(Manfred Klimek / Editorial team / animated pic: runwayml)
For the first time, France is drinking more beer than wine. Bang! A sentence that, just twenty years ago, would have sounded like a far-fetched, irrational culture-pessimistic thesis is now suddenly there as a sober statistic. But the truly astonishing thing is not the success of beer. It is the decline of everyday wine.
Because France remains emotionally a wine country. Almost every French person still regards wine as part of the national identity. The great regions continue to enjoy worldwide fame, the top wines command record prices, and Burgundy and Champagne sometimes seem more sought-after internationally than ever. And yet wine is disappearing from everyday life.
Red wine above all.
The glass with lunch, the carafe in the evening, the simple table wine with a snack or a piece of cheese – this is precisely the culture that is currently dying out. Not abruptly, but slowly. Almost silently. And with it, that social middle ground of winegrowing on which everything was built for centuries is disappearing.
This development is hitting Bordeaux particularly brutally.
Because the Bordelais made a mistake that is now coming back to haunt it. Or, more precisely, two mistakes. The top châteaux, including smaller châteaux that were affordable for a long time, became increasingly unaffordable for ordinary consumers. Over the decades, great Bordeaux wines were transformed from ambitious wines for the bourgeoisie into global luxury objects for fund managers, collectors and speculators. There is little to object to economically – the demand was there, the market paid, and created room for money and investment. But at the same time, Bordeaux thereby lost its cultural roots in everyday life. The region became emotionally distanced from the middle class that had once made it great.
And beneath that, too often, a sea of unremarkable, technically overworked, industrial-looking and industrial Bordeaux wines was left behind. That is where the real problem lies. For the majority of Bordeaux winegrowers do not produce Premier Grand Crus, but simple wines. Over the years, many of them lost every trace of charm, juiciness or drinkability. Over-extraction, too much oak, green tannins, unimaginative cellar techniques and an almost bureaucratic concept of quality turned countless inexpensive Bordeaux wines into wines that were correct, but unappealing.
At some point, French consumers – and not only they – reacted with indifference.
That is the real tragedy of the Bordelais: the region became both too expensive and too boring. Today’s consumer is perfectly willing to accept high prices – if they recognise emotion, character or something distinctive. What they are increasingly unwilling to accept are interchangeable wines with a grand historical gesture and little immediate pleasure in the glass. That is precisely why regions that were once regarded as sideshows often perform better today: the Loire, Etna, parts of Spain, and even the new wine regions of Eastern Europe.
What is interesting here is that the decline in red wine consumption is by no means taking place with equal intensity everywhere – if it is happening at all. In many Eastern European countries, wine – and red wine in particular – remains deeply rooted in everyday life. In parts of Latin America too, the development looks completely different. There, wine often still possesses, for the most part, the social self-evidence that Western Europe is currently losing. People drink it less ideologically, less ritualistically and often with less guilt. That plays an enormous role, because in recent years Western Europe has burdened wine with debates about health, morality, alcohol policy, identity and social codes. Beer has so far escaped these debates more easily. It seems more relaxed, uncomplicated and immediate. That is precisely why it is currently winning back ground among younger consumers.
The wine industry itself bears some of the blame. For decades, people tried to make wine simultaneously more luxurious, more academic and more heavily regulated. Tasting rituals, scoring systems, technical language, collector prices and limited allocations – all of this increased prestige, but increasingly distanced wine from the everyday lives of ordinary people.
And that everyday life was its true strength for centuries.
For Europe’s great wine countries never lived primarily from icon bottles. They lived from millions of simple, honest table wines. From red wine in glass carafes. From village inns. From lunch tables. From workers, farmers, tradespeople and small members of the middle class who did not explain wine, but drank it. This world is now disappearing.
However, this does not automatically mean the end of wine. A profound transformation is more likely. Wine will become rarer, more deliberate, higher-quality and, at the same time, more strongly a cultural and luxury product. The vast quantities of simple red wines that defined Europe for decades, by contrast, will continue to shrink. France is experiencing this transformation earlier and more visibly than others. Perhaps more brutally too, because no other country has linked its identity so closely with red wine.