/ Strategy
Many wineries do not realize that export prospecting, agency fees, and outreach setup can be co-funded by EU wine promotion grants. Here is the plain-English version.
/ The short version
Here is something a surprising number of European producers never find out: a large chunk of what you spend reaching foreign importers can be paid for by someone else. Not a loan, not a tax trick, but co-funding designed specifically to help wineries sell abroad. The reason most estates miss it is simple. The programs are wrapped in bureaucratic language and administered by bodies that do not exactly market themselves. So let us strip it back to what matters.
Across the EU there is a long-running wine promotion scheme, part of what is called the Common Market Organization, or OCM. Its whole purpose is to make European wine more competitive in markets outside the EU. It co-funds promotional work in those markets, and historically the headline rate has been up to half the eligible cost. Each country runs its own version. In France it is administered by FranceAgriMer under the "promotion in third countries" program. Italy and Spain run their own national calls under the same EU umbrella.
There is important news here for 2026. Faced with a wine sector under real pressure, the EU adopted a reform package in early 2026 that, among other things, lifted the co-funding ceiling for third-country promotion. The EU share can now reach up to sixty percent of eligible cost, member states are allowed to add national funding on top, and the combined public contribution can run as high as eighty percent in some cases. The same reform lengthened how long a project can be supported, to three years and renewable. In plain terms, the scheme just became more generous at exactly the moment exporters needed it. A note of realism: national calls already published for the current campaign were built on the older fifty percent rate, so what you can actually claim depends on which call you apply to and when, and the higher ceilings flow through as countries update their programs. Check the live figure for your country before you budget around it.
This is not a token gesture. France's most recent annual third-country call ran to an envelope of around eighty million euros. Italy's equivalent national call was larger still, comfortably into the high tens of millions, with a sizeable cap per project. These are real pots of money, distributed every year, and a meaningful share goes unclaimed by smaller estates simply because they never apply.
The scheme covers promotion in non-EU markets only. That means the United States, the UK (now outside the EU), Switzerland, Japan, Korea, China, and so on all qualify. Selling within the EU, to Germany or the Netherlands for instance, falls under different rules. So the grant fits export ambitions aimed beyond Europe's borders, which is exactly where the biggest opportunities tend to be.
This is the part that should make you sit up. Eligible activities are broad. They typically include trade fair stands, tastings, public relations, advertising, inviting importers and journalists to visit your estate, market studies for a new country, and the market prospecting and digital outreach that finds new buyers. In other words, the work of building an importer pipeline in a foreign market, the cold outreach, the campaign setup, the prospecting, is frequently the kind of cost these grants are meant to cover.
Not a loan, not a tax trick, but co-funding designed specifically to help wineries sell abroad.
That is worth pausing on. The done-for-you outreach a service like ours runs to connect you with importers abroad is, for many producers, exactly the category of eligible promotional spend. A large share of it, potentially, refundable.
Be realistic: the paperwork is real. Applications run on annual deadlines, you usually build a project per target country, projects span multiple years, and you generally pay first and are reimbursed against proof of spend, so cash flow matters. The smoothest path for a small estate is rarely going it alone. Many producers apply through their interprofession or a collective body, which can bundle smaller estates into a single stronger application, or lean on an advisor who handles these files for a living. Your regional chamber of commerce or wine council is the right first call.
We are not grant consultants, and the rules shift year to year, never more than right now with the 2026 reform bedding in, so anything specific needs checking against the current national call. But the principle is solid and the money is real. Before you treat your export budget as money you have to find yourself, find out how much of it the system was already willing to pay.