The globe in a glass

“WINE making is really quite a simple business,” Baroness Philippine de Rothschild likes to tell visitors to her château near Bordeaux. “Only the first 200 years are difficult.” The museum at Château Mouton Rothschild is full of artefacts tracing the story of wine back to Roman times; a special cellar is devoted to vintage bottles going back to the mid-19th century. The whole place reeks of history, as well as wine.

But the baroness's remark is stronger on grandeur than candour. Leave aside the fact that the Rothschilds did not take over the château until 1853. More significantly, wine critics and ordinary consumers alike are becoming increasingly aware that you do not need a long history of wine making to produce great wine. New Zealand's wine industry got going properly only in the 1970s, but according to Oz Clarke, a respected British critic, New Zealand sauvignon blanc is now “arguably the best in the world.” America's Robert Parker, the most influential wine critic in the world today, is a great lover of Bordeaux wines, but he has written that Grange, Australia's most famous wine (which was first produced in the 1950s), “has replaced Bordeaux's Pétrus as the world's most exotic and concentrated wine.”

The notion that the best wines of the new world can match or even surpass the great wines of the old world was first established in 1976, at an event subsequently labelled “the judgment of Paris”. Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant based in Paris, brought together 15 of the most influential French wine critics for a blind tasting of top wines from France and California—for this purpose, whites made from chardonnay grapes and reds made from cabernet sauvignon. The critics were shocked to discover that, without the benefit of labels to guide them, they had awarded the highest marks to Californian wines, both white and red. This caused an outcry in France, and led to accusations that the results had been rigged. But when the tasting was re-staged two years later, it produced similar results.

Since the 1970s, more and more new wine-making areas have come on stream. These days the Californian producers are part of the establishment and sometimes appear disquieted by the success of upstart new producers to their north, in the states of Washington and Oregon. The Australians first began to break into the world market in the 1980s. In the past decade, wines from Chile have become the fastest-growing imports into the United States. Argentina is likely to be next to make a big breakthrough in international markets. Producers in Eastern Europe and South Africa, too, have been handed new opportunities by the collapse of communism and apartheid.

Even so, the globalisation of wine still has a long way to go. One big obstacle is the parochialism of consumers in wine-producing countries. In France, one of the biggest consumers as well as producers of wine, imports command less than 5% of the market. “French people absolutely refuse to drink foreign wines,” says Françoise Brugiere, head of research at the Office National Interprofessionel des Vins in Paris, with a certain fierce pride. But a frustrated would-be importer puts it differently: “It's no accident that Chauvin was a Frenchman.”

To be fair to the French, they are not alone in their wine chauvinism. For example, around 90% of the wine drunk in Australia is home-grown. At least the Australians can reasonably argue that most potential suppliers are half-way round the globe (although distance has proved no barrier to their own successful export drive), but Italy and Spain have similar figures. Of the major producing countries, only Germany and the United States are also significant importers. In Germany, this is largely because very little red or really dry white wine is produced at home. The Americans are very open to trade, and—as a nation of immigrants—perhaps less prejudiced about foreign wine.

Despite the advent of a horde of new-world producers, some 70% of the world's wines are still made and drunk in Western Europe. Anyone scanning the wine shelves of British supermarkets might well conclude that Australia had joined the ranks of the big producers, but they would be wrong: it accounts for only 2.3% of world production, less than Bordeaux alone.

However, new-world producers are having a much bigger effect on the world wine market than the production statistics would suggest. In the late 1980s around 85% of all the wine exported in the world came from just four West European countries—France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. By 1997 that figure had fallen to 72%, and has almost certainly fallen below 70% since. New-world exports have surged over the past decade; those from Chile are up over 400%, and those from Australia up 350%.

The British market provides a particularly useful gauge of the state of competition, because Britain is the world's biggest importer of wine. It has no serious domestic producers to favour, and has strong historical ties both to the traditional producers and to those of the new world. In this vital market, the traditional European producers are clearly struggling. Only six years ago, French, German and Italian wines between them accounted for around two-thirds of British consumption by both volume and value; now the figure has dropped below half, and is still heading down.

New-world producers have well over a third of the British market. Australia leads the field with a share of over 15%, and Chile and South Africa have each leapt from around 1% of the market to about 6% in only six years (see chart 1). What is more, wines from Australia and New Zealand now command higher average prices in Britain than wines from France, Italy or Spain—a considerable achievement in an industry where all producers are struggling to get into the fastest-growing and most profitable niche of “premium” wines.

New world, new ideas

Most important of all, the influence of the new world goes well beyond market share and price. It is being felt most keenly in the techniques for making and marketing wine. Australia may have only a tiny share of the world's wine output, but it produces 20% of the world's scientific papers on viticulture and oenology. “Flying wine makers” from Australia and New Zealand are advising vineyards and winemakers in every corner of the world.

Their impact is being felt even in Bordeaux, the heart of the French wine industry. Vintex, one of Bordeaux's leading négociants (middlemen who buy wine from local producers and sell it on to retailers in France and abroad), relies heavily on wine makers from Australia and New Zealand to advise the vineyards it works with. Although some of the most revered wine makers in the world are Bordelais, Bill Blatch, the president of Vintex, thinks that outside the rarefied world of the very top producers, the Australians and New Zealanders have the edge on professionalism and sensitivity to the tastes of foreign consumers.

John Worontschak, an Australian wine maker who works in Bordeaux as well as with producers in places as diverse as Uruguay, Italy, Mexico and Sussex, is blunt about why experts from his part of the world are now in such demand: “It's because we're open to new ideas, and we're not full of pretentious bullshit.” Warming to his theme, he explains: “Too many people walk into somewhere like Château Mouton Rothschild, swoon at the art collection and get an inferiority complex.” Flying wine makers like Mr Worontschak happily acknowldege that the top Bordeaux wines are “pinnacles of the industry”. But they also insist that the key to making consistent, high-quality wine lies in the careful application of scientific methods and modern techniques.

Who can argue with that? As it happens, quite a lot of people, and not just French producers worried about market share. Some critics fear that the flying wine makers from the new world, and the spread of large wine companies, will gradually eradicate the diversity and sense of place that is wine's most distinctive selling point. The Jeremiahs fear the rise of a few homogenised styles of “world wines”—generic chardonnays and merlots—that could be produced almost anywhere. In the process, they say, wine will lose its magic, and ultimately its market.