(Claude Auguste is a South Tyrolean lawyer in Verona – and also studied constitutional law)
In 1975, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died. The year before, Portugal had overcome its authoritarian past with the Carnation Revolution, while Greece had ended the rule of the colonels. In the same decade, a small oenological revolution began in my Italian homeland, whose significance for the global economy and cultural history could scarcely be appreciated by anyone at the time. A number of Tuscan wine producers had decided to disregard the legal and stylistic conventions of their origins and to make wines according to their own ideas. In doing so, they established a new category of great Italian red wines, which would later achieve international fame under the designation Supertuscans.
Sassicaia, whose first commercially marketed vintage was 1968, and the 1971 vintage of Tignanello were also expressions of a changing social self-understanding. Within a few decades, Italy had developed from a predominantly agricultural, and in parts bitterly poor, country into one of the most important industrial nations in the West. Its fashion, design, architecture and automobiles gained international renown. Now wine followed.
In 1976, the British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organised that legendary blind tasting in Paris at which Californian wines triumphed over some of France’s most renowned wines. The Judgment of Paris has since become the subject of books, films and numerous oenological legends. Its true significance, however, lay less in the rankings of the individual wines than in the disempowerment of a cultural authority that had until then remained largely unchallenged. From that point onwards, the origins of great wines no longer had to be legitimised by centuries of European history. A wine producer from California could compete on equal terms with the owner of a French château. For the history of wine, the 1970s were therefore of a significance comparable to that of the history of modern democracy. Established hierarchies lost their binding force, social and economic opportunities for advancement expanded, and the legitimacy of authority increasingly had to be earned through performance.
I do not wish to overstate the connection between these developments. History knows of enough well-meaning historians who have tried to derive a causal connection between two events from their occurring at the same time. Yet it is worth considering the development of international wine production over the past half-century from political and constitutional perspectives as well.
For modern wine is to a considerable extent a product of the liberal world order. This does not mean that democracy invented great wine. The history of European quality wine owes an extraordinary amount to monasteries, the aristocracy and monarchical social orders. The development of Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Rheingau would scarcely be conceivable without ecclesiastical and aristocratic land ownership. Europe’s ruling houses possessed a considerable appetite for good wines, and even distinctly unpleasant monarchs could have excellent taste.
What changed in the second half of the twentieth century was the social accessibility of this culture. For centuries, significant wine had been a privilege. It formed part of the representational inventory of the powerful, and later also of the self-image of the prosperous middle classes. The liberal societies of the post-war period, by contrast, created an ever-expanding middle class that could work its way towards access to the luxuries of the formerly ruling classes. Good education, professional advancement, rising incomes, international mobility and the gradual reduction of working hours opened up opportunities for millions of people that had remained closed to their parents and grandparents.
They travelled to France and Italy, learned about the regional cuisines, brought a few bottles of wine home and began to take an interest in their origins. An occasional purchase developed into a passion. That passion, in turn, gave rise to a market that had not previously existed in this form.
The social standing of the winegrower also changed. Winemakers, whose work had been regarded as an agricultural activity for generations, advanced to become entrepreneurs, internationally respected specialists and occasionally even artists. Their individual interpretation of a landscape suddenly interested people on other continents. Female and male winemakers were invited to tastings in London, New York, Tokyo and later Hong Kong. Their wines were discussed in magazines, their views sought in interviews and their business decisions closely followed. What a remarkable career this profession has had within just a few decades!
The culmination of this development began after 1989. With the collapse of European communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the increasing integration of Asian economies into world trade, a promise of security and prosperity of historic proportions emerged. The liberal West had prevailed through its economic performance. Numerous formerly socialist states sought political and economic integration into Europe. Since the end of the 1970s, communist-ruled China had been pursuing an increasingly market-oriented economy and joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The notion that the political systems of these countries would also eventually liberalise proved, as we know today, considerably premature. Economic openness and political freedom are two very different matters. At the time, however, there was an optimism that even those who understood little of political theories and were primarily interested in the development of their businesses could not escape. This optimism was toasted with champagne and wine.
