opinion / finish


Wine in danger Michel Bettane


T


he French wine industry is right to sound the alarm—and not only because it’s being clobbered by


soaring energy and materials prices that spell a shortage of glass bottles and wooden pallets, or even for that matter a shortage of labels and cardboard boxes. The figures are there for all to see: Wine consumption is down by roughly 8 percent in volume and 4 percent in value. Only rosé seems to be holding its own, courtesy no doubt of the unusually mild winters we’ve been seeing in recent years. With the post-lockdown euphoria now well and truly over, lying health lobbyists have got us worried. The wine industry faces a shaky future, and the stellar achievements and reputations of the best wine growers, particularly in terms of environmental accountability, are unlikely to come to the rescue. Ethical culture at the service of agriculture is wishful thinking. Not long ago, Sotheby’s magnificent


Paris premises were the venue for a talk on fine wine and its future by the endlessly energetic Pauline Vicard, director of London-based fine-wine think tank Areni Global. A fascinating topic, to be sure, particularly since defining “fine wine” means taking into account a wide range of factors, among them the development of new vineyards, the arrival of a new generation of international consumers, the evolution of collective and social


Lying health lobbyists have got us worried. The wine industry faces a shaky future, and the stellar achievements of the best wine growers, particularly in terms of environmental accountability, are unlikely to come to the rescue


218 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023


consciousness, and the vicissitudes of history and trade.


But to say that fine wine serves as a pathfinder for all wines could turn out to be more dangerous than useful. And garbled communication is the last thing we need here. European democracies in particular will certainly balk at anything that smacks of privilege, luxury, or undue influence— anything that threatens their egalitarian, individualist cultures. Yet the audience at this presentation heard relatively little from winemakers themselves, even less from wine commentators. Most of the talk was about wine distribution and retailing, delivered by speakers who somehow managed to translate the idea of “wine enthusiast” or “connoisseur” into the idea of “wine collecting.” No surprises there. More worrying is the fact that they encourage an idea of wine collecting driven by an obsession with rarity, with collecting ever more inaccessible wines as a symbol of luxury. The richer the collector, the narrower their area of interest and the more rarefied their tastes. What starts out as a pleasure ultimately becomes a lust for exclusivity—for the satisfaction that comes from sole ownership. Are we seriously to believe that this is part of what defines fine wine?


Emotional losing to fi nancial Personally, I have no objection to the luxury wine business. Without luxury wine producers, much of our wine knowledge would disappear, and the protection of cultural heritage would lose some valuable sponsors. But it is one thing to protect cultural heritage and quite another to redefine the rules and criteria on which it depends. Let the luxury business do that, and you can kiss your cultural heritage goodbye. Yet there’s no escaping the fact that the modern wine business is essentially about margins—what seller and buyer


In those days, all wine, no matter how extraordinary, was treated as a consumer product. French people tasted wines for the emotional value of the experience. Those days are gone. What we have now is a fi nancial product


respectively stand to make on the deal. This is evident from the ever-larger margins taken by fine-wine auctioneers, a habit almost certainly born of the purchasing practices of Oxford and Cambridge colleges (buying more wine than they needed, with a view to reselling what they didn’t drink). For centuries, therefore, our friends across the Channel paid next to nothing for the wine they drank. But that hasn’t always been the case


here in France. When the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce drew up the first classification of Gironde wines in 1855—the ranking system put in place by Napoleon III—it used price as an indicator of quality. Not a rule as such, but a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. All of that becomes meaningless in today’s speculative wine market, where a premier cru classé costs 20 times the price of a cinquième cru classé. In those days, all wine, no matter how extraordinary, was treated as a consumer product. French people tasted wines for the emotional value of the experience. Those days are gone. What we have now is a financial product, a commodity promoted by finance journalists and assorted financiers, sure to fetch ever-higher prices on the resale market, thanks to speculative machinations within the industry itself. I despair. Bringing shame on our vineyards, I ask you… 


Illustration by Dan Murrell. Translation by Florence Brutton


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