We all need French lessons

There’s a sense that it’s slipping down the food and drink rankings. But don’t believe everything you read about the decline of French gastronomy and wine culture, says David Williams

The ASI Best Sommelier of the World competition is one of those events that must look completely bizarre to an outsider. It looks a little strange even to those people who, like me, work in a slightly different corner of the wine world. Watching the footage on YouTube, you could be forgiven for asking how something so apparently mundane as the serving and selling of wine in a restaurant context had somehow been turned into a spectator sport.

Well, I suppose giving up an evening to watch and cheer on a group of highlydriven men and women as they precisionpour a few flutes of Champagne or conduct a blind tasting under intense pressure is no less absurd than buying tickets to see the exhibition of professional floor-cleaningon-ice that is curling. Still, the fact the triennial event managed to attract more than 4,000 people to an arena generally used for high-profile sport and music events is quite some testament to the status of wine-waiting.

Apart from the astonishingly high level of engagement, one of the curious details of this year’s competition was the feeling of thwarted expectation and angst on the part of the host country, France.

Just as the lead-up to the Tour de France in the French press is dominated by the search for the latest poor tyro expected to carry the weight of a nation’s longing for an end to its near-40-year wait for a French winner of the national race (Bernard Hinault was the last Frenchman to win in 1985), so the hope in Paris in February was that local star sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier would become the first French world champion sommelier since Olivier Poussier in 2000.

It wasn’t to be. The four-day event, which featured 68 contestants, was ultimately won by a Latvian, Raimonds Tomsons, with Lepeltier coming in fourth after losing out in a semi-final featuring a cosmopolitan field of 17 national champion sommeliers from the likes of Norway, Taiwan, South Africa and the USA.

The long wait for a winner has inevitably been taken by some in France as yet another marker on the long, slow decline of France’s wine and food culture – a small but telling detail to be filed alongside the slow death of the local brasserie or the fact that France is the largest market for McDonald’s outside the US, and a sign that France is no longer the centre of the gastronomic world.

It’s a contention that is hard to argue with when it comes to food alone. There’s no question that the past 50 years, and certainly the past couple of decades, have seen a progressive dilution of French authority on culinary matters. Visitors to France will be aware of the prevalence of poor-quality, uninspired, and over-priced food once you get outside the larger cities. And even fair-minded Francophiles would struggle to argue with the proposition that the increased respect and influence attained by, among others, Japanese, Spanish, Italian and Lebanese cuisine has been a hugely positive and palate-expanding development for the world’s chefs, diners and home cooks, not least in France itself.

When it comes to French wine, however, the declinist narrative, the idea that France has been progressively losing out to upstarts in new and old world alike since at least 1976 – the Judgment of Paris, and all that – is rather more difficult to sustain.

I’m not saying that French wine hasn’t had its share of problems in the past half- century. An industry that had developed to slake the thirst of a local, and sometimes indiscriminate market that consumed something in the region of 120 litres per head per year as recently as the 1960s, has not always coped well with the changes demanded by a drop to something like 40 litres per head (and, with younger drinkers increasingly turning away from wine, counting downwards).

Life for many growers, particularly in the historic engine rooms of production in LanguedocRoussillon and the less glamorous rump of Bordeaux, is often grindingly hard and poorly rewarded. Answers to the questions posed by the new world revolution have often been neither punctual nor convincing. Meanwhile, the quality of wine all over the world has improved, including at the level of so-called fine wine that the French have so long defined and dominated.

But there is another, no less compelling, and rather more positive parallel story to tell about French wine in 2023. This, after all, is a country that has just reported record wine and spirits exports: up 11.2% to €17.2bn in 2022.

French wines also continue to dominate the traditional world of fine wine and investment, accounting for 78 of the 100 names on Liv-ex’s Power 100 Index. But French vignerons have also played arguably the leading role in developing the natural and natural-leaning scenes that have become a kind of alternative, more affordable “new” fine wine scene, while French winemakers and companies remain the single most influential source of outside expertise and investment all over the winemaking world, from the 25 French owners of vineyards in Napa Valley, to the work of LVMH in shaping China’s first genuinely fine wine, Ao Yun.

Even the story of a Latvian – “un letton!” – beating the French at their own game at the ASI Best Sommelier of the World is not quite the telling detail detractors of French wine might think it is. This after all is a competition that was started in France, by an organisation that was formed in France, celebrating a profession that emerged in France.

The culture of sommellerie may have long since spread around the globe, attracting adherents from Vienna to Taipei. But at its heart it remains, like so much else in the wine world, quintessentially French.