In the restaurants of London and Frankfurt, in the newly opened luxury hotels of Eastern Europe, in the boardrooms of New York and in the private clubs of Shanghai and Hong Kong, the successes of globalisation were celebrated with Europe’s and America’s finest wines. Bordeaux acquired the status of a cultural currency in parts of Asia. The great Champagne houses expanded, Italian wines established themselves on international wine lists, and even small family estates that had remained largely unknown outside their regions for decades gained access to customer bases overseas. The cultural beverage had become a cult beverage.
The wine benefited from a particular characteristic. It had an origin, a history and a personality. In an economy whose products were becoming increasingly standardised, whose companies sold the same goods under the same brands worldwide, the geographical and gustatory uniqueness of an agricultural product of all things developed into a considerable economic advantage.
Globalisation enabled the worldwide marketing of the local. A winegrower from Piedmont did not have to leave his homeland to achieve economic success in San Francisco or Singapore. He did not even have to increase his production volume significantly. Under favourable circumstances, it was enough to improve his wine and adjust its price accordingly.
Especially today, one should not underestimate this achievement of the liberal world economy. It enabled numerous farming families to retain their landholdings, renovate their historic buildings, invest in their children’s education and remain in regions that would otherwise have been affected by emigration and economic decline.
As a wine enthusiast and lawyer, I am naturally also interested in the legal preconditions of this development. A vineyard is a long-term investment whose profitability depends on legal and political circumstances that the owner can influence only to a limited extent. Anyone planting vines today must be able to trust that they or their descendants will be able to benefit from the fruits of this labour in thirty, forty or fifty years.
Security of ownership, reliable inheritance rules, freedom of contract, independent courts and a certain degree of predictability in state action are of considerable importance to this profession. In addition, there are the possibilities offered by the free movement of goods, international cooperation and the unhindered exchange of scientific knowledge. A liberal democracy does not guarantee excellent wines. But it can create outstanding conditions for their production and economic existence.
It is therefore striking that the overwhelming majority of global wine production today takes place in states organised democratically. Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Austria, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile and South Africa constitute a substantial part of the international wine economy. In 2025 alone, the European Union accounted for around sixty per cent of global wine production.
Admittedly, this geographical distribution also has climatic, historical and religious causes. There are outstanding wines from politically unfree countries, and over the past few decades China has made considerable efforts to establish its own quality wine industry. The rise of Chilean viticulture also began in part under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Economic success is by no means ruled out under authoritarian governments. The claim that only free people could make good wine would be historically untenable and, from an oenological perspective, somewhat daring—but it cannot be dismissed entirely.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the extraordinary diversity of today’s wine world is particularly closely connected with the liberal model. A functioning wine market depends on individual decisions, different tastes, competing convictions and the possibility of departing from established views. It requires a critical public sphere, independent writers, adventurous restaurateurs and consumers who allow themselves to form their own judgements. The Supertuscans, after all, also came into being because some people did not want to follow the views of the authorities responsible for them.
Today we are witnessing a development that gives some cause for concern. Liberal democracy and the international wine economy are coming under pressure at the same time. Both are losing their status as social self-evidences, and both are confronted with the erosion of those economic and cultural conditions that had enabled their rise. In its democracy report for 2026, the Swedish V-Dem Institute identified a total of 44 states in which processes of autocratisation are taking place. Only 18 states were moving towards further democratisation. According to the institute’s calculations, the average level of democratic freedom, measured across the world’s population, has now returned to the level of the late 1970s. The very period, that is, in which modern international wine culture began its rise.
Meanwhile, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine reports estimated global wine consumption of 208 million hectolitres for 2025. The global vineyard area contracted for the sixth consecutive year. International wine trade also declined in both volume and value.
It would be unserious to infer an immediate causal connection from these two statistical developments. The wine economy is being affected by climatic change, demographic developments, changing consumption habits and, in some regions, considerable structural overcapacity. Some of these problems already existed during the great phase of economic growth. But the crisis of the liberal world order is exacerbating them.
The resurgence of protectionism, the erection of new tariff barriers, the political instrumentalisation of trade relations, the persistent burden of rising living costs on the European middle classes and geopolitical uncertainty are affecting an industry that had relied for decades on the international opening-up of markets. Twenty years ago, winegrowers in Tuscany, on the Moselle or in Burgundy could assume that further sales markets would become available to them in the future. Today, they must reckon with losing already established markets again as a result of political decisions.
