(Manfred Klimek / Editorial team / animated pic: runwayml)
For the first time ever, France is drinking more beer than wine. Bam! A statement that, just twenty years ago, would have sounded like a far-fetched, irrational and culturally pessimistic theory is now suddenly a sober statistical fact. What is truly astonishing, however, is not the success of beer, but the decline of everyday wine.
For emotionally, France remains a wine-loving country. Almost every French person still regards wine as part of their national identity. The major wine regions continue to enjoy world fame, top-quality wines fetch record prices, and Burgundy and Champagne are, in some respects, more sought-after internationally than ever. And yet, wine is disappearing from everyday life.
Red wine, in particular.
The glass with lunch, the carafe in the evening, the simple table wine with a snack or a piece of cheese – it is precisely this culture that is currently dying out. Not abruptly, but slowly. Almost silently. And with it, the social heart of viticulture – upon which everything was built for centuries – is disappearing.
This development is hitting Bordeaux particularly hard.
For the people of Bordeaux have made a mistake that is now coming back to haunt them. Or, to be more precise: two mistakes. The top châteaux – including smaller ones that had long been affordable – have become increasingly unaffordable for ordinary consumers. Over the decades, the great Bordeaux wines have transformed from ambitious everyday wines into global luxury items for fund managers, collectors and speculators. Economically speaking, there is little to object to – the demand was there, the market paid the price, and created scope for money and investment. Yet at the same time, Bordeaux lost its cultural roots in everyday life. The region became emotionally detached from the middle class that had once made it great.
And all too often, what remained was a sea of insipid, technically over-processed, industrial-tasting and mass-produced Bordeaux wines. That is precisely where the real problem lies. For the majority of Bordeaux winegrowers do not produce Premier Grand Crus, but rather simple wines. Over the years, many of these have lost all sense of charm, juiciness or drinkability. Over-extraction, too much oak, green tannins, uninspired winemaking techniques and an almost bureaucratic notion of quality turned countless affordable Bordeaux into wines that, whilst technically correct, seemed uninspiring.
French consumers (and not only them) eventually reacted with indifference.
This is the real tragedy of the Bordeaux region: it became both too expensive and too boring. Today’s consumer is perfectly willing to accept high prices – provided they recognise emotion, character or something special. What they are increasingly unwilling to accept are interchangeable wines with grand historical pretensions but little immediate pleasure in the glass. This is precisely why regions that were once regarded as secondary now often fare better: the Loire, Etna, parts of Spain, and even the new wine regions of Eastern Europe.
It is interesting to note that the decline in red wine consumption is by no means equally pronounced everywhere – if it is occurring at all. In many Eastern European countries, wine – particularly red wine – remains deeply embedded in everyday life. In parts of Latin America, too, the trend looks completely different. There, wine often still retains, for the most part, that social normality which Western Europe is currently losing. It is drunk in a less ideological, less ritualised and often less guilt-ridden manner. This plays an enormous role, because in recent years Western Europe has overburdened wine with debates about: health, morality, alcohol policy, identity and social codes. Beer has so far managed to escape these debates more easily. It comes across as more relaxed, less complicated and more immediate. That is precisely why it is regaining ground, particularly amongst younger consumers.
The wine industry itself bears some of the blame for this. For decades, attempts were made to make wine simultaneously more luxurious, more academic and subject to more rules. Tasting rituals, scoring systems, technical jargon, collector’s prices, limited allocations – whilst all this increased its prestige, it increasingly distanced wine from the everyday lives of ordinary people.
And it was precisely this everyday nature that had been its real strength for centuries.
For Europe’s great wine-producing nations never relied primarily on iconic bottles. They thrived on millions of simple, honest table wines. On red wine in glass carafes. From village pubs. From lunch tables. From workers, farmers, craftsmen and ordinary people who didn’t analyse wine, but simply drank it. This world is currently disappearing.
However, this does not automatically mean the demise of wine. A profound transformation is more likely. Wine is becoming rarer, more consciously consumed, of higher quality and, at the same time, increasingly a cultural and luxury product. The vast quantities of simple red wines that characterised Europe for decades, on the other hand, will continue to dwindle. France is simply experiencing this change earlier and more visibly than others. Perhaps even more dramatically, because no other country has linked its identity so closely to red wine.