Americans Hit The (Wine) Bottle

Published July 22, 2007

Sacre bleu! The United States is about to become the world's biggest wine consuming nation, overtaking France by 2010.

It's hard to believe that in the 1920s America experimented with Prohibition. Coming up on a century later, French wine consumption is tumbling while Americans are drinking more.

The good news for the French is that as wine becomes more popular, interest in Old World, and particularly French wines is on the rise.

The Telegraph reports that exports of French wines to the US rose 11.4 percent last year.

Does this figure take into account the numbers of Americans coming back to French wine after boycotting French products following President Jacques Chirac's opposition to the Iraq War? EURSOC called a US wine-drinking friend who told us "the sort of people who boycotted French products in 2003 weren't what you would call wine drinkers."

So that's that, then.

However, our wine buff tells us, the joy of finding a new market to shore up falling home demand hasn't cheered French winemakers. Americans, he says, rely on the scores awarded to wine by critic Robert Parker (to be fair not only Americans do this, EURSOC's local Paris offy lists Parker scores too). Wine makers, in turn, work hard to produce wines which will appeal to Parker's palate, leading some makers (often those who score poorly) to complain that Parker's influence is changing France's ancient wine culture.

Parker's supporters argue that wine is an ancient international business. The vignobles of Bordeaux produced wine aimed to appeal to the Dutch and English markets before the Americans came on the scene. Who knows what wine will taste like in 2050 when the Chinese, Indians and Russians will dominate the market (or so we are told).

Furthermore, he says, American buyers tend to go for the good stuff, pricing it out of the reaches of the home market, giving the French a further opportunity to carp about how they can no longer afford their birthright.

Typical France: Every silver lining has a cloud.