|
|
| |
|
| |
| |
Partners:
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Vignerons d’Europe
Slow Food brings a thousand winegrowers from all over Europe to Montpellier
Vignerons d’Europe will