Poor reporting on the reform of the European's farming subsidy framework led Italians to worry unnecessarily about how much water the EU will be putting in their cherished national wines. If you happened to watch the football Euros this summer, you may have noticed that the prize for the most valuable player (MVP) after each match was sponsored by the alcohol-free product of a world-famous beer brand. The choice of promoting a non-alcoholic beer in such a big event shows how much consumer demand for drinks with a lower alcoholic strength has been increasing in recent years. The annual production volume of non-alcoholic beer in Germany rose from roughly 200 million litres in 2005 to more than 400 million litres in 2020, according to Statista, a company specialised in market and consumer data. The alcohol-free segment is becoming an important market opportunity as well for the wine sector, which has not yet developed many products of this kind. When presenting its reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2018, the Commission proposed the possibility that certain European wine specialities - protected with the PDO (protected designation of origin) and PGI (protected geographical indication) - could be totally or partially de-alcoholised. “Our motivation was to create new business opportunities for our wine producers because there is a growing market for such wines, partly motivated by health nutrition concerns, but also driving requirements,” the deputy director-general of the Commission's DG AGRI, Michael Scannell, told EURACTIV in a recent press conference. Thoughts might turn also to the penetration in markets where alcohol consumption is forbidden on religious grounds, although we do not have to go that far: another poll by Statista says that nearly 20% of Dutch respondents between the ages of 25-39 drank alcohol-free wine sometimes in 2018. However, the proposal in the CAP reform brewed up trouble in the member state that accounts for one-third of the total PDO-PGI wines registered in the EU's database e-Ambrosia - 526 out of 1610 wines protected in the bloc. Once the proposal started bouncing on the mainstream media outlets, anger in Italy bubbled over. Believe it or not, most people understood that the EU was somehow planning to partially or completely remove alcohol by adding water to their beloved wines. It all started with press releases from farmers organisation Colideretti that were entirely transposed - and misinterpreted by readers - in a one-sided article that appeared in the country's leading economic newspaper. I realised the issue had snowballed since the publication of that article when I was contacted by the Italian public service broadcast to explain in a radio show what was happening and reassure listeners about something that never happened. Of course, anti-EU parties jumped on the wagon of the de-alcoholised wine debate to dig up dirt on the bloc and sensationalise the topic even further. It didn't help that it was accompanied by a reference to a popular folk song in Roman dialect which says that if the innkeeper pours water into wine, customers will sing to him 'you put the water in, we are not going to pay you out'. It left specialised journalists fighting a piece of fake news created and spread by the same mainstream press. In May, a group of MEPs, led by no less than former European Parliament President, Antonio Tajani, asked the Commission in a parliamentary question whether de-alcoholised beverages, since they are different from wine, should be renamed so that consumers are not misled. The Commission replied by saying that the decision rests with the EU lawmakers - the European Parliament and the Council - specifying that in the interinstitutional discussions, they agreed to consider de-alcoholised and partially de-alcoholised wines as wine products but that they required specific labelling for such products. But again, in answering MEPs questions, Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski had to reassure Italians that not only did the CAP provisional agreement not allow the addition of water during the de-alcoholisation process, but even the original proposal did not include any reference to water addition. “We’re very mindful of ensuring that we don't damage the reputation of our wines,” said the Commission's Scannell, adding that there would be very strict conditions applying to the technical requirements governing such wines. The Commission will also set down conditions to apply to those wines in the future through secondary legislation, such as implementing and delegated acts. “Essentially, we're getting, very carefully, the balance right between creating a new business opportunity without compromising the excellent reputation and interests of existing producers,” said Scannell. The risk of inaction here is to allow companies that had nothing to do with wines enter a promising market, while traditional wine producers risk being marginalised for not having joined the race, which would certainly be something for the sector to w(h)ine about. |