Speaking from the OIV’s headquarters in Paris, by web conference, Director General Pau Roca presented on 27 April, information on wine production, consumption and international trade in 2021.
State of the World Vine and Wine Sector
State of the World Vine and Wine Sector in Russian
REPLAY
First meetings in Dijon, new OIV headquarters
The GA launched the procedure of ratification of the changes in the Founding Agreement to include the transfer from Paris to Dijon.
The Director General and the President informed the Assembly about the procedure that will install the new office of the Organisation provisionally in La Cité internationale de la Gastronomie et du Vin. Part of this recently inaugurated complex was proposed by the City Council of Dijon while the works to habilitate the future headquarters in the Hotel Bouchu d’Esterno are underway. The works are expected to take two years.
Texas new observer
The State of Texas was accepted as new OIV observer. By joining the organisation as observers, Texas aspires to enter into contact with the rich network of experts from all around the globe. “We come to the OIV to learn from the best practices and the experiences of great countries of the world of vine and wine. Texas has lots of ideas and initiatives to share with the world”, said the deputy commissioner of agriculture of Texas in his intervention, Jason Fearneyhough. As a proof, the State shares the challenges identified by the OIV in Climate Change and Digitalisation. “We want Texas to be inspired by the world, and the world to be inspired by what we do in Texas", he added.
43rd Congress of Vine and Wine in Mexico
After two years of pandemic and without having celebrated the respective congresses, Mexico was granted the first and most important event of the Vitivinicultural sector in the world now that the most dangerous effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have diminished.
Mexico was chosen by the OIV Member States for many reasons such as: The geographical representation and growing importance in the vine and wine sector due to the country's commitment to increase its wine production.
The 43rd World Congress of Vine and Wine is committed to being an inclusive, safe and sustainable event. To this end, a Sustainability and Best Practices Committee has been appointed to intervene in the design, planning, organization, execution and evaluation of the Congress.
The OIV Scientific and Technical Committee (CST) of October 2019 endorses the incorporation of the study of the use of water in the wine making process as an issue into the OIV work programme. A Task Force on Water into Wine has been established to deal with scientific and technical issues related to the addition of water in the wine making process and Prof Monika Christmann has been designated as rapporteur.
This document brings together in its first part, the history of the notifications sent to the WTO and the second part is devoted to the state of art of the various regulations in this area.
Addition of water is generally allowed for technological requirements and in particular to incorporate any oenological substances permitted for use as a food additive or a processing aid.
In addition, the different regulations do not specify a maximum percentage of water used for technological requirements.
The members of the Task Force have studied the requirements of exogenous technological water for the dissolution of oenological products and winemaking practices.
The lack of knowledge and transparency on the quantities of water added for oenological questions actually poses a problem of legal insecurity for operators in international transactions.
It is important to make all decisions based on science and to not let governments play with this unknown situation.
This report identifies three main areas of investigation for the OIV in relation to the issue of water in the wine making process.
1.Methods of analysis
2.Provision regarding water addition for specific Technical needs
3.The impact of oenological practices
Read the report.
This year, the Consortium of international companies (Familia Torres from Spain, Moët & Hennessy from France, Sogrape from Portugal, Viña Concha y Toro from Chile and Yalumba Family Winemakers from Australia) is making an equivalent contribution to that determined by the OIV, which makes it possible to offer different types of research grants.
Priority themes for 2022 research grants
This year, special attention will be given to:
1. Conservation and Sustainable Management of Biodiversity and Ecosystems in Transitioning to a Nature-Positive Grape and Wine Value Chain
2. Sustainable management and adaptation to climate change.
3. Living and Healthy soils in viticulture
2022 - OIV Research grant program in support of priority programme fields
Application forms must be filled out and sent preferably by E-mail to job@oiv.int or by mail to OIV – Research grants – 12 Parvis de l'UNESCO – 21000 Dijon CEDEX,
Deadline for submitting requests: 6 November 2022
Among the distinguishing features of his character is his relationship with alcohol, which cannot be explained solely by the usual behaviour of a circle of young people grouped under the term, the ‘Lost Generation’, potentially coined by Gertrude Stein.1 She thus would designate a group of writers, artists, and publishers who came to Paris to escape the American Prohibition. From this war-torn generation a literary movement was born, highlighting the invigorating virtues of wine in general and of Paris, the capital of pleasure, in particular.
