percent less in 2023 than in the previous year and had four percent less sales,” says Kopp. “We haven’t had a decline like this in decades.” From his point of view, there are two main reasons for this: on the one hand, the decline in consumption among consumers directly, and on the other hand, more closure days and higher prices in the catering industry.
In order to remove excess wine from the market, the EU allowed so-called crisis distillation last summer. Wine is processed into cheap industrial alcohol and is still used that way. But it’s not economical. In January of this year alone, the EU spent 71 million euros on this, with the largest share going to France.
Even if the process may already be common there, crisis distillation is not a permanent solution – promoting biodiversity with brownfields or using the steep slopes to generate solar energy is. At least the conversion of land from wine to olive cultivation is already financially supported in France.
In Kopp’s cooperative, ten hectares have just been registered for clearing or conversion to other agricultural crops. However, such changes would only be visually visible where terraced steep slopes turn into gray bush landscapes in winter.
