“Wine and culture“
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I’m very honored to address you today, members of the Académie Internationale du Vin, and I thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. Today I stand before you as an alternate member of the Académie Internationale du Vin, thus fulfilling one of the dreams I had as a child when my grandmother’s brother, the family winemaker, introduced me to the secrets of wine production. Since then, wine has always been of paramount importance to me. In addition to my university studies in oenology, my apprenticeship with Madame Stavroula Kourakou Dragonas, Honorary President of the International Organization of Vine and Wine, has had a profound effect on my life. My presentation today is intended to stimulate your interest, so that we can see wine in its current social dimension and help, as far as possible, to restore it to its rightful place among man’s cultural and economic activities.
But let’s start at the beginning, by clarifying the meaning of certain notions so that we can speak the same language. I consider civilization to be, in short, man’s behavior towards his fellow man, his profession and the society in which he lives. Such behavior improves his education, his professional and economic status, and his social activities. The abundance brought about by progress, which has its basis in culture, subsequently influences the evolution of culture. In the history of mankind, we always see empires being built, only to crumble later, and which mark our history by using their accumulated wealth to develop their own civilization.
Each civilization had its own characteristics and values that set it apart from the others. They all had a common denominator, which was their economic strength. I don’t want to tire you with evocations of the past. I’ll just point out that, at the height of the classical Greek era, the god Dionysus held a pre-eminent place among the gods of Olympus, and wine was the characteristic product of Greek civilization. The Roman Empire also retained this characteristic.
Over the centuries and under the domination of the Christian religion, wine became less appreciated. The Christian religion had no patron saint of vines. Wine is considered a sinful, metaphysical product, a remnant of paganism. But on the other hand, wine is the blood of Jesus Christ, used for Holy Communion, and Jesus Christ appears in Byzantine icons as a vine and says in scripture “I am the vine”.
Despite all this, wine remains in the consciousness of the people as an indispensable product, with essential nutritional qualities and a power that liberates the soul and spirit. In the Muslim world, we see much the same phenomenon, where religion forbids the consumption of wine, more or less strictly depending on the sect, but where there are hymns to wine, poems by Omar Kayam and promises of pleasures in the afterlife, where the consumption of wine is implied. The pleasures of this afterlife take place in beautiful gardens where vines are the main crop. I think these stories, with their contradictions and the double substance of wine, good/bad, belong to the realm of philosophy.
My only observation is that, over the centuries, wine has played little or no part in everyday life, especially among people living around the Mediterranean basin, for two main reasons: it’s a nourishing good, and a way of warding off grief. Today, we live in the age of the American empire. After the Second World War and the shrinking of the British Empire, the characteristics of American civilization have come to dominate and shape our lives. Especially after the fall of the Communist model, we have an invasion of American civilization or, if you prefer, Western civilization.
What I’d like to stress here is that I’m not implying that American-style capitalism has won out over communism. That’s not the theme of this presentation at all. What I am saying is that what I define as American culture dominates our lives. The globalization of markets, the leveling of products, social classes and values, the love of numbers, loneliness – these are just some of the characteristics of this American civilization. And this civilization does not count wine among its values. Wine has no nutritional qualities, and alcoholic beverages are the companions of loneliness and chase away the sorrows of Western man.
After the second half of our century, and the domination of the American prototype, man’s traditional ties with wine were broken. The man of contemporary civilized society, with his high standard of living and the abundance of information offered to him by the media, has sacrificed the pleasure of drinking wine over a meal with friends to the hasty consumption of whisky and vodka at the bar, as part of a controversial modern type of entertainment. But let’s take a closer look at this man. He is bombarded daily by millions of messages in which he gets lost and lost in a multitude of proposals and information. He’s insecure, a victim of this global phenomenon. What’s more, they’re oppressed by Anglo-Saxon anti-alcohol hysteria. Bombarded by advertising messages urging them to consume liquids, to drink without distinguishing between Coca-Cola, beer, whisky or wine.
The economic aspect of life and advertising have completely disorientated him. What’s more, the speed of modern life has led us to drink anything and everything in a hurry. Wine is seen as just another consumer product, and loses its impact on the soul, the human “psyche”. At the same time, the emergence of multinational giants, modern soft drinks or mineral water empires, aided by aggressive sales techniques, anti-alcohol campaigns and the powerlessness of wine producers to protect their products on international markets, have led to a worldwide decline in wine consumption and ensured that wine is seen as just another consumer product.
It’s clear that wine is drifting away from our table as a nutritious product or meal accompaniment and is tending, especially in the non-wine-producing countries that determine the lifestyle of the Western world, to become an exotic luxury product. Desperate, the regular wine consumer bows to the indications of the “connoisseurs” and looks for banana aromas in the wine, all the while afraid of the alcohol in his glass. Of course, I’m referring here to extreme cases. On the one hand, I’m talking about the new drinking habits of countries that don’t produce wine, that have no tradition in this field, but are wealthy consumers, such as England, the Scandinavian countries and the U.S.A., and on the other hand, the new drinking habits of wine-producing countries, where the invasion of other drinks tends to dominate everything. In these countries, wine tends to become a status symbol for the consumer, and this style appears everywhere.
