Wine’s house is on fire
This is the summer when the global “wine crisis” became official.
The media landscape of Italy and France is brimming with gloom: The “golden age” of wine is over, young people prefer cocktails, farming costs are up, bottle prices are down, and cellars are full of unsold wine. The wine world is, in a word, screwed. (Hand gesture optional.)
I was recently interviewed on the doom by my adopted hometown newspaper L’Arena in Verona, and it got me thinking. Is the crisis another cycle in wine’s long history? Or is there a problem in how we think about wine?
Wine is often viewed as an industrial commodity: bottles, acres, hectoliters, sales growth, costs, etc. But to me wine should be approached for what it is at base: a cultural product to be shared at table with food.
Good wine goes with good food.
In other words, if you want to sell Tuscan wine, promote excellence in Tuscan food and in your home terroirs. Promote it to visitors, locals and even school children. The same is true of all the rest of Italy, and France. Put your best dishes forward with your best wines.
Sadly, especially since COVID, more restaurants have had a tough time maintaining people and quality. Others are just going for the quick Euro.
What if we changed the way we taxed restaurants. Instead of taxing sales and profits, tax could be inversely set to the quality of the food. The fresher, more local and better tasting the food, the lower the tax bill.
Fast food chains on the other hand could be taxed like cigarettes. Spaces in public palazzos are often rented to the high bidder, which sounds responsible but is anything but.
There’s lots of discussion about climate change and its effects on wine, but little discussion on how much humans have changed.
Of course, young people don’t drink wine. Wine is about sharing, and they’ve been reared in the bubble of their personal devices. Naturally they go for the perfect individual liquid: cocktails.
