European health organisations are powerless against the wine lobby

In alcohol policy, the influence of prominent global producers such as Heineken, AB InBev, Carlsberg, Diageo, and Pernod Ricard is well recognised and discussed. The wine industry is configured differently, with fewer major producers and well-known brands but collectively the industry is no less influential than the beer and spirits sector, as has been made clear by developments in the EU in 2025. 

The EU Wine Package has provided considerable financial support to the wine industry and has also allowed industry influence over alcohol labelling policy. Alcohol product labelling was a key initiative in ‘Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan’ (EBCP) of Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission (1). Parts of EBCP were challenged by the alcohol industry including the wine sector.

To implement the 10-year plan, von der Leyen made a one-off budget of 4 billion euros available to DG SANTE, the Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety of the European Commission to reduce harm from alcohol (2). However, at the same time the wine sector received an annual amount of 1 billion euros from DG AGRI, the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development to help produce and sell their product, which DG AGRI views primarily as an agricultural product (3).

So the situation was of two budgets from two Directorates-General, pulling in different directions.

Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan

In 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the European EVID-ACTION project, co-funded by the European Union (4). It linked to the Cancer Plan and focused on all EU Member States, plus Iceland, Norway, and Ukraine. One of the project’s aims was to communicate knowledge about alcohol and cancer. The EBCP incorporated key objectives from the existing WHO alcohol policy and the EVID-ACTION plan. These included revising alcohol marketing and excise policies in the EU, and introducing mandatory alcohol labelling. On labelling, this was initially with regard to nutritional value and ingredients, and at a later stage the health risks (cancer, cardiovascular diseases)

As has been widely reported, many EBCP proposals were cancelled by the European Commission in the run-up to the 2024 European elections (5). Among other things, the intention to require mandatory information about health risks on alcohol labels was abandoned. However, policy related to wine continued to progress with the launch of the High Level Group for the EU wine sector in September 2024, which was tasked with analysing the challenges for the wine industry and developing policy to support the sector (6). 

The wine sector used this opportunity to progress their own favoured version of alcohol labelling which was very different from the ambitions in the Beating Cancer Plan and those of health organisations. In general, the resulting EU Wine Package was a plan with very different objectives to von der Leyen’s Beating Cancer Plan and very different ideas from WHO Europe’s EVID- ACTION project.

Wine Package

On 04 December, 2025, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union reached a provisional agreement on the new Wine Package, with which the European Commission aims to support the wine sector. This agreement still needs to be approved by both the European Parliament and the European Council before the new rules can take effect.

The core of the package is that additional funding will be made available to the wine sector to adapt production to market developments such as declining demand, overproduction, and demand for non-alcoholic beverages. Funds will also be made available to stimulate the promotion of EU wine globally.

Agreement was reached on the designation of de-alcoholised wines. Wines with a maximum of 0.05% alcohol may be sold as 0.0 wine, and those with a maximum of 0.5% alcohol may be sold as alcohol-free wine. The wine sector’s lobbying for the right to call de-alcoholised wines up to 6% alcohol “low-alcohol” was quite rightly rejected. It was agreed that these may be called “reduced-alcohol wines.”

Health organisations sidelined

Importantly, the Wine Package maintained the current situation that nutritional information and ingredients do not need to be included on wine labels, unlike almost all other products in stores. The wine industry had long argued that a QR code on the label, which consumers could scan and be directed to a website was preferable to written information on the product. Health organisations viewed QR codes as, in practice, a barrier to informing consumers and studies showed that few consumers scanned the codes (6 out of 7,079 people in fact). Health organisations and academics were not part of the discussions on the wine package (7) and the wine producers got their wish.

Public health organisations explicitly expressed their objections to the package to members of the European Parliament via emails and press releases. They pointed out the significant health damage with around 800,000 people dying annually in Europe as a result of alcohol consumption (8) and the costs to EU countries resulting from alcohol consumption, while the wine sector receives over 1 billion euros in subsidies from the EU annually. The European Alcohol Policy Alliance (EUROCARE) and the NGO Movendi International stated in their responses that wine is not a food product and therefore should not be promoted with taxpayers’ money (9,10).

The wine sector, on the other hand, did not address the concerns directly but defended its importance in familiar style saying: “Wine is tradition, a cultural cornerstone, it represents moderation and conviviality, and is part of the art of living in many cultures. The socio-economic significance of vineyards and wine production in rural areas is undeniable” (11).

In short, when it comes to the wine sector, Europe is choosing economic interests at the expense of the health of its citizens. Thanks to the tax contributions of the Europeans, European wine producers are provided with grants to maintain their industry.

For the European Commission, wine is primarily an agricultural product.

Paul Hallman, a German master’s student has conducted an impressive thesis (5) in which he analyses the political process behind the Wine Package. He interviewed several people directly involved in this process. This statement from a DG AGRI employee offers an important insight into the attitudes which the wine industry benefits from. “Wine is essentially an agricultural product; it is not an alcoholic beverage made from an agricultural product.”

The master’s thesis indicates that nowhere in the world is as much wine produced and consumed as in Europe. Italy is the largest producer, followed by France and Spain. In 2024, this amounted to an estimated 139 million hectolitres, worth roughly 100 billion euros (12).

One of the Hallman’s conclusions is that the agricultural interests of the EU Member States are primarily shaped from Brussels, and that Member States have limited leeway to shape their own agricultural policies. This differs greatly from the way health policy is shaped in Europe, which is primarily determined and implemented at the national level (13). EU Taxation regulations allow countries to have zero excise duties on wine, the only alcohol product category where this is permitted. All EU countries have excise duties on beer and spirits but 15 of 27 EU member states do not levy excise duties on wine. This widespread exemption from wine taxes is despite the WHO view that levying excise duties on alcohol is the most effective measure to curb alcohol problems (14).

In summary, the above analysis demonstrates once again that at the European level, the interests of public health are being overshadowed by the economic interests of the alcohol industry, with different sectors of the industry exploiting different opportunities. The European wine industry has so far successfully defended its image as an indispensable cultural product and this has allowed the industry exceptional privileges. The task for health organisations is to challenge this “wine exceptionalism” and ensure that wine is treated no differently than beer and spirits in alcohol policy.

Written by Wim van Dalen, Director of the Netherlands Institute for Alcohol Policy, STAP and Project Leader of EUCAM, the European Centre for Monitoring Alcohol Marketing.

All IAS Blogposts are published with the permission of the author. The views expressed are solely the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute of Alcohol Studies.