(Claude Auguste)
European winegrowing can also be managed to death. It can be dissected in studies, packaged in campaigns, pressed into monthly abstinence programmes and, in the process, told that all of this is “for its own good”. That is exactly what is happening now. While winemakers have cellars full of wine, urban circles in the old countries of the Atlantic West preach abstinence as a lifestyle and declare enjoyment to be a legacy burden. The result does not smell of the future, but of cold herbal tea, of cultivated boredom without any desire to break out or even decadence – decadence is apparently toxic these days too.
Anyone who wants to continue selling in this climate is tilting at windmills, wearing down their strength fighting for the nonsensical.
The good news: nobody is forcing winemakers to sell where little is happening now.
The bad news comes from those countries that declare themselves moral pioneers: there, wine is increasingly declared a problem, not a promise. The discourse is sterile, the pleasure of a glass suspicious, consumption always in need of explanation. Anyone who drinks has to justify themselves. Anyone who does not drink – and who previously had to justify themselves just as inappropriately for this non-drinking – gets applause. This is no longer a market, it is a tribunal.
The new Jerusalems (a Klimek term that I am happy to borrow) of winegrowing lie elsewhere.
They lie where wine is not constantly viewed with suspicion. They lie where wine is accepted. Where nobody asks whether a third glass is still “justifiable”, but whether one should open another bottle. Where enjoyment is not a political statement, but part of social advancement. That is precisely why these markets are so hungry.
India, for example. A gigantic market, with which the European Union is now entering into a free trade agreement. Hundreds of millions of people, an exploding middle class, cities newly emerging from slums, consumers who do not want to abstain, but to arrive in their individual private life. Wine is not yet an everyday drink there – and that is precisely why it is coveted. Anyone who drinks wine demonstrates worldly sophistication. Anyone who drinks good wine demonstrates success. No campaign in the world can replace that.
Latin America follows suit. Free trade there too, if the European Parliament does not lose its nerve again. There, in Latin America, wine is not morally dissected, but drunk every day. Without a guilty conscience, without supervised reflection. Anyone who believes that alcohol-free alternatives will prevail there is confusing wishful thinking with reality. And despite having its own wine market, the hunger for new, enriching grape varieties is endless.
And then there is what is happening right on our doorstep – and which many are completely underestimating. Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Slovakia, Poland, Czechia. Countries where wine is culturally charged. Not backward-looking, but connected to the future. Anyone who understands wine belongs. Anyone who talks about it demonstrates education. Anyone who collects demonstrates ambition.
There, Dry January is not debated, but ridiculed. Not out of ignorance, but because it is perceived as a Western affectation: an expression of satiated societies that can afford the luxury of renouncing pleasure and then celebrating that too. For many young consumers there, it is not a role model, but a warning signal.
It must be said plainly: anyone who wants to save wine must stop trying to save it everywhere.
Because wine needs markets that take it seriously. People who recognise it as a cultural asset. Societies in which enjoyment is not immediately viewed with general suspicion. The future does not lie where wine is defended, but where it is positively anticipated.
The new Jerusalems are not utopias. They have existed for a long time. One simply needs the courage to go there – and to stop allowing oneself to be lectured by those who have long forgotten why wine was ever important in the first place.