« Either we do catastrophism, or we think about new opportunities » – Liberation
For Maxime Toubart, vice-president of the National Committee for Wine Interprofessions (CNIV) and producer of Champagne, this crisis more weakens a sector already affected by the drop in wines in the world. But it must also push the sector to question its resilience, while calling for a collective and European response.
To what extent does this increase in customs taxes threaten the wine and spirits market?
The repercussions is made on the entire sector, but also on related jobs: equipment, machinery, employees, building. There are also those who resell at the end who will be penalized: the importers, the distributors and the American wine merchants will have a business that will tend. Today, no one has to gain what is an economic and commercial conflict. We, traders and producers, need visibility, and for that, it takes commercial agreements and a favorable playground over a long time.
Is this news a serious threat to an already weakened market?
This crisis increases another subject, which is that of the decrease in wine consumption around the world, especially with our historic markets, including France. There are two solutions: either we fall back ourselves and we do catastrophism, or we tell ourselves that it’s time to think about new opportunities. I think there are still many countries that are in its infancy in terms of wine consumption. This is the case of Southeast Asia, South America. What is happening today with the American subject shows the need not to focus just on a few countries. We must not just comment. This crisis must question us about the resilience of the sector and the supply of our products around the world.
How to compensate for the loss of the first foreign market for French wines?
Today, we have no precise solution. You can’t turn around in a month. Creating a commercial relationship with importers, distributors, retaining customers is taking several years. It is not an industrial production in tense flows. I’m going to talk about a sector that I know well, champagne, but it’s worth for all products. We have established our trade around 140 countries today. Clearly, there were 27 million bottles in the United States; We cannot go from 27 to 12 million And to say that we will develop elsewhere. You cannot switch the volumes from one country to another, because there are not necessarily requests. Japanese customers are not going to drink double what they drank before. We therefore call for de -escalation, appeasement and a collective and European response. We must now cool the machine so that we quickly return to our job which is to produce and sell bottles.