The image of a writer working at a table in a Parisian bistro has been etched in our minds by stories of all registers by and about this clan of gifted revellers, some of whom owed a certain amount of their creative energy to alcohol. Hemingway, however, embodied the sort of melancholy genius that has been associated with drunkenness and creativity since Aristotle, and that is now called bipolarity.2 But beyond this nebulous and often tragic combination, Hemingway often presents and represents wine through an idiosyncratic art of writing, cadenced like a surge of drunkenness.
Bottle semantics
Through a writing style that leaves nothing to chance, Hemingway gives us a kaleidoscopic vision of alcohol. Beyond the obvious attraction, he turned it into both a character and a commodity with a wide symbolic arsenal representing friendship, masculinity, vulnerability, flight or even self-destruction, but also an element of sensual pleasure and an invitation to a stylistic, lexical and semantic journey.
In his writing, Hemingway adapts his phrasing to the dynamism of the scenes and plays with time, translating the perceptual variations of his protagonists, especially according to their state of intoxication. The past narrative thus alternates with the present. This practice of oscillating time is particularly effective in Hemingway’s work, generating a sense of instability that is common in literature of the era.3 Indeed, his playing with time makes it possible to express a new state of consciousness, and it takes a form of detachment to accept its condition, between shadow and light, or even to understand other literary geniuses – Turgenieff, in particular.4 Most often, however, Hemingway expresses the wandering thoughts of a generation caught between antagonistic ideologies, which he uses as mirrors of man’s inner torments.5 In this way, his literary journey is loaded with meaning, and this fictional discontinuity translating the sinews of life is a grand theme of modernist literature. Hemingway expressed this theme through brevity and disguise, a mode of expression akin to the twists and turns brought by the drunkenness of his characters in all their respective complexities. More than the alcohol they quaff in this semantic journey, their foggy paths present unfaithful mirrors, as thought and memory sometimes do.
Alcohol as a linguistic code
In the short story titled ‘Hills Like White Elephants’,6 the phrase ‘the man drank his beer’ means ‘he said’, a repetitive activity in which the idea of raising the forearm conveys this nod in agreement. In ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, ‘Oh, I'm still drinking their whisky’ serves as a cue for hunters to announce that a safari has gone wrong. Otherwise, the winner toasts to the sound of ‘Tonight we'll have champagne for the lion’.
More complex are the flows used in the semantic field of seduction: thus, an important female protagonist of Hemingway's first published novel, The Sun Also Rises, Brett, evokes masculine advances by mentioning being offered a drink (‘Bought me a drink’7), a silently eloquent invitation, which elicits satisfaction or annoyance depending on who is asking.
Wine, the acolyte of sociability
In virtually all of his works, Hemingway portrays alcohol as a protean character, of which wine in particular takes on a series of facets. This omnipresence is particularly striking in A Moveable Feast, a work of fiction with an autobiographical allure.8
Unlike distilled alcohol, or even beer, which accompanies many drunken deliriums, wine appears in many festive situations – which relates Hemingway to Jefferson's grand plan to fight against rampant alcoholism through oenophilia.9
Celebrating ‘togetherness’, wine carries a complex symbolism akin to the simplest scenes: a fishing trip (Fiesta: the Sun Also Rises, chaps. 12 and 13), or a series of alliances (A Farewell to Arms, chap. 7), which can also emerge around strong alcohols like rum.10
Champagne, unsurprisingly, showers many friendly festivities. The mention of a brand adds to the celebration, Mumm in The Sun Also Rises, or Perrier-Jouët in The Garden of Eden11); it acts as an additive to the general exaltation of a youth in a constantly evolving universe.
