The headwinds Franco encountered in Verona this April were not, in themselves, unfamiliar — the wine trade has always had its share of obstacles, its seasons of uncertainty, its moments when the market seemed to be sending signals that nobody particularly wanted to decode. What was different this time, what Franco and the other Americans who made the journey to Veronafiere were carrying with them like extra baggage through the pavilion gates, was the sheer accumulation of it all, the sense that the problems had stopped arriving one at a time and had decided, collectively, to show up together.
There were the tariffs, of course, which had become a kind of running dark joke among the trade — proposed, then walked back, then reinstated in a different form, then paused again while everyone waited to see what mood Washington was in that particular morning. The Italian producers understood tariffs in the abstract, had lived through trade disputes before, but what they couldn't quite grasp was the improvisational quality of this particular administration's approach to commerce, the sense that policy was being made in real time by someone who had not read, or did not care about, the previous chapter. American buyers were showing up to Vinitaly booths unable to quote prices with any confidence, unable to commit to volumes, unable to say with certainty what a case of Barolo would cost by the time it reached a shop floor in Cincinnati or Dallas or Portland.
And that was before you factored in the broader atmosphere of unease — the war in the Middle East that had been grinding on long enough to stop being breaking news but not long enough to stop affecting energy costs and shipping routes and the general disposition of consumers who had grown accustomed to a world that seemed, however imperfectly, to be moving toward something better rather than away from it. Consumer confidence, that slippery and ultimately emotional measure of whether people feel like spending money on things that bring them pleasure, had been eroding for months, and the distributors and importers, the wine shop owners and restaurant operators who had made the trip to Verona were carrying that erosion with them, visible in the way they tasted — carefully, noncommittally, one eye always on the price list.
The competition for the American drinking occasion had also changed in ways that would have been difficult to explain to an Italian farmer who had been making wine on the same hillside for three generations. Ready-to-drink canned cocktails, hard seltzers engineered for convenience and sessionability, cannabis in forms that ranged from the discreet to the theatrical, alcohol-removed wines that had quietly gotten good enough to fool people at a casual dinner — all of it was eating into the moments that wine used to own without competition. And underneath all of that, still accumulating in the data and in the anecdotal reports coming from the front lines of retail and hospitality, was something harder to name but impossible to ignore: a new class of medications, prescribed now in numbers that were reshaping entire categories of consumer behavior, that seemed to be doing something to the appetite for alcohol that nobody had fully quantified yet but that everybody in a serious conversation was beginning to talk around, carefully, the way you talk around something when you're not quite ready to say it directly.
It went beyond goals and sales targets. It was as if the whole industry was stuck in its metaphorical straight of Hormuz waiting for something to change, some giant to break, some easing of the passage through the narrow halls of commerce. Franco and his colleagues had never seen anything like this. The older tradesmen and women had. Similar things happened in the 1970s with the oil crisis, in the 1980’s with the banking and another oil crisis, in the early 1990’s with the first gulf war and dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the late 1990’s early 2000’s with the dot com bust and in 2001 with the 9/11 tragedy. But this time it was different.
Meanwhile the farmers and winemakers loaded up their cars and drove home to Calabria, Sardegna, Piemonte, Toscana and all points in between and beyond. They’d be deceived twice – first by a country that was once their largest export market and secondly by the organization put in place to promote their wares. Caught between liars and thieves, and once again the noose around the little guy, the family farmer, tightened.
“Davvero desolante leggere queste sue parole e per me, figlia di chi ha ideato Vinitaly e che nella Fiera di Verona ha messo tutta la sua passione, lo è ancora di più. Naturalmente la stampa locale non parla di questa 'disorganizzazione', chiamiamola così. Evidentemente gli interessi sono altri. Grazie per tutto quello che fa e continuerà a fare per il vino italiano.” - Serena Betti
[Trans: It is truly disheartening to read your words—and for me, the daughter of the man who conceived Vinitaly and who poured his entire passion into the Verona Trade Fair, it is even more so. Naturally, the local press makes no mention of this "disorganization"—let's call it that. Evidently, other interests are at play. Thank you for everything you do, and will continue to do, for Italian wine. -Serena Betti]
“…other interests are at play.”
When are these forces going to stop playing with the lives of farmers and their families?
Hit me with those laser beams, Frankie...
