‘May I suggest an excellent biodynamic vineyard tour,
followed by a visit to a 15th-century church, sir?’

Regular readers of The Vine Route already know about my interest in wine tourism. One of my first articles on this blog was about a VinExpo conference on the subject. And I’ve just put the final touches on a southern Corsica wine tourism guide for Wink Lorch’s www.winetravelguides.com website.

So I was excited, yet a little puzzled (“What do sommeliers have to do with wine tourism?,” I asked myself), as I sat down for the “What role do sommeliers have in developing quality wine tourism?” conference at Vinisud 2010.

A half-dozen sommeliers were seated at the presenters’ table in the front of the room. The introductions for these six gentlemen went on for a good fifteen minutes. “Best sommelier of France 1994,” “Best sommelier of the world 1998,” “Best sommelier of the universe”…etc., etc.” I won’t list their names and full titles here, as I want to keep this article under 1,500 words.

This is totally irrelevant to the article, but I had never realized before that sommeliers are like the rock stars of wine. The conference room was filled with other sommeliers, wannabe sommeliers, and sommelier hangers-on. I swear that one of the sommeliers in the room, just before asking a question from the floor, introduced himself as having been a sommelier in a restaurant run by a chef who was once a sous chef for Paul Bocuse .

Drumroll…. Pleaseeeese, ladies and gentlemen. These sort of titles and snobbery is why people find wine to be so intimidating, pretentious and pompous. I’ll get off my soapbox now, and get back to the conference topic, but for me, perhaps the only non-sommelier in the audience, at least one of the wheels on this discussion had already rolled into a ditch before things got underway.

The first speaker got things further astray by insisting that sommeliers needed a “formation” (“training”) in wine tourism. At the moment, he explained, the most that they can do is provide several local vineyard addresses to anyone interested in visiting some winemakers.

“Right,” I thought to myself, the sommelier is going to suggest, along with the Château Latour 2004, a wine tourism route,

The next sommelier spoke about sommeliers having a reputation as being “aloof, cold, and hiding behind a bowtie. “We need to use simpler terms, and to not be so intimidating,” he added. “And,” I silently said to myself, “get rid of those multifarious ‘Best sommelier this and that’ titles.”

We seemed to be getting somewhat back on track when this same sommelier mentioned the need to create wine routes with recommended vineyards, hotels and restaurants on them, although this was so self-evident that you wondered if he might next begin telling us about this brand new communication medium—the Internet. That’s when the next sommelier dropped the bombshell, informing us that it wasn’t the winemaker’s job to be “a wine tourism guide.”

He went on to explain that winemakers had enough to do, trying to make good wine, and all, and trying to make their vineyard profitable. “They shouldn’t have to learn English, or to spend time away from their vines or winemaking activities by entertaining questions from visitors,” he explained.

“But, but, duh…” I heard myself starting to say, aren’t these visitors potential customers? And if they’re interested enough to make their way to a vineyard, aren’t they potential customers-for-life?

Since I’ve learned over the years that customer service is an oxymoron in France, I had a hint where this discussion was headed. And I wasn’t disappointed. The next sommelier began drawing comparisons to the patrimoine-driven wine tourism in France and the “industrial” wine tourism that is practiced in Napa Valley. The new Conseil Supérieur de l’oenotourism that was created early last year within the French Ministry of Agriculture and the French Ministry of Commerce even has promoted the creation of a special, “Vin et Patrimoine” wine label that would be linked to wine tourism routes that highlight the French countryside.

The word “patrimoine,” in French, is about as difficult to translate as that elusive French word “terroir.” The best English translation seems to be the word “heritage,” but, in French, “patrimoine” goes far beyond this meaning, including everything from the paysage (countryside), traditional architecture, festivals, local gastronomy, wine (of course), and a multitude of other cultural aspects.

“We really don’t want a Napa Valley-style wine tourism,” he explained, where people in mass numbers (he mentioned a figure of two million visitors, or so, per year, but it’s actually closer to five million) are visiting vineyards in tour buses. The main goal of these wine tourists, he said (showing why he had become a sommelier rather than a diplomat), was buying baseball caps and t-shirts. He went on to say something about Australian wine tourism, but by then my ears were so inflamed that I couldn’t make out the comment.

I’m not going to get into any cultural debate here. I’m one of the world’s biggest admirers of the French countryside, and I’m all for protecting it. But a discussion about whose responsibility it is to promote French wine tourism is not really advancing things. And, not surprisingly, in true dirigiste style, eventually several people got around to saying that it was the government’s responsibility, at either the regional or national level, to create the necessary tourism infrastructure.

And, just when it seemed that the discussion was going to become bogged down completely in a cliché-ridden bog pit, the next speaker was introduced. Presented as a member of “the new generation of sommeliers,” Parisian Oliver Magny brought a distinctly capitalistic viewpoint to the table. Four years ago, at age 24, he created Ô Chateau, what they modestly call on their website “a cool wine tasting company.” Magny has been called “the Jamie Oliver of wine,” and with his shock of unkempt hair and self-promotional zeal, it’s not difficult to see the resemblance to the ubiquitous English chef.

Although it’s obvious that Ô Chateau’s style of off-the-wall, unpretentious wine tasting events won’t travel far from Paris, where it has profited from the over-abundance of foreign tourists, particularly Americans, and in its having a chic wine cellar located near the Louvre, as well as Champagne Cruises on the Seine, it’s interesting to see such a capitalistic approach to wine tourism in France taking hold. Magny said it straight out, not perhaps in so many words, but the meaning was clear: “Show me the money.”

“No one here,” he said, “is talking about the need to make money, and that’s essential if people are going to be involved with any type of wine tourism endeavor, whether it’s tourists, sommeliers, or tour guides.”

There’s no arguing about his success: over 60,000 people in the past four years have participated in Ô Chateau wine tastings. They have recently gotten the doors of Paris’s tiny vineyards of Montmartre open for a wine tasting for the first time in their history, and just their overall effort to make wine fun and interesting is novel and refreshing to see in the face of so much pomp and ceremony.

This led to the session’s last speaker, Alexandre Lazareff, a graduate of France’s elite École nationale d’administration (the school where many French senior officials are educated), a former author of gastronomic guides, and now Secretary General of the aforementioned Conseil Supérieur de l’oenotourism. His comments at Vinisud appear to indicate that this new wine tourism ministry favors creating, in each of France’s wine regions, a magnet attraction that will draw in large numbers of tourists.

Details about who would be responsible for developing the necessary hotel, restaurant and transportation infrastructure around these regional wine tourist centers wasn’t spelled out, but he did cite, as an example, Georges Duboeuf in Beaujolais. Whatever you might think of Beaujolais Nouveau or Hameau Duboeuf, the Disneyesque wine park that has attracted over one million visitors since Duboeuf opened it in 1993, there’s no denying the entrepreneurial marketing genius of this one-time vigneron.

Other similar sites mentioned by Lazareff include the €55m wine cultural center planned for Bordeaux, and a major project that he said is about to be announced in Provence. In the Languedoc-Roussillon, where this Vinisud conference was taking place, he said that someone like Gérard Bertrand, an ex-rugby international player who has built one of the region’s largest wine businesses, has the capacity and financial acumen to create a regional wine tourism center.

French Paradoxe
And I definitely have to agree with this assessment that a large wine tourism center, whether it’s a private-public partnership like that planned for Bordeaux, or something like Duboeuf World in Beaujolais, or a well-known château in Provence, or even whether it’s left up to someone like Gérard Bertrand who preaches traditional French terroir, while overseeing a modern operation with multiple properties offering multiple brands, the seed of French wine tourism has definitely been planted. It needs careful weeding and training, and it will take time to grow.  But I’ve learned from living here not to bet against French creativity, energy, and their organizational capacities. It’s going to be interesting to see how this effort evolves.

Tagged as: Tourism