Swiss wine growers seek to limit European imports

Grape pickers in a vineyard overlooking Lake Geneva in Epesses in the region of Lavaux. Keystone / Valentin Flauraud

Swiss vineyards are pushing for tighter limits on foreign wine as they struggle with falling consumption, foreign competition and questions over quality – a move that could unsettle EU producers, for whom Switzerland is a critical export market.

Several producer groups and the Swiss farmers’ union want to restore a system tying an importer’s right to bring in foreign wine to the volume of Swiss wine it sells – similar to a regime that was in place until 2001.

“Unlike many other agricultural products, we do not have effective border protection for wine,” the union said, adding that foreign bottles entered Switzerland at “very low” prices. “We have beautiful vineyards that we want to preserve. Everyone benefits from a strong Swiss wine industry.”

Swiss wine growers are struggling with overproduction as consumption in the country has fallen almost 20% in two decades, while vineyard area has remained steady.

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Among the EU’s most valuable wine export markets, Switzerland imported about 161 million litres of wine – mainly from France, Italy and Spain – in 2024. Domestic wines hold about a third of market share.

Wine traders and other groups warned that restrictions could provide temporary relief but would not address deeper issues, including declining global alcohol consumption and consumers favouring other types of alcoholic drinks.

Some Swiss producers also struggle to sell because of quality issues – though the 2001 rule change gave local producers an incentive to improve since it opened the domestic sector to more competition. Only about 2% of Swiss wine is exported.

One wine merchant said producers were creating a false sense of crisis. “They say Swiss wine will die if we don’t protect it,” Philipp Schwander said. “This is absolutely not true – like everywhere in Europe, there is overproduction and there are some Swiss producers with wines that are extremely difficult to sell.”

“The share of Swiss wines in wine companies like mine is around 2% or 3% of total sales because the best Swiss producers mostly sell directly to customers,” Schwander said. “If these new rules come in, we would have to close.”

“They want to bring us back to the dark ages where quota systems also allowed bad producers to sell their wines easily without competition,” he added.

The proposal mirrors Switzerland’s meat import regime, which enjoys more protections than wine, and marks the third attempt in a decade to revive quota-linked rules.

Lobbying for fairer competition

Swiss vineyard areas have remained flat in the past two decades. Bordeaux has cut its vineyard surface from 122,000 hectares in 2005 to 94,700ha in 2024 – a drop of roughly 20%.

“Lower-priced foreign wine is not the main problem for most local producers, in our view,” said Olivier Savoy, secretary-general of the Wine Trade Association in Switzerland, which represents traders, retailers, producers and wineries.

“The real issue is that Swiss wine has not articulated its purpose or identity clearly. It has not been marketed with the same conviction as, for example, Swiss chocolate or cheese.”

The national body that represents Swiss wine producers, Vignoble Suisse, has been lobbying to change the rules, along with local vineyard associations. Vignoble Suisse said it wanted to “allow for fairer competition and prevent the resulting loss of market share for our wines”. The wine associations of Vaud and Valais cantons did not respond to a request for comment.

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There could be a parliamentary vote on the issue as soon as the spring, but parliamentarian Benedikt Würth of the Centre Party said he expected any quota proposals to face political resistance.

“Changing market rules I don’t think will have majority support in parliament,” he said.

Würth highlighted that this year’s federal budget already included up to CHF10 million ($12.7 million) to help growers modernise, diversify into new crops and scale back production.

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