Brussels, Dec. 17 - Europe's farm chief offered concessions on Monday in her cherished plan to shake up EU wine policy, yielding ground in some of her more unpalatable ideas in an attempt to persuade key EU countries to sign up to a deal.
The plan, authored by EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel, aims to get rid of unwanted surpluses by paying winemakers to dig up vines in a voluntary scheme -- and so make EU wines more competitive against New World rivals.
Home to some of the most famous wines on the planet, like Burgundy, Chianti and Rioja, the European Union is also the world's top producer, consumer, importer and exporter of wine.
One of the plan's controversial proposals, to ban sugar used in winemaking to boost alcohol content, has now gone -- but countries that use it will have to say so on the bottle's label.
Apart from the labelling requirement, this should please countries like Germany and others in central Europe, like Austria and Hungary, that add sugar to their wines.
That is not yet guaranteed, since Fischer Boel also wants to reduce limits on using sugar or concentrated grape must, which is used in sunnier southern EU countries, for enriching wine.
For months, the EU has split along broad north-south lines over the proposed sugar ban. Sugar is used widely in northern and central European winemaking but banned in Mediterranean regions like Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and southern France.
No agreement on wine reform is expected on Monday, since Fischer Boel will now meet key national delegations later in the evening before drafting a second compromise deal that should be presented to ministers early on Tuesday for further debate.
Initial reactions to the revised plan were, as usual, mixed but drew an angry reaction, for example, from major grape must producer Italy over the backtracking over the sugar ban.
"Italy is very annoyed, while Spain seems more open. Italy was very negative, saying that dropping the sugar ban is discriminatory and skews things in favour of northern countries," one EU official told reporters.
"This (first compromise agreement) is just a start and there's a lot that people are still unhappy about. We're a long way from an agreement, maybe tomorrow," another said.
DISTILLATION
Fischer Boel also yielded to pressure from major wine-making countries like France and agreed to let subsidised distillation continue for awhile, instead of scrapping it straightaway.
Not only does Europe produce too much wine that is not being drunk, it pays out public cash to distil the surplus into industrial alcohol or biofuels. Subsidies for this distillation will now be phased out by 2010/11, with conditions attached.
Fischer Boel granted a couple more years of life for the EU's existing ban on new vine plantings, until 2015, before it gets scrapped. Some countries want to keep the ban for even longer, while others don't want to see it end at all.
Vine planting is strictly controlled in the EU and, with few exceptions, no new plantings are allowed until mid-2010.
Many earlier problem areas have been smoothed over, such as a carrot-and-stick plan to encourage winemakers to dig up vines. Fischer Boel has yielded ground here, reducing the target area to be dug up and the scheme's length from five years to three.