French destroy 10,000 bottles of Spanish wine

French wine makers have smashed up 10,000 bottles of wine, claiming competition is just not fair!

In 2022, 26% of all wine consumed in France was imported, mainly from Spain and Morocco, with Cava and Spanish white wines often half the cost of French competitors.
On the 19th October hundreds of French wine growers staged a protest attacking trucks bringing in Spanish wine, destroying 10,000 bottles of the over 800 million bottles that will be imported into France this year.

Frédéric Rouanet, chairman of the Aude Vignerons Association, who led the protest claimed “Let Paris know that the government bears a heavy responsibility for the drop in wine consumption and that they must compensate us accordingly. Starting from today, we are going to remove the possibility of buyers being able to get cheap wines from elsewhere … we are going to stop Spanish imports.”

Spanish bottles sell for just under €1 a litre, compared with over €3 for those produced and sold in southern France according to EurActiv a pan-European media network specialising in EU Agrifood. They also claim France imported 6.5M hectolitres (867 million bottles) of wine. In 2021 France consumed 25 M hectolitres according to OIV. Assuming consumption remained similar in 2022 that equates to 26% of wine sold in France being imported.