Dream’s hit Things Can Only Get Better was the theme tune of Britain’s Labour Party in Tony Blair’s 1997 victory, much reprised at Labour’s election landslide earlier this month. It might as well be the jingle of the international wine trade and its press too, with their story of never-ending improvement and growth. But that narrative masks substantial variations in the ways that different regions are evolving, even in the same country. More important, things can – indeed might well – go backwards.
Permanent progress is certainly a seductive theme when surveying the last 40 years in wine. Last year on these pages, Peter Pharos advanced the theory that wine has now entered a “postmodern” phase – yet he still assumed things were getting steadily, if chaotically, better.
New techniques, prolonged investment, and in non-Mediterranean Europe, the effects of global warming mean winemakers are making better wines in many places now than in 1984. Countries and regions that were barely on the wine map then have become important: most of New Zealand’s almost 42,000 ha of vines (2023) were planted in that time.
In places there is a clear correlation between money and rising quality. Bordeaux has enjoyed massive investment in this century, driving land prices to around €3 million per hectare in Pauillac. And at the top end, there are effectively almost no bad vintages any more.
Yet that’s only part of the story, even just in Bordeaux. A large section of the region, while probably making better wines than ever, is mired in crisis. Last year the French government contributed €38 million to a fund aimed at uprooting 9% of Bordeaux’s vines, while this year has seen angry protests by vignerons. At best, this is progress of a very qualified kind.
There are certainly places where quality is rising for reasons other than cash. I would argue that, alongside Greece, Spain has the most exciting wine scene in Europe right now. Without getting into squabbles around natural wine, it’s clear that the rise of lower-intervention winemaking is a key part of that success.
That’s true in the shift in some Garnachas to a fresher, more mineral, “Atlantic” style, as exemplified by a number of Sierra de Gredos producers (I’ve written elsewhere about this.) There are examples in Campo de Borja and Priorat too. A similar thing is happening with some Monastrells: a selection from Jumilla on show at last month’s Old Vine Conference were impressive and supple, in a very different style to the big, baked monsters that used to be the norm. But I don’t think anyone could really have predicted that pattern of change ten years ago.
Moreover, the momentum is uneven. At this week’s northern Spanish tasting, for instance, I couldn’t detect much change to red wine styles in Toro, many still over-extracted and over-oaked. And while there are thrilling producers in Rioja, from small, low-intervention operations such as Eva Fernández and Luis Ruiz de Viñaspre’s Maisulan to the traditional grandeur of La Rioja Alta, there’s an awful lot of rubbish too. That’s one factor driving the worst crisis in the region’s history and the bankruptcy earlier this year of one of Spain’s largest wine companies, Marqués de la Concordia.
Future progress in wine will be similarly patchy – but the biggest challenge we face, climate change, will affect most producers to some degree. It already is: international wine body the OIV estimates that total global wine production fell last year to around 244 million hectolitres, the lowest figure since 1961, largely due to extreme climatic conditions causing early frosts, heavy rain and drought.
This is partly what I mean by the risk of things going backwards. While lower supply might be no bad thing in the short term in some places – witness Australia’s chronic wine glut – the longer-term implications are severe.
The painful truth is that wine regions can come and go. In parts of southern France such as the Aveyron, the vineyards never really recovered from the double hammer blows of phylloxera and World War I. But you don’t need to go back to the nineteenth century to see the basic fragility of viticulture.
Never mind the Biblical hailstorms that hit Chablis in May this year; the week before, Cahors suffered not only hail but its second catastrophic late frosts in four years, having been hit by drought and mildew in the years between. As Aaron Ayscough recounted last week, after losing 90% of the crop, some producers are seriously questioning the future viability of the industry there. Even English winemakers, obvious beneficiaries of global warming, face growing extreme weather risks, as this year’s sodden spring and summer attest.
Nor are all risks climatic: political upheaval can affect national industries deeply. South Africa’s wine industry benefitted enormously from the end of apartheid and the advent of democracy in 1994. But the end of communism in Bulgaria had the opposite effect on the country’s winemakers, cutting the amount of land under vines by more than half and setting exports back decades.
More recently, Australia has been badly hit by several years of Chinese tariffs, finally lifted in April this year. And while Donald Trump’s swingeing 2019 tariffs on European wines mercifully had only a limited effect before he was kicked out of office, it’s not hard to imagine him creating similar havoc if re-elected in November.
I don’t want to sound like a Cassandra. The variety and quality of wine available to us in today’s internationalised market is extraordinary. But there is nothing inevitable about any such historical juncture. And unless we tackle the challenges of making the industry sustainable more urgently than we are now, then in 30 years’ time we might realise just how historic the point we’re at now really was.
Andy Neather blogs about wine and food at The View from My Table https://aviewfrommytable.substack.com; photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash