France's Agriculture Minister Dominique Bussereau called the European Commission's planned reform of the EU wine market "unacceptable". France, besides Italy and Spain, accounts for the lion's share of EU wine production, and its farmers would be hit hard by commission proposals to scrap lucrative production subsidies. The EU had announced its decision on Thursday. The minister said the decision to remove subsidies such as those for crisis distillation - turning excess wine into ethyl alcohol - was "premature" and that an alternative support system should be put in place first.

He also criticised plans to shift money set aside for supporting wine producers into the more general rural development fund. Digging up vineyards - the commission wants to remove 400,000ha of vines in the next five years - is not the only solution, Bussereau argued.

Bussereau said the commission's proposal was based on an incorrect assessment of the state of the market, and that it "lacked the ambition" that the EU wine industry needed to compete more effectively with New World rivals.

Spain, another major wine producer, has also criticised the plans put forward by EU's Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel. Spain's Agriculture minister José Puxeu said the proposal did not strike the right balance between the major companies selling wine and the smaller farms producing it. He said Spain would not agree to any proposal that reduced its capacity to be the world's biggest wine producer.

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