The wine crisis spares no one in Gironde! The entire ecosystem has been faltering for several months now. On the front line, we of course find the wine growers with the implementation of the famous grubbing plans.
But behind this, everyone is suffering, and in particular the cooperative cellars. In Gironde, there are around thirty of them and make up a third of our wine growers. Most of them have existed for almost a century and today, 40% of them are in difficulty according to an estimate from the professional union “Vignerons Cooperateurs”. Several are even close to going out of business.
From around a hundred to around fifteen members in 15 years
This is the case, the emblematic cooperative cellar of Créon. For the first time since its creation in 1936, it did not harvest this year. A sad event. At the foot of this immense concrete building where the paint is crumbling as quickly as the wine crisis is growing, Chantal is nostalgic. But not at all surprised: “It does not surprise me to see this situation since more and more vines are being uprooted and wine growers have not been able to cope for years.”
Inside, it’s dead calm. There is hardly any activity left. Only one employee still watches over the cellar. The good old days seem very far away, as Robert, a member for almost 35 years, explains: “This place is quite a story. It is almost 90 years old. It has provided a living for a lot of people, employees, operators. It’s unfortunate.” In the 2000s, 400 to 500 hectares of vines were still harvested there per year. More than a hundred wine growers would go there. But everything collapsed in the space of 15 years. Last year, there were only around fifteen members left.
Join together to survive in the face of competition?
“Three-quarters of them retire and behind them, there is no one to take over,” adds Robert, fatalistically. The building was therefore recently put up for sale. Only the cellar store is still open three times a week. Creon’s case is not isolated. Many wineries are struggling today. They are on the front line in this crisis for Jérôme Gagnez, taster for 25 years: “They offer wines that are in very turbulent segments. These are wines that can be produced almost anywhere which are not really local wines with a strong identity. They are therefore facing the full brunt of competition from the right, to the left and from abroad.”
To get out of it, they would like to obtain an emergency fund of 75 million euros at national level for the next three years in order to “restructuring cooperative tools in economic underperformance and volume overcapacity”. Stéphane Héraud, the president of the federation of cooperative cellars in New Aquitaine, also calls on them to go through “the regrouping, the gathering”. An obligation so as not to see the thirty Gironde cooperative cellars closed one by one in the coming years.
