There is a development in the current wine crisis that is being talked about surprisingly little. We only need to read the comment sections beneath the relevant articles. There is little sympathy there for winegrowers reporting dramatic falls in sales, full cellars and economic difficulties. Instead, indifference, mockery, occasionally undisguised schadenfreude. And by no means only in some dark corners of the internet. Even beneath articles in mainstream and centre-left media, the tenor is remarkably similar: Then they should just make it cheaper. They’ve earned enough for long enough. We’ll just drink something else.
Anyone who reads these comments for long will come across the reason for the anger fairly quickly. It is the price. Again and again, people recall that a good bottle of wine cost ten or fifteen marks in the days of the Deutschmark (which is true, but is bullshit as an argument). Then the new wineries that have emerged over the past thirty years enter the picture: natural stone, glass façades, tasting rooms, impressive cellars. Alongside them, the Range Rovers and other large cars that successful winegrowers allegedly drive around in, the holidays, the visits to Michelin-starred restaurants. In the eyes of some members of the public, the likeable farmer has become someone who has made himself pretty comfortable with what was originally a simple agricultural product – an elite. And now, when the customers are absent, it is supposedly the customer who should feel sorry for them.
This is remarkable, because ten or fifteen years ago winegrowers were probably the most likeable group within agriculture. They stood for landscape, craftsmanship, enjoyment and a new form of rural self-confidence. In Austria, there was the added factor that modern quality winegrowing emerged largely unburdened by the blood-and-soil romanticism historically attached to the image of the farmer elsewhere. Young winegrowers travelled, studied, discussed soils and biodiversity, worked organically and biodynamically, and opened their farms to visitors. The winegrower almost became a cultural figure. People knew the names, collected vintages, travelled to tastings. Today, beneath reports of the crisis, one reads sentences from urbanites that they would probably also shout after other farmers in difficulties: serves them right. The old urban-rural divide is back.
There is a great deal of economic nonsense behind this. Particularly persistent is the notion that producing a bottle of wine costs five euros at most and that everything above that practically goes into the winegrower’s pocket. In this calculation, everything that can lie between vine and retail price – land, buildings, machinery, staff, hand harvesting, barrels, bottles, energy, storage, financing, distribution, trade, taxes and the risk of an entire harvest – disappears. A €30 wine does not mean that the winegrower earns €25 from it. At the same time, it would be too easy to look for the blame solely with the supposedly clueless consumer. For their second complaint contains a kernel of truth: ‘I used to be interested in wine. But at some point the prices ran away from me. After that, I was no longer interested in the subject’ (a poster on derstandard.at). That is exactly what happened. Particularly at the top end, ambitious prices sometimes became fantasy prices. Bordeaux is the most extreme example, but Germany, Austria and Italy also tested how far the willingness to pay of an euphoric clientele could be pushed. The market allowed it. So they did it.
And then there is the great legend of the discount wine that beat Château Latour in a blind tasting. Stories like these are ideal for wine contempt. Discount wines have in fact become considerably better. Modern cellar technology can now produce clean, fruity, perfectly respectable wines for little money. It does not follow that provenance, ageing potential, craftsmanship and flavour complexity are imaginary. Blind tastings produce surprises, sometimes spectacular ones. To infer from a single result that a six-euro wine is fundamentally as good as a great Bordeaux would be about as serious as declaring, after winning a cup match, that there is no difference in quality between amateur and professional football. Nevertheless, the story fits the resentment perfectly: the experts have no idea, wine journalists even less, and we idiots were supposedly expected to pay for decades for something that – just as well – sits on the discount shelf.
The real problem lies deeper. Wine has lost some of its social legitimacy. Its prices did not merely rise during the boom years; they became a symbol of a world that now itself looks old. The wine connoisseur who lectured about vintages, quoted Parker points and showed off his Bordeaux cellar was once a figure of social advancement. Today, to many younger people, he seems more like someone from another century.
Wine today is probably genuinely a little like the SPD and CDU are at present: a great institution of yesterday that derives from its former importance the assumption that it will naturally still be needed tomorrow. But culture works no more according to the law of inheritance than politics does. The new political radicalisations do not help wine either. Identity there is not created through culinary education or a bottle whose provenance arouses curiosity. One’s own fury is often sufficient as an intoxicant.
For the wine industry, the mockery in the comment sections is therefore more unpleasant than a poor half-year balance sheet. Prices can be corrected. Stock can be reduced. Vineyard acreage can be cut. But regaining lost sympathy is much more difficult. To do so, the industry would first have to accept that the public is under no obligation to find wine wonderful.
The next wine renaissance therefore probably will not begin with a better harvest. Rather, with something that was lost a little during the great hype: the feeling that a good bottle does not have to prove how much we understand about wine. It only has to give us a hell of a lot of pleasure.