We could talk for hours, analyzing and criticizing the characteristics of today’s dominant civilization. But our subject is wine and its relationship with civilization. Please allow me to digress for a moment to talk about the situation in my own country. I have had the great good fortune to live through and actively participate in the changes that have taken place in the Greek wine industry over the last twenty years. I’ll try to give a very brief history. As I have already mentioned, for centuries wine has marked the economic life of the Greeks and of the Mediterranean basin in general, and has been intimately linked to everyday life and eating habits.
Since the 19th century, the industrial revolution and the birth of an independent Greek state have led to the country’s economic dependence on the economic and commercial interests of the great powers. Spain, Portugal, Italy and France, major wine-producing countries, were fortunate enough to be far from the Ottoman Empire and to be able to promote their wines, not only as one of their agricultural riches but also as a mark of their culture, which led to the evolution of the types of wine produced and consumption procedures. However, Greece remains an anonymous producer and supplier of this product to the major consumer centers.
Wars, phylloxera, and more wars and eras of subjugation, accompanied by a lack of self-confidence and self-respect, lead us into a new era in the early 70s, where wine is in the hands of the big merchants, who are unable to promote Greek appellation wine on the big international markets where change is continuous. At the start of this new decade in Greece, we enter the period of new legislation, concerning appellations of origin, rightly put in place with a view to our integration into the European Community.
We also witness the beginnings of a union movement, the expansion of the bottled wine market, and economic prosperity. This brings us to the 90s. The results of this change are already visible. The number of large companies selling bulk wines is diminishing, or disappearing, so to speak, the large companies selling mass-market bottled wines are destabilized, and small wine producers, with little tradition but producing quality wines, are appearing. They are raising the quality of Greek wines, fuelling competition and successfully restructuring the country’s wine sector.
On a global scale, we have the following picture:
Countries that have traditionally produced wine, and in which wine production and consumption have followed a steady evolutionary course, are now being challenged by changes in lifestyle and are experiencing a downward trend. In countries that don’t produce wine (Northern Europe), we’re witnessing an upward trend in consumption, but here wine has taken on the value of a status symbol. In new countries such as the USA, Australia, South America and South Africa, wine is still seen as just another consumer product. They apply new technological methods to the wines they produce, such as adding wood shavings to aromatize them and obtain the desired taste, and apply aggressive marketing methods to the marketing of wines, with the same approach used for all other mass-market products.
But in all cases, what’s in effect is “less, but better quality”. Let’s now take a look at the new environment that is being transformed. We are witnessing the globalization of the market, which is creating uncertainty and insecurity, as we feel that we are not part of the evolution that is taking place. A frenetic movement, not only physical but spiritual, is necessary to keep up with the rapid evolution of technology, an indispensable condition for survival. Information bombardment for products and services, very often excessive and useless. A climate of anxiety and insecurity about the environment, social stability and the new order of things. In such a climate, wine tries to find its way. I believe that the wine consumer is making a desperate effort to find his roots, his security.
Man’s close relationship with the land is one of the factors that determine his life choices. Wine is a product linked to the land. This product, an indication of culture in other eras, is trying to survive today in a new, unfriendly environment. Our duty, as men of wine, would be to see things clearly on the basis of what I’ve just said. Wine is not one of the main elements of the American civilization that dominates our daily lives. So it couldn’t possibly become what it once was. We need to find new ways of integrating it into its new environment, and this search could not and should not be satisfied with improving wine quality alone, nor with changes in legislation, or even with collective advertising promotions. On the other hand, I believe that the development of indigenous grape varieties, or of the characteristics and particularities of a specific production that the terroir gives to wines, ends up in the long run making wine a picturesque product of popular tradition and a sign of our cultural heritage.
We need to find ways of integrating wine into the needs of consumers living in an environment such as the one I described above. The Treaty of the European Union states that the Union “shall offer its contribution to the promotion of the culture of the Member States, while respecting their regional and national diversity and at the same time proposing the common cultural heritage”. How do you expect us to include wine in the common cultural heritage of Swedes and Greeks with such a technocratic definition? For the former, wine is an “exotic” product, for the latter a gift from the gods. As Braudel puts it in his work “Civilisation Matérielle”, the South looks with a certain sarcasm at these northern drinkers, who don’t know how to drink and empty their glasses in one go.
I’ve had the good fortune to take part in a number of international commissions and wine organizations, either as a representative of my country or as a leading figure in the world of wine, and we’ve always discussed subjects whose aim is to ensure the survival of wine. I’m going to mention two of them which I believe could be the focus of our efforts: Wine and Health: it’s been scientifically proven that moderate consumption, and especially of red wine, has a multitude of positive effects on the health of body, mind and soul.
Jeunes amis du vin: an effort to create groups of young people who could introduce moderate wine consumption into their daily lives, using its psycho-liberative faculties to achieve a better balance in their psychic state. These efforts are well under way. Slowly but steadily, the concept of wine as a product that is “good” for people is gaining ground. Wine is becoming a new type of product, precisely because our society is undergoing colossal changes. In my opinion, this phase of perpetual change will last for several years, and its development will be influenced not only by the new conception of producers, but also by that of consumers. I believe that, more than ever before, we in the wine industry must work together to tackle the problems and difficulties facing our product in this new world.