Even the Chinese market has lost a substantial part of its former dynamism. The People’s Republic, once described as an emerging market, has long since become an industrial and technological great power whose economic confrontation with the West is having a substantial influence on the conditions of world trade. The hope that growing Chinese prosperity would bring political liberalism and Western enjoyment culture to prevail alike has proved to be an illusion.
The wine business is a particularly sensitive indicator of social confidence in this respect. Hardly anyone needs a good Bordeaux to secure their material existence. They buy it because they want to treat themselves, because they are celebrating a success, because they are expecting guests or because they are looking forward to a pleasant evening. Even the purchase of a wine that one intends to drink only in twenty years contains a considerable degree of confidence in the future.
By contrast, anyone worried about their job, their pension or the political stability of their country will occasionally reorder their priorities. Demand for luxuries also has a psychological dimension to which classical economic analyses, in my view, pay too little attention.
Moreover, within our Western societies, one can observe a change in the understanding of freedom that causes me some unease as a conservative liberal. In some areas, there is declining support for leaving adult people responsible for their private decisions. This also applies to the consumption of alcoholic beverages.
The medical risks of alcohol consumption are undisputed. Informing people about them is among the legitimate duties of the state and its institutions. A liberal society may certainly wish its citizens to live healthily. It must, however, accept that health does not necessarily represent the sole or highest value of an individual’s existence. The scope of state welfare and the limits of social paternalism are therefore also a question of our liberal self-understanding.
It would nevertheless be misguided to interpret every public-health regulation as an expression of an authoritarian mindset. Even states organised on liberal principles need rules. The decisive questions are whether these rules are proportionate, whether they withstand public scrutiny and whether sufficient scope remains for the individual to shape their life responsibly.
The wine economy should participate in this debate. It should, however, do so with somewhat greater intellectual ambition than it has hitherto. Its concern cannot be limited to securing its turnover. It also concerns the cultural significance of self-determined enjoyment in a free society.
Finally, discussions about the future of wine often forget that it enables a particular form of social gathering. At the table, people with different political convictions, professional interests and personal experiences encounter one another. For a few hours, they share a common object of attention. They converse, disagree with one another and occasionally even gain an understanding of their interlocutor’s views.
Certainly, many a war has already been decided at tables laid for a meal. I do not wish to romanticise wine as a peacemaker. Yet the willingness to enjoy things together, to offer hospitality and to disagree in a civilised manner belongs among those cultural achievements without which a liberal democracy can scarcely endure in the long term. Historians of the political public sphere have sufficiently described the importance of Europe’s coffee houses, salons and taverns for the development of the modern bourgeoisie. For a democracy needs places outside the state where people can interact and form their opinions. European table culture was and remains such a place.
Perhaps one day we will regard the decades between the 1970s of the last century and the beginning of the third decade of this century as an extraordinary historical epoch. As a period in which democratic freedom, economic prosperity, international understanding and an immense expansion of individual opportunities for enjoyment combined to form a particular social constellation.
The fact that this epoch seemed self-evident to us was one of its greatest advantages and at the same time one of its greatest dangers. We regarded what had been achieved as a permanent condition. We believed that the economic interconnectedness of humanity would gradually defuse political conflicts, that global prosperity would continue to grow and that individual freedom would prevail in the long term. We raised a toast to this future. Now we must ask ourselves whether we have done enough to preserve it.
The international wine economy has a vital interest in restoring a reliable, open and peaceful world order. It also has an interest in the economic welfare of broad sections of the population and in the freedom of individuals to shape their lives according to their own ideas. It should therefore understand that its future will also be decided beyond the vineyards.
I do not believe that great wine would disappear with the decline of liberal democracy. Wealthy people will exist under every political order, and experience shows that the rulers of authoritarian states have little inclination to deny themselves those pleasures that they withhold from others. What we could lose would be something of considerably greater historical value: the participation of broad sections of society, achieved over decades, in one of humanity’s oldest cultures of enjoyment.
Great wine would once again become the privilege of a few. After half a century of extraordinary freedom, a historical circle would thereby have closed. And we would merely have arrived where we had already been centuries ago.