Wine and culture

I have been reading lately many impatient interventions on the relationship between wine and culture, considered rhetorical, boring, self-referential and the cause of young people’s disaffection with the subject and consumption. Communication should be “pop,” punctiliousness about origins loses possible youth clientele, better deregulation of designations and so on.

The situation is complicated

Evidently market difficulties, the combined dispositions affecting the image of wine and a certain desire to simplify, which sometimes also means trivialization, is catching on. If we then add to that the anguish with which many insiders are awaiting the boon of U.S. tariffs (exports to the U.S. account for about a quarter of the total and nearly two billion euros in sales) the situation becomes even more complicated. So, as the pool players say, calm and chalk.

Origin makes all the difference

Meanwhile, let us remember that if wine is what it is, so not just another drink, it is because for at least three centuries the origin has made a difference. It has determined the uniqueness, the recognizability, in a word, the even material value of the wines of the most famous regions. Bordeaux, Champagne, Langa, Burgundy, Mosel, are first of all places. Then they are also represented, defined, enriched by the wines that have been produced and not since yesterday morning.

What matters is the style of storytelling

Is it boring? It depends on how you tell it. Rhetoric is in the style of communication, not in the content. Of course, if overly technical aspects are favored at the expense of an exciting account of places and people, if self-referentiality and narcissism prevail, then yes, things no longer work, assuming they ever did.

But this does not mean that telling the origins of a wine is not instrumental in defining it. Besides, it is something that belongs deeply to it, and this happens almost only for wine. Also, and back to the relationship with culture, how come. poets, men of letters, painters, musicians, philosophers, politicians, even kings and emperors often dealt with wine? Not about cheese, not about EVO oil, some about cooking. From Caravaggio to Carducci, Rossini to Eric Clapton, Cavour to Napoleon, Sting to Albano Carrisi.

The emblematic aspects of wine

Because there are extremely emblematic aspects in wine. There is the Dionysian, there is the relationship between man and nature, there is the interpretation of a territory, there is the history of families of winemakers, sometimes real dynasties, who have somehow ennobled the agricultural sector. The transition from serf status to that of modern farmers also, and perhaps especially, came through viticulture and wine production, which had a significant social impact, therefore.

But who are “the young people”?

Rhetorical? Uninteresting to young people? It drives me crazy that someone considers “young people” as a uniform category. Young people also include those who study enology, viticulture, do research, and delve into modern marketing techniques that are also applied to the wine sector.

There are thousands of new producers, there are many who take courses. Then there are many others who consider wine something uninteresting, too expensive, old as an image. Of course.

Let’s talk about economic possibilities

However, I can’t help but remember that when I was in my twenties I myself didn’t drink or hardly drank, mainly because, not working, I didn’t have the economic possibility to approach the world of wine. The problem, therefore, does not lie mainly in the fact that the world of wine does not interest young people, but that many of them are repelled by it mainly for economic reasons.

Then, yes, rhetoric, technicalities, someone’s narcissism, things to avoid. Not the relationship between wine and culture, not the origin story, not those aspects that have made wine much more than “something to drink.”