Wine tends to be an individual business but, in the face of recent headwinds, is there safety in numbers?
In September, 16 of Europe's largest wine cooperatives assembled in the roof of the Pullman Eiffel hotel in Paris, drawn together by the annual Rendez-vous du Vin conference. Engaging with more than 100 buyers from diverse locations, delegates at the conference were surprisingly upbeat – optimistic even. Perhaps the news about declining consumption, bankrupt wineries, climate change and rampant inflation has yet to sink in?
Yet this competitive business model has thrived for over a century – it has triumphed in spite of global recession and two world wars. Indeed, Europe's inaugural cooperative, the Cave de Ribeauvillé, was founded in Alsace in 1895. Copycats soon appeared, inspired by the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen and his creation of Germany's first benefit societies and credit unions.
Today, viticultural associations make around 50 percent of French, Italian and Spanish wine. But, faced with a myriad of external pressures, will cooperatives still be around in a hundred years' time?
I attended Rendez-vous du Vin to find out.
Weathering the storm
"As you've already witnessed, we try to be optimistic about the future of the wine world," announced Olivier Bourdet-Pees, directeur général at Producteurs Plaimont.
"But we are going through a painful transition that will leave many players by the wayside. We know how difficult it will be for so many winegrowers, armed with nothing more than a willingness to pass on traditions to their successors, to face these challenges in isolation – inevitably, there will be human tragedies behind these realities.
"Cooperation was originally created with the primary idea of pooling resources to reduce costs. Now, the wineries united under Rendez-Vous du Vin represent a different fundamental idea: pooling resources to raise awareness, to individually convey our convictions to an increasingly demanding consumer, and above all, as we’ve already discussed, to reinvent how we evolve entire territories to keep them in constant adaptation to the challenges of the moment."
In February this year, one of Spain's key wine companies, Marques de la Concordia Family of Wines, was declared insolvent. This is clearly a pitiful end to a once thriving emblem of Spain's viticultural landscape. But it is not surprising. High inflation, allied to shifting consumer priorities and climate pressures, has affected producers everywhere.
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