PARIS — Forget about things improving with age. Some officials here are saying French wine needs to be made more appealing to their not-so-vintage countrymen.

Lawmakers said Wednesday that young people in France need better education on the tradition of wine-drinking, according to a report aimed at getting the country’s storied but struggling wine industry back on track.

Declining consumption at home coupled with a dwindling demand for French wine abroad have pulled the French wine industry into crisis over the past 10 years.

France remains the world’s most wine-thirsty country, the report said, but average consumption per person has dropped from 26 gallons, or about 423 glasses a year in 1970 to 15 gallons, about 234 glasses in 2003.

“To be French is to know wine,” said lawmaker Philippe-Armand Martin, co-author of the report, which advocates educating and courting youth as means to increase consumption.

“That’s not to say baby bottles should be filled with wine,” Martin said, encouraging the steering of young people “toward a moderate consumption of our quality wines.”

Vie Libre, an association of reformed alcoholics, said it was shocked by the report — especially by the idea of bringing a marketing message into schools.

“Vie Libre believes there can be no question of inciting minors to consume a product to which 10 percent of adults have an addictive relationship,” the group said in a statement, adding that it planned to protest to lawmakers, teachers’ unions and parents’ federations.

The report argued that wine, in moderation, can have health benefits. But only 37 percent of French youth aged 17-25 reported liking wine, and 92 percent prefer another alcoholic beverage, the report said.

The lawmakers said young people were forgoing wine’s “health benefits and tasting pleasure” with a desire for higher alcohol content. Martin and co-writer Gerard Voisin, both members of the conservative ruling party UMP, cited a 2005 national survey that linked decreased wine consumption among youths with an increase in drunkenness.

To boost sales overseas, the report proposes an international campaign promoting the “originality and superiority” of French wine. Sales of wines from China, the United States and Australia have inched up in the last 10 years, edging out French producers. In France, a government crackdown on drunken driving in recent years has also hurt sales.

Chronic overproduction has compounded the problem, sending surplus wine to the distillery to be boiled down to pure alcohol. Until last year, so-called “crisis distillations” were only for the cheapest table wines. Last year, quality wines joined the ranks of wine that was distilled.

To try to keep prices steady, the European Union has resorted to paying vintners to destroy billions of bottles each year — the EU distilled 740 million gallons of wine in 2005.

Other recommendations in the report include revamping vintners’ training, simplifying bottle labels, classifying wines by three sweeping categories, and creating two national departments in charge of wine and its exportation.