The world of wine is a business of big money: 234.7 billion dollars in 2023. Quebec drinks its fair share: last year, the Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ) sold 14 million bottles… only in December ! Behind the wines that will undoubtedly be on the tables this holiday season lie the political dynamics of the planet. Here are a few drops of information on a highly geopolitical alcohol to help you see the world in red and white.
Migratory wines
The vine follows the great human march, from conquests to the cosmos. The expansion of the Roman Empire rooted wine in the Mediterranean region, where it still dominates today thanks to the triumvirate formed by Italy, Spain and France, responsible, between them, for half of world production estimated, in 2022, at 258 million hectoliters — or 33.5 billion bottles.
A thousand years after the fall of Rome, wine arrived in the New World with the conquistadors. “As early as 1518, Cortès cultivated vines in Mexico,” notes Professor Stéphane Dubois in an issue of the International and strategic review in 2013. The colonization of Africa, especially South, and Asia then led to the globalization of the grape and its most sacred derivative.
The New World is now destabilizing the old when it comes to wine. Europe still dominates, but less than in 1995, when it still bottled 73% of world production.
Today, the vine accompanies humanity even into space. Twelve Bordeaux grands crus and 320 vines stayed aboard the International Space Station between 2020 and 2021 — a prelude, perhaps, to future harvests on Mars…
The vine and China
The two world superpowers are polar opposites when it comes to wine. While the United States is toasting and 15% of global consumption ends up in American throats, China, at the other end, is having a hangover. Its economy is running out of steam and leaves a bitter aftertaste in the wine industry of the Middle Kingdom.
Under the Maoist era, the wine industry, already weak, experienced a long lethargy. China’s economic boom, however, has propelled the wine industry: between 2000 and 2012, the area devoted to vine cultivation tripled in China, to reach more than 700,000 hectares. A blend of Chinese cabernet, the Jia Bei Lan 2009 from the He Lang Qing Xue vineyard, even won the crown in 2011 at the prestigious Decanter competition, beating Bordeaux wines to the post. It was consecration… until the coming to power of Xi Jinping in 2012 put a brake on this momentum.
Wine consumption has continued to decline in China for 10 years. The campaign against corruption undertaken by the Chinese president partly explains this decline. The wealthy snatched up the great wines to wash down copious banquets intended to oil the wheels of the State in their favor. The implementation of a “resolutely nationalist policy” which rejects “the ideas, values and symbols of the West” has also put Chinese wine consumption under pressure, explains the geographer and director of the Confucius Institute. ‘Orléans, Guillaume Giroir. So much so that today, China, which has 17% of the world’s population, drinks barely 1.5% of the world’s wines.
The USSR and the root of evil
Anxious to prove its superiority to the world, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union boosted wine production until it became, at its peak in the 1970s, the third largest producer on the planet. However, Château Lafite never had to envy Soviet wines: under the USSR, quantity took precedence over quality.
However, alcohol consumption represented a public health issue of prime importance in the early 1980s in the USSR. A study by Alexander Nemtsov, a researcher at the Russian Ministry of Public Health, estimated in 2002 that alcohol caused directly and indirectly, at the time, the deaths of more than 500,000 people each year in the Union – or a third of all deaths.
As soon as he came to power in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev implemented a sobriety campaign which included temperance and the massive uprooting of vines. This dry law had earned the secretary general the nickname “mineral water secretary”, according to an article by Daniel Tarschys published in 1993 in the journal Europe-Asia Studies.
War wines
Wine is often found at the barricades in the event of conflict between two nations. When Australia launched an investigation to determine the origin of COVID-19, Beijing saw red and imposed a 218% tax on the country’s wines. The measure has been going on for three years… but Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell suggested this week that it could soon end.
These retaliations are reminiscent of other embargoes imposed on wine in recent history. “Georgia traded a lot with Russia until there was political friction in 2006,” explains Guy Dorval, geographer and author of a course at Laval University on the geopolitics of wine. Moscow imposed an embargo on wines from Georgia and Moldova that year. Two years later, Russia invaded South Ossetia. »
The American war in Iraq and France’s refusal to participate had also disrupted the wine trade between the two countries. “Washington had imposed a 25% tax on French wines,” continues Guy Dorval.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine also had consequences on the glass industry. kyiv has several glass factories and the price of energy needed to run the kilns has jumped. The incessant bombings have also disrupted production: in November 2022, the reference magazine Wine Business estimated that the price of glass bottles had jumped due to the war.