French wine makers destroy Spanish wine in protest over cheap imports

French winemakers today intercepted trucks carrying cheap Spanish booze and smashed crate-loads of it all over the road. Le Boulou tollbooth, just ten miles from France’s border with Spain , was turned into a battleground this morning when dozens of protesting winemakers halted lorries and tore into their contents. They destroyed several wine shipments, smashing the bottles and pouring the red booze all over the tarmac in a vintage demonstration of the French public’s penchant for demonstrating against perceived injustices.

Countless liters of white wine and bubbly were also wasted, with shocking images from the scene depicting crates upon crates of bottles littering the scene. One enraged grape grower leaped onto a truck with a sledgehammer, violently swinging the tool at boxes of vino, while others flicked open the tap on one lorry, unleashing a torrent of red that soaked the road. Another group of demonstrators piled up crates of tomatoes and tires to make an impromptu bonfire.

Frederic Rouanet, the president of a local syndicate of winemakers who organized the protest, said the demonstration comes as part of the ‘economic war against economic criminals who abuse ruined winegrowers’, before adding: ‘We are going to take away the possibility of being able to import foreign wines.’ It remains to be seen whether Rouanet’s wine-soaked manifesto will be realized, but for now,  the repercussions for the protest seem minimal, as the disgruntled grape growers were mostly left alone by police, according to French newspaper Vitisphere. In videos posted on X, protesters can be seen tumbling over a mountain of crates carrying Freixenet wine.

Many of the crates had been upended so their valued contents spilled out across the road. Bottles upon bottles of bubbly were seen rolling around amid a sea of broken glass and wasted booze. The protesters then took the splintered remains of the crates and added them to a pile of hundreds of cardboard boxes containing Spanish tomatoes, before lighting the whole lot on fire. Some threw yet more boxes into the flames, while others somehow procured a batch of tires, whose rubber whipped up a serious blaze that trailed thick plumes of black smoke into the sky. A pair of firetrucks later descended on the scene to quell the inferno.

Before the protest escalated, a delegation from winegrowers of different local syndicates and trade unions met to discuss the cheap Spanish imports that threatened to put French winemakers out of business. This fiery demonstration was launched just two months after French media reported in August that the government is set to pour away millions of liters of wine – and will even rip up vineyards. The move comes as part of a bid to reverse tumbling prices amid falling sales. Production of wine has continued to rise in France, leading to a glut of unsold wine that has in turn caused prices to dip. Major wine-producing regions, particularly the famed Bordeaux area of France, are struggling.

The French government has announced a £170 million($207 million) plan to buy up huge quantities of the excess, which will be destroyed. The alcohol content will be recycled to make hand sanitizer, cleaning products,  or perfume. French agriculture minister Marc Fesneau said the fund was ‘aimed at stopping prices collapsing and so that wine-makers can find sources of revenue again’. But he stressed that the industry needed to ‘look to the future, think about consumer changes… and adapt’.

Figures from the European Commission say wine consumption for the current year is estimated to have fallen 15 percent in France, 7 percent in Italy, 10 percent in Spain, and a staggering 34 percent in Portugal. However, production in the EU has risen by 4 percent. The commission said the worst affected areas were those producing reds and rosés from regions of France, Spain, and Portugal. Given this stunning market saturation, Spanish importers are trying to beat their French competition by offering cheaper prices, threatening the livelihoods of many French winemakers.

But this is not the first time French winegrowers made a statement against cheap imports by destroying wine. French producers have been furious that their traditional rivals in Spain – and also Italy – are exporting hundreds of millions of liters of cut-price wine that threaten their livelihoods for years. Dozens took to the roads at Le Boulou in 2016, stopping Spanish tankers and then emptying their wine onto the roads in a very similar protest.

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