Despite what the wine trade might prefer to believe, wine’s social license to operate has never been guaranteed.
Wine has never survived on utility alone. It survived because societies chose to see it as part of culture, hospitality and collective life. But today, wine’s cultural relevance is being challenged from many sides. The health lobby has been talking about zero safe level for alcohol for two years now; the gym culture is telling everyone on social media to cut out alcohol and young aspirational stars are now proudly abstinent. At the same time, representations of wine – and fine wine in particular – are often associated with elitism, exclusion, excess or irrelevance.
If cultural relevance underpins wine’s legitimacy and ultimately its long-term economic viability, then understanding how cultural relevance is created, sustained and renewed becomes one of the most important challenges facing the wine sector today.
A changing landscape
At the most basic level, wine is alcohol. And alcohol, consumed beyond moderation, carries public-health risks that governments are increasingly willing to regulate. That alone puts wine under scrutiny.
Being an agricultural product doesn’t guarantee legitimacy either. It’s not hard to question the relevance of a non-essential crop at a time of resource scarcity, particularly one that relies heavily on pesticides. A 2012 French Senate report found that viticulture accounted for 14.4% of pesticide purchases while covering just 3.3% of agricultural land; even today, the industry still puts the figure at around 12.7%.
Nor does the economic power of an industry determine its ability to endure over time and across societies. The fur industry, once worth billions of dollars at its peak in the 1980s, is now on the brink of extinction following shifts in societal values.
What has long protected wine is something less tangible: its status as a cultural good.
As long as wine is seen as a product that carries meaning beyond its functional use or economic value, it will benefit from a form of tolerance that goes beyond its other realities.
Increasingly, it cannot.
The power of public perception
"Why do we drink wine?"
This was a question that Véronique Lemoine, technical director at La Cité du Vin and the Foundation for Wine Civilisations in Bordeaux, explored at a recent conference held at the Cité.
"If no one feels like drinking wine – if there is no desire for wine, no desire even for the act of drinking it," she says, "then there is no wine."
This desire for wine is fuelled by collective narratives. "For us humans," she continues, "fiction is as real as the ground we walk on. It is what supports us in the world."
For 8,000 years, wine has been upheld by powerful stories and representations, linking it to divinity, health, social status, conviviality and power, all of which have supported its consumption.
But these traditional narratives have always been in flux.
"These traditional values and collective representations are, by definition, imaginary," she says. "And if they are imaginary, it means they can change. Today, very few people drink wine because of its connection to the divine, for example, or because it is considered good for their health."
Wine’s traditional narratives are therefore fragile, subject to change, and even to disappearance.
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