The Plight of the Keyboard Wine Alarmists

By Lafras Huguenet

Ah, the tortured scribblings of the modern wine writer. One can scarcely open a broadsheet, click a link, or stumble into a symposium without being greeted by another lachrymose jeremiad on the “existential crisis of wine”. (My editor of this site included, bless him.)

Good heavens. These are the same people who can’t order a flat white without weighing its socio-political implications, and now they are foisting their neuroses onto the poor, unsuspecting grape.

According to this doom-mongering sect, the fermented juice of Vitis vinifera is perched upon the precipice of irrelevance, about to tumble headlong into the oubliette of forgotten cultural artefacts, somewhere between the penny-farthing and the spinet. Why? Because, they say with sepulchral solemnity, a few quarterly reports show a dip in sales. Cue hand-wringing. Cue navel-gazing. Cue Aristotelian essays on whether wine has meaning in a TikTok world.

What balderdash. What arrant, over-fermented poppycock.

Wine does not have an “existential crisis.” Wine has an existence. Eight thousand years of the stuff. Longer than Christianity, longer than Islam, longer than parliamentary democracy and, mercifully, longer than the modern wine columnist. Empires have risen, fallen, and been written about in worse Latin than this, yet throughout it all – through Visigoths, Mongols, and even Prohibition – the human urge to crush a grape and wait for the magic has remained undimmed.

And so when I read these airy philosophical tracts, dripping with self-importance and purple prose, I can’t help but think the problem is not with the wine at all. The problem is with the writers, staring at their glass as though it were the Delphic Oracle, and upon seeing nothing deciding to conjure doom instead. If wine were a person, it would roll its eyes and get back to the serious business of being delicious with roast lamb.

Yes, there is a temporary dip in consumption. Shocking news, that: consumption patterns change, circulate, evolve and reinvent. But wine does not require the ministrations of amateur Kierkegaards speculating on its demise. Wine is not a neurotic, therapy-seeking middle-manager. Wine is a cultural constant, part of human conviviality and civilisation, as essential to our story as bread, cheese, and quarrelling with the neighbours.

So let us leave aside this pretentious hand-flapping about relevance, this sepulchral chorus of “Is wine still important?” and instead pour another glass. The relevance of wine is proven every time cork meets corkscrew, every time a bottle is opened and, mirabile dictu, someone smiles.

To those columnists who would fashion an existential tragedy out of a blip in sales charts: kindly stop projecting your own mid-life crisis onto the bottle. Wine has survived worse. And unlike you, dear scribe, it will still be here in another 8 000 years.