Michel Bettane on the lessons small wine producers can learn from coffee.
The Burgundian model clearly has the wind in its sails—and not just in France. All over the world, we’re seeing a marked shift toward small-production, varietal wines from named vineyards. Personally, of course, I have no objection to Burgundy-style winemaking, even if I was brought up to believe that blended wines are more interesting—partly as a testament to human ingenuity, but also because large-production wine is normally more widely available.
What should set alarm bells ringing, however, is the parallel drift toward micro-farming, agriculture being no stranger to this sort of effect. Its proponents claim that micro-farming offers a more principled approach to agriculture because quality monitoring is easier with small quantities. That, and the fact that individual producers put their reputation on the line with every bottle. Given the state of the world, converting to an entirely new way of life—in this case, winemaking—is an attractive proposition. Hence all these jaded, young (and not-so-young) professionals buying up vineyards in little-known areas where land remains more affordable.
So far, so easy. The hard part is learning a new and exacting craft, where the war against the weather pales in comparison to an intransigent classification system long overdue for an overhaul. As things stand, your small producer with no money to spend on marketing is unlikely to go very far. When a brand is faced with indifferent consumers overwhelmed by choice, price is the only real way to stand out. Price is what makes the difference, not quality. But in the effort to keep price down, quality goes out of the window, and with it any chance of its producer surviving long enough to make a wine fit for (discerning) drinking.
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It’s hard enough getting a foothold in Bordeaux, let alone in lesser-known areas like the Larzac or Anjou. Going organic isn’t the solution, either. Good for the planet it may be, but organic farming comes with higher production costs and higher yield losses in bad years. Before you know it, the producer has gone bust, and eventually the entire industry is under strain. That’s what happens when things go haywire.
Coffee, wine, and a question of time
Take the coffee industry, for example. The 1800s saw coffee plantations spring up all over the world, with small producers rushing to meet demand only to be swallowed up by big producers—until war, economic crises, and regime changes swallowed them up, too. Then came industrial agriculture and, with it, biodiversity loss and the death of traditional farming and village life. By the 1980s, global demand for coffee had certainly made the industry more competitive. But recovery was marred by tensions between big buyers, like Nestlé and Starbucks, and small producers caught up in a so-called fair-trade system that was unfair to them and misleading for the consumer.
It says a lot for their courage and determination that, despite a lack of resources, hundreds of coffee farmers joined the specialty-coffee movement, committing themselves to make and sell only high-quality, artisanal coffee. Fortunately for them, there is no anti-coffee lobby, no enemies from within campaigning to criminalize coffee drinking on health grounds. The same cannot be said for wine.
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In France, the Loi Évin has already muzzled the wine media, and it’s just a question of time before other countries pass the same law, with the same effect. If Évin and his like have their way, vineyards will disappear and, along with them, the kind of rural living that makes France so attractive—its landscapes, villages, local economies… The consequences would be disastrous. And all those hundreds of micro-wineries in little-known areas still struggling to make a name for themselves will be left high and dry. They may well be making top-quality wines that deserve to be known, wines that suit the new generation of drinker—but since they cannot publicize it, no one will know. There may even come a time when wine as a product survives only in China and the Global South, where coffee is now even more profitable than tea, to say nothing of wine. Well, fancy that!
