Review En Magnum No.28

In the great environmental upheaval that assails us, the wine civilization has, not one, but many cards to play. Viticulture is not like any other agriculture. It is no longer subsistence farming and can therefore more easily embark on drastic ecological shifts where other productions are torn between the imperative to save the planet and that of feeding the planet. Its symbolic, historical, and mystical dimension gives the commitments of winemakers a particular strength and significance. Finally, unlike countless other sectors of human activity, the world of wine is not dominated by an oligopoly of large companies, but on the contrary, fragmented into a myriad of actors, each acting or reacting in their own way, according to their personal convictions and sometimes the expectations of their respective markets. This structural scattering gives rise to a remarkable impression of bubbling awareness of the environment and the solutions that each individual, on their scale, can bring to it. Forty years ago, in a scattered order and with multiple strategies, the wine industry realized that it was high time to remedy the mediocre and productivist routine that had taken hold of its industry. It also became aware, twenty years later, individually more than collectively, that it had to overturn the table of its ecological practices. It embarked on a chaotic and exciting journey towards this essential transformation, with its modest or famous heralds, its multiple initiatives, and its still too partial results. These upheavals and new practices often corresponded to strong choices made by winemakers of character, initially often isolated in their microcosm, and then gradually joined by many others, representing all types of vineyard structures and all sizes of companies. Today, the organic revolution far exceeds the framework of a political ideology, but also that of the labels that are supposed to regulate it. It is this rich, sometimes erratic, and ultimately fundamental narrative that we tell you in the 28th issue of En Magnum. THIERRY DESSEAUVE