France's Wine Industry in Decline

France's winemakers will hold emergency talks with the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, tomorrow to demand urgent government action amid warnings that the country's most emblematic industry is plunging into crisis.

The delegation of growers and merchants from France's major wine-producing areas will tell Mr Raffarin that French wine exports plummeted by nearly 10% last year, while domestic sales - with the exception of rosé, helped by the exceptionally hot summer - fell by almost 5%.

The average French adult drank 58 litres of wine last year, according to figures released last week by the trade association Onivins, compared with just over 100 litres throughout the 1960s. Only 37% of the French now consider themselves regular consumers, against 61% in 1980.

Wine consumption in French restaurants has slumped by 15-20% in less than a year, according to a survey by the Côtes-du-Rhône wine board.

So concerned is the rival Bordeaux board by the trend that it is providing restaurateurs with discreet "doggy boxes" so that diners can take unfinished bottles home.

"Last year's is truly an excellent vintage, in terms of volume and quality - but all the indicators are on red," said Francois Leveque, a leading Bordeaux wine merchant. Even the reserved René Renou of the INAO institute that controls France's appellation controlée label has spoken of a "looming crisis".

The decline is also reflected in a sudden collapse in the price of vineyards, which around Bordeaux are now selling for about €23,000 (£15,000) per hectare compared with €37,000 in 2002.

Industry insiders say that between 600 and 1,000 mainly small, independent Bordeaux producers are on the verge of bankruptcy.

France's wine industry is more than merelysymbolic: it employs 300,000 people and in 2002 contributed €5.7bn to the balance of payments.

But experts say sales abroad (around 25% of national production is exported) have been hit by quality wines from Australia, California and Chile, which between them planted some 100,000 hectares of new vineyard from 1998 to 2000 - the equivalent of the entire Bordeaux winegrowing area.

French exporters are also finding it hard to compete against powerful global brands with big marketing budgets and low prices.

"They've been engulfed by the competition," said Olivier de la Selle, a Paris wine trade analyst. "Top French vineyards, and regions with a strong commercial drive like Champagne, have so far escaped relatively lightly," Mr de la Selle told Le Monde. "But everyone else is in difficulty.

"And this is just a foretaste of what's to come."

In France, where foreign wines have managed to grab just 2% of the highly patriotic national market, the fall in consumption that began in the 1970s is accelerating fast due mainly, producers say, to recent government health and safety campaigns.

If the French are drinking less in restaurants, they argue, it is largely because the police, at the instigation of the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, have begun to treat drink-driving as a serious offence.

The growers also complain that strict advertising laws in force since 1991 prevent them doing much to reverse the trend.

Both the Bordeaux and Burgundy wine boards have recently been taken to court by the National Association for the Prevention of Alcoholism for advertising campaigns whose slogans included: Let's drink less, but let's drink better.

"We're not against fighting alcoholism," said Xavier Carreau, head of the Great Wines of Bordeaux Federation. "But we ask the authorities to target people's behaviour, not products. How can we be expected to do anything about this decline if we are not allowed to promote the quality of our products?"

The blow to an entire nation's amour-propre comes as evidence emerges from Brussels that if the outside world is no longer quite so enamoured of one prized Gallic icon, another has fallen from favour as well: the French language.

The number of European commission documents written in French fell by 10 percentage points to 29% in 2002, against 57% in English.

In the council of ministers, the record was even worse: just 18% of texts originally appeared in French, down from 42% in 1997.

And the trend will only accelerate as the EU enlarges: 69% of officials from the new member states have chosen English as their preferred main working language, against 18% for German and 13% for French.