Analysis of the 2007-2008 Hérault premiumized grubbing-up campaign: a tool to better understand Fischer-Boel’s 2008-2011 grubbing-up campaigns and the desire in 2022 to reintroduce locally premiumized grub-ups

The objective of this article is to study the microeconomic motivations of the grubbing up of vines by analyzing of application files and a survey in a department in the south of France, Hérault, the year before the 2008/2009 campaign, which implements the European grubbing up program of 175,000 hectares of vines. Only one French department and one campaign are evaluated: Hérault and 2007/2008. Our originality is the analysis of a subset consisting of 341 Viniflhor applications for grubbing up premiums, which represents 20% of all beneficiaries receiving premiums. The applications were later sent with the applicants’ consent to a development agency. Within this subset, we selected 51 grape growers with whom we conducted a qualitative and quantitative survey. Our goal was to identify their real motivations for grubbing up their vines. We first undertook a historical review of Europe’s grubbing up policy and of older research analyzing in detail this question such Pierre Bartoli’s 1982 thesis. We also included studies of the Observatoire de l’Hérault (Dyopta) that take into account experts’ opinions and statistical viewpoints. This review enables us to present the main indicators that let us “objectively” analyze these grub ups. We then put forward synthesized results explaining the qualitative interviews. Altogether they confirm the goals of the European Commission that were to incite non-profitable older grape growers, working on small land lots to grub up the entirety of their farms. But joined to the aforementioned are many other farms that grubbed up only a small fraction of their vineyards mainly to cash in on the premiums in times of a dire wine crisis. Grubbing ups of young “improving varietals” reinforces this analysis.