By Cláudia Ascensão Nunes

After decades of subsidizing expansion, Brussels is now paying to destroy vineyards, without fixing the distortions it created.

The European Union is paying to uproot vineyards. The new Wine Package, proposed in March 2025 with a provisional agreement reached in December 2025, proposes among several measures, the possibility of using EU funds for the voluntary destruction of productive vines, which represents the most visible sign of a market distortion created by decades of intervention from Brussels.

Successive policies supporting the wine sector progressively disconnected production from market signals. The result was a growing imbalance, marked by persistent surpluses and, later, by subsidies aimed at vineyard removal itself. It is within this context that the European Union now presents the Wine Package, yet another regulation which claims to solve a problem that previous policies helped to create.

When the Common Agricultural Policy was established, it was quickly determined that one of its core objectives would be the protection of farmers, ensuring stable incomes and food security. In the wine sector, this logic translated into strong interventionism aimed at expanding and stabilizing production.

For decades, Brussels subsidized vineyard planting, protected minimum prices, and absorbed producers’ economic risk, disconnecting production decisions from signals of demand. Producing more ceased to be an economic choice and became a politically safe decision.

This approach created a structural market distortion. As wine consumption began to decline across Europe for........

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