(Claude Auguste)
You can also smother European viticulture to death with excessive care. You can dissect it in studies, package it in campaigns, squeeze it into monthly abstinence periods, whilst explaining to it that all this is ‘for its own good’. That is exactly what is happening right now. Whilst winegrowers have cellars full of wine, urban circles in the old countries of the Atlantic West are preaching abstinence as a lifestyle and declaring enjoyment to be a relic of the past. The result does not smell of the future, but of cold herbal tea, of cultivated boredom with no desire for rebellion or even decadence – after all, decadence has recently become toxic too.
Anyone who wants to continue selling in this climate is tilting at windmills, squandering their energy on the absurd.
The good news is that nobody is forcing winemakers to sell where business is currently slow.
The bad news comes from those countries that proclaim themselves moral pioneers: there, wine is increasingly being declared a problem, not a promise. The discourse is sterile, the pleasure of a glass of wine is viewed with suspicion, and consumption always requires justification. Those who drink must justify themselves. Those who do not drink – and who previously had to justify their abstinence just as inappropriately – receive applause. This is no longer a market; it is a tribunal.
The new Jerusalems (a term coined by Klimek, which I am happy to borrow) of viticulture 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 ‘acceptable’, but whether another bottle is to be opened. Where enjoyment is not a political statement, but part of social advancement. That is precisely why these markets are so hungry.
Take India, for example. A huge market with which the European Union is now entering into a free trade agreement. Hundreds of millions of people, an exploding middle class, cities rising from the slums, consumers who do not want to do without, but are finding their place in their individual private lives. Wine is not yet an everyday drink there – and that is precisely why it is so coveted. Those who drink wine demonstrate cosmopolitanism. Those who drink good wine demonstrate success. No campaign in the world can replace that.
Latin America is following suit. Free trade – provided the European Parliament doesn’t back down again – will come here too. There, in Latin America, wine is not subjected to moral scrutiny, but is drunk every day. Without a guilty conscience, without second thoughts. Anyone who believes that non-alcoholic alternatives will gain a foothold there is confusing wishful thinking with reality. And despite having its own wine market, the appetite for new, enriching grape varieties is insatiable.
And then there is what is happening right on our doorstep – and which is completely underestimated by many. Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic. Countries where wine is steeped in culture. Not backward-looking, but forward-looking. Anyone who understands wine is part of it. Anyone who talks about it demonstrates their knowledge. Anyone who collects it shows ambition.
Over there, Dry January isn’t discussed – it’s ridiculed. Not out of ignorance, but because it’s perceived as a Western fad: an expression of satiated societies that can afford the luxury of foregoing pleasure – and then celebrating that fact, too. For many young consumers there, this is not a role model, but a warning sign.
Let’s be clear: if you want to save wine, you must stop trying to save it everywhere.
For wine needs markets that take it seriously. People who recognise it as a cultural asset. Societies in which enjoyment is not immediately viewed with suspicion. The future lies not where wine is defended, but where it is positively anticipated.
The new Jerusalems are not utopian dreams. They have long since existed. One simply needs the courage to go there – and to stop letting oneself be lectured by those who have long since forgotten why wine was ever important in the first place.