The summer now ending will serve as a warning: heatwaves, drought, scorching, hailstorms, and the giant fire that saw 42,000 hectares of Gironde forest burned have given climate risk a very palpable reality. We know it: it will demand adaptive cultivation practices, innovation and investment. At the same time, Bordeaux is facing a very deep market crisis: de-consumption, flagging exports, crushed prices, rising stocks, raw cash flow. The courts are recording record numbers of legal proceedings and vines are being pulled up. Since 2010, the Gironde has lost a quarter of its vineyard area.
The injunctions to the players in the wine industry go round in circles: “adapt!”; “produce differently”; “cut your costs”; “find new consumers”; “export”; “open your cellars to wine tourism”, and so on.
Very well. But they would also need to be allowed simply to get on with their trade, because for the moment they are submerged in a sea of paper. They are asked to be more agile while being weighed down with ever-heavier standards.
The administrative straitjacket has a cost
The State itself concedes it: the industry is “over-administered”. The Senate has counted 86 potential declarations and 54 portals, and estimates that a winegrower loses nine hours a week to them (more than a working day) in harvest, stock, movement, planting, grubbing-up and enrichment declarations, the traceability register, calculation of excise duties, VAT on en primeur deposits, export formalities, specifications, approval, labelling, nutritional QR codes, packaging, employment law, safety, environment, GDPR, and so on. Our readers know the list and suffer from it to the point of suffocation.
This over-administration has a cost. It is paid for in experts’ fees, in service providers, in software, in time lost in front of an online service. It is also paid for in delayed decisions, in moral exhaustion and sometimes in human despair.
For while a large group can absorb the standard, the same cannot be said of a small business, where the same man prunes, vinifies, sells, hires and files declarations.
The rule must serve the activity
Let there be no misunderstanding: it is not a question of abolishing the rule. We are pleading here for a useful rule. Wine needs it and our appellations contrôlées are largely its product. It is good when it protects the consumer, the producer and the employee, and when it leads a sector towards greater efficiency.
The French administrative reflex has long been diagnosed. For an identified problem, its iron rule. Then a clarification. Then an exception. Then a declaration to verify the exception. And an inspection to finish.
Aware of the problem, our leaders regularly call for “simplification”, but this almost always ends in replacing a paper with a screen, and for the “user” a digital Cerfa form is sometimes more paralysing than a paper Cerfa.
Lightening the load must become a discipline and common sense a line of reform. Measure the cost of an obligation before imposing it. Erase the one that duplicates. Assess risk situations first before imposing the same procedure on thousands of operators. And why not go all the way? When a rule no longer has any demonstrable usefulness, abolish it.
