‘Wine is not a sin’ were the opening words from Jean-Robert Pitte, the former president of the Sorbonne University to a wine conference in Italy last week.

Pitte’s presentation – at the World Wine Symposium (aka The Davos of Wine) – was on the future of wine consumption in the wine producing countries of Europe, and particularly in France.

He quoted ‘Vin, vie, verite – wine, life, truth’ as the backbone of the cultural force of wine.

But try telling this to the French Government, whose prohibitionist actions over the last two decades have managed to bring down local consumption to around 40 litres a head, about the same as in Switzerland.

This started with the loi Evin, a law that banned advertising of any form of alcohol or tobacco that suggested that such a products might provide pleasure and has been continued with gusto by L’Association Nationale de Protection contre l’Alcool et les Addictions (ANPAA), which has an annual budget of €66m and 1,400 employees and scores of state-supported doctors to do its bidding.

The result, said highly-respected journalist Michel Bettane, was that wine was being treated by these people as a huge ogre, which must be totally restricted and controlled.

The problem, however, is that the State does not separate wine from alcohol, nor has it realised that the problem of alcoholism in France pretty much ended when the workers ceased to drink 3 litres of rotgut a day.

The Government doctors maintain that wine is unhealthy, to which 80 year-old Dr NK Yong, Singapore’s leading wine collector, replied ‘anyone who tells you wine is not good for you is lying. If the politicians don’t understand this, you should change the politicians.’

Messrs Pitte and Bettane urged that the public has to be motivated to attack these prohibitionist rules for ‘a national, vocal uprising is urgently needed’.

France had one such in 1789, in 1848 and in 1968. Why not in 2010?

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Written by Steven Spurrier

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Steven Spurrier
Steven Spurrier
Decanter Magazine, Consultant Editor
Decanter’s consultant editor Steven Spurrier joined the wine trade in London in 1964 and later moved to Paris where he bought a wine shop in 1971, and then opened L’Academie du Vin, France’s first private wine school in 1973. Spurrier staged the historic 1976 blind tasting between wines from California and France, the Judgment of Paris, and in the 1980s he wrote several wine books and created the Christie’s Wine Course with then senior wine director Michael Broadbent, a veteran Decanter columnist. In 1988 Spurrier returned to the UK to focus on writing and consultancy, with his clients including Singapore Airlines. He has won several awards, including Le Personalité de l’Année (oenology) 1988 for services to French wine and the Maestro Award in honour of California wine legend André Tchelistcheff (2011) and is president of the Circle of Wine Writers as well as founding the Wine Society of India. He also produced his own wine, Bride Valley Brut, from his vines in Dorset.