Even the Spectator seems to be ahead of the French government on understanding this!
cross France this Easter families will gather to eat, drink and, in many cases, smoke drugs. There are five million regular cannabis smokers in France and a further 600,000 who are classified as cocaine addicts.
The number of people who consume wine on a regular basis is just over seven million (11 per cent of the population), a figure that has been in freefall this century.
In the past 60 years the consumption of wine has plummeted in France, from 120 litres per person per year in 1960 to less than 40 litres in 2020. The beret and string of onions round the neck was always an Anglo-Saxon stereotype about our neighbours but not so their love of wine. While we Brits would nurse our pints of stout or bitter, the French would uncork a bottle of red.
The power and wealth of the drug cartels in France has rocketed
No more. In the last ten years the number of regular wine drinkers has fallen by 32 per cent, resulting in brutal ramifications for the major distributors. The sale of Bordeaux wines is down by 35 per cent in the past decade, while it’s 31 per cent for Côtes-du-Rhône and 29 percent for Pays d’Oc red.
Champagne has also gone flat. In 2023 there was a 20 per cent fall in sales, although this was partly attributable to an increase in price, on average 10 to 12 per cent a bottle.
But the decline of wine consumption is a cultural phenomenon which, according to one of France’s leading sociologists, Jerome Fourquet, has had dramatic social and economic consequences. In his 2019 book, L’archipel francais, Fourquet noted that France’s biggest wine region, Languedoc-Roussillon, has lost 43 per cent of its production surface since 1975 because of the dwindling demand for wine. The number of wine cooperatives has fallen from 550 in the 1970s to 200 in 2012. Once the cooperatives were at the heart of communities, along with the church and the rugby club.
It is a diminution that shows no sign of abating. In an interview last October Denis Verdier, the president of a wine federation in Languedoc-Roussillon, said: ‘The crisis is here, but we won’t give up…we must and we will innovate.’
Easier said than done when an increasing proportion of the population doesn’t drink alcohol. Last year this figure was nearly one in five (19 per cent), an increase of 4 percentage points since 2015.
France’s shift has undoubtedly been influenced by immigration this century and the growing number of Muslims. In 1950, for example, there were 230,000 Muslims in France; seventy years later there are 6,635,327.
This is also a significant factor in the rise of cannabis as the drug of choice for the French youth.
Read more
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-french-want-weed-not-wine/
