France elects a friend of wine?
There are a lot of reasons for the world to be glad that Emmanuel Macron trounced Marine Le Pen in France's presidential election last weekend.
The world celebrated Macron's resounding win, The Guardian newspaper in Britain reported, because France stood strong against a destabilizing "tide of populism after the Brexit vote and Donald Trump's victory in the US election."
But we're here to talk about wine, not politics, and Macron's win appears to be good news for wine lovers in France and around the world, too. Decanter, Britain's respected wine journal, reported this week that Macron appears to be not only a wine lover but a skilled enthusiast with serious blind-tasting skills.
This is important, Decanter points out, because one recent president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, was a teetotaler and actively antagonistic to France's world-leading wine industry, while another, Jacques Chirac, famously preferred beer to wine. The last president who actively supported French wine as an export industry was François Mitterrand, who left office in 1995.
There's hope for Macron, Decanter writer Laura Seal wrote on May 9. "Macron has shown knowledge of France's wine heritage. In the run-up to the election, French magazine Terre de Vins filmed a candid series of videos with the newly elected French president ... in which he shows off his blind tasting skills and declares 'wine is an ambassador' for the country." Here's a link to the Terre de Vins article and videos (in French).Macron correctly identified two of three unidentified samples: a Bordeaux Blanc and a Côteaux d'Aix en Provence rosé. His only miss came in identifying a Château Pape-Clément 2005 as being from Pauillac, not Pessac-Léognan. (I don't know that I could do better. How about you?)
Still, the article concluded, "Macron will need to work hard if he is to appeal to winemakers who voted for Le Pen, and to find favour with supporters and abstainers in an industry that has often complained of being un-loved in recent years. French parliamentary elections in June will be an interesting first test of confidence in him."
