Dry January has crawled to an end, and thank heavens for that. I never tolerated food and drink fads in my kids, so don’t want to hear about them from adults. It is time instead to talk of wine and, more specifically, wine tourism. I’ve been practising it for decades – walking through vineyards, sipping, slurping, talking with winemakers about landscapes, family, grape varieties and, after the fourth glass, the possibility of time travel.
Now the rest of the world is catching up. Two of Britain’s more interesting wine holiday companies – Grape Escapes and Smooth Red – are estimating 30 per cent growth for 2018. Meanwhile, the longest-established such outfit, Arblaster & Clarke, is already filling up its trips to South Africa for 2019. Naturally, wine tourism remains a niche for the cultivated. “The demographic is top-end,” says Sam McCathie at Arblaster & Clarke.
But I’m assuming that includes everyone presently reading this, so I won’t slow down.
There are good reasons for the surge. We’re all drinking a lot more wine, and from a pleasing array of countries. It is no longer the preserve of old buffers the colour of claret. “The tourism business structure has changed,” says Jenna Jones of Grape Escapes. “It used to be mainly male, mainly people who already knew about wine. These days, we’re taking couples, younger people and small groups of friends. On a recent tour to Bordeaux, we had a 19-year-old couple alongside a fellow of 75.”
As everyone points out, travel itself is now cheaper and easier. And wine is almost always produced in beautiful places to which you’d want to go anyway. Contemplate the Stellenbosch and Napa valleys, Spanish Rioja and McLaren Vale in Australia, the Alsace, Prosecco and Palatine wine routes or the highly desirable Tuscany and Provence. Here be damn-near-ideal arrangements of mountains and hills, with vines rising up slopes and rolling towards villages and towns designed for mellow well-being.
And the thing is, precisely, that these are wine countries; have been, in the main, for centuries. Wine tourism furnishes a satisfactory supply of vintages – but so does Asda. The overwhelming advantage is that, like no other agricultural product, wine also acts as a passport to the heart of these lands, their culture and past, their food, festivals, jollity and people. Especially the people. Of course, some are pompous. A few are mad.
After a tense dinner, I was once ejected from a French estate by an ex-army officer with a shotgun in the back of his Jeep. But, in my experience, most are first-class, warm and welcoming. They give the wine a human story. You’ll think of them and maybe smile when you pull out the corkscrew back home.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