Hemingway individualises wine throughout his work. Nevertheless, careful observation reveals that each wine performs a specific role. His reverence for Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Saint-Émilion makes him appear as a connoisseur, capable too of appreciating a Château-Margaux to the point of detecting in it the sign of a return to civilisation after a drinking binge.12 He evokes the messages that wines convey, even when their strength leads drinkers to dilute them with water.13
White wines, however, can reflect the lightness and enthusiasm of vibrant youth: the wines of Chablis, Sancerre, Pouilly-Fuissé, Montagny or Mâcon, accompany a kind of counter-rivalry in Montparnasse during the inter-war period.
Less immediately identifiable to Hemingway in the collective imagination is his ability to have wine mirror feelings. For example, he chose Beaune wine (leaving the colour and climate free to the reader's interpretation) to illustrate a moment of peaceful intimacy with his wife, Hadley. A particularly eloquent sequence shows them rejoicing at the idea of ‘drinking Beaune’ before reading, then ‘going to bed and making love’.14 This harmonious intimacy is part of the playful side of the sociability that accompanies wine,15 in contrast to veiled situations of modern bacchanals.
Inspiring liqueurs
In Hemingway, alcohol enters the “aesthetics of the personal breakdown” through its abundant variety, and thus becomes a lexical and semantic sphere.16 This escape through alcohol sometimes appears as a mirage, reminiscent of the pictorial motif of the vanitas or the literary use of an ellipsis. With chronic drunkenness, the vicious circle drags on and the feeling of emptiness inherent in the human species is reduced to existential nothingness.
Alcohol has a thousand meanings in the creative terminology of Ernest Hemingway, not all of them positive. The main message of Ernest Hemingway's prose on alcohol lies in its metamorphic principle. Within the multitude of spaces, feelings and meanings that wine has, let us remember the seductive idea of wine of a stimulator of amorous impulses, the spark of artistic stimulation, and amiable sociability.
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1 Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. The talented guests who would gather at her salon in Paris (rue de Fleurus), including Picasso, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, helped define modernism in literature and art.
2 Within the extensive bibliography devoted to the subject, see Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire, Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Free Press Paperbacks, published by Simon & Schuster New York, 1994, chap. 6. For the Aristotelian foundational text, see Jackie Pigeaud’s edition (and introduction to the edition), L’homme de génie et la mélancolie, Paris, Rivages poche, Petite Bibliothèque, 1988.
3 What Crowley calls the ‘drunk narrative’. W. Crowley, The White Logic, Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction, 1994, Preface, page x.
4 Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, chap. 14.
5 A Farewell to Arms, chap. 12
6 Published in 1927, this short story sometimes appears in French under the title ‘Paradis perdu’.
7 The Sun Also Rises, Book 2, chap. 8.
8 Posthumous novel published in 1964.
9 See my Oenocultural Note number 1
10 A Farewell to Arms, chap. 7; 9.
11 The Garden of Eden, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986, chap. 19, p. 162, “such a nice wine […] we were always so happy with it”; “‘It was always such a nice wine’ she said. ‘And we were always so so happy with it’.”
12 The Sun Also Rises, chap. 19.
13 Spanish and Italian wines are mentioned here and there (Rioja Alta, Valdepeñas, Marsala, Piombo, Chianti) as well as some Swiss (from Aigle or Sion) and Algerian wines.
14 A Moveable Feast, ‘Miss Stein Instructs’.
15 A Moveable Feast, ‘With Pascin at the Dôme’.
16 Breakdown now replaces the idea of the crack, which modernist authors developed as a literary aesthetics, Fitzgerald in particular, in The Crack-Up published in 1936. This topos was then adopted by an entire generation.
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