(Manfred Klimek, SWR screenshot)
Once upon a time on ‘Tatort’. Stuttgart, 2009. A German Sunday evening, as ritualised as it gets. Millions watch as the detectives stumble their way through the script, sometimes more, sometimes less original. But this particular ‘Tatort’ had a twist that, today, 16 years later, seems almost like science fiction: they were drinking. Lots of beer. Even more wine. And at the end, Inspector Bootz – a young investigator with a serious expression and tousled hair – stands there, holding an elegant yet down-to-earth (in my view) Riedel red wine carafe. Not just any glass, not a supermarket decanter, but a piece of glassware culture that wasn’t placed in the script by chance, but comes across as a statement: wine is part of it.
Today? Unthinkable. No screenwriter would dare to have a female inspector handed a glass of Riesling after work. No carafe, no Pinot, no quiet moment with a fine wine. The new ‘scissors in the mind’ is the WHO. On the basis of studies that hardly anyone reads, that no one really scrutinises any more, and which nevertheless loom over all debates with apodictic force, wine is broadly labelled as ‘extremely dangerous’. Wine, which was once the symbol of European food and drink culture, is being lumped in with vodka from a plastic cup or alcopops at the station.
The result: screenwriters are caving in. Producers are cutting out any scene that might even give the slightest impression of wine being enjoyed. And the associations? Silence. Winegrowers’ associations, viticultural organisations, institutions that are actually there to defend wine as a cultural asset, have, over the last twenty years, criminally failed to recognise the threat to wine and to anchor it in the cultural mainstream. They are happy to talk amongst themselves, in trade journals, at trade fairs, in their own glossy brochures. But when it comes to making the normality of wine visible – on television, in novels, in TV series, in the everyday images of our society – there is a void.
This has created a vacuum that others are filling. The ‘No-Wine’ cabal – that new alliance of WHO resolutions, government warnings and a hyper-moral zeitgeist that senses a life-threatening risk in every glass of wine – has taken control of the narrative. Wine now appears solely as a danger, a problem, something that must be ‘managed’. No wonder the scripts are being watered down: instead of a Riedel carafe in ‘Tatort’, we now see tap water in a reusable cup. Welcome to the new aesthetic of harmlessness.
But culture does not thrive on bans. It thrives on images that become etched into the collective memory. Wine in a ‘Tatort’ episode was never advertising – it was reality. It was what one might reasonably expect in a country with 13 wine-growing regions: that a glass is poured after work, that carafes gleam, that food and drink go hand in hand. This has nothing to do with excess, nothing to do with abuse. It has to do with civilisation.
So the crucial question is: when did the associations stop engaging in this discourse? When was the decision made to retreat into the niche of specialist communication and hand over the stage for grand narratives to others without a fight? And why does nobody notice that this is precisely what is erasing a piece of everyday European culture?
It is not enough to wallow in our own little world. It is not enough to shine at trade fairs. If wine is to have a future, it must also be present in the mainstream media. In TV series, in films, in novels. As what it has always been: a part of our everyday lives. A symbol of enjoyment, of conversation, of a different sense of time to that of constant alarmism.
The call to action is simple: associations, wake up. Do not leave the field any longer to the WHO and the fearmongers. Ensure that wine once again has the imagery to carry it forward. That it once again features carafes in ‘Tatort’, glasses in TV series, and a presence in the stories that reach millions. Otherwise, all that will remain in the end is the museum-piece pose, the scene’s self-reflection – and its silent displacement by a culture that no longer wishes to see the difference between a glass of wine and a litre of vodka.
Wine is a cultural asset that must also be defended – on television, in the cinema, in the media. Otherwise, it will disappear, quietly but thoroughly. And when, twenty years from now, we watch 46-year-old episodes of *Tatort*, we’ll ask ourselves: was it really possible for the detectives to drink wine? Yes, it was possible. But only as long as wine was still taken for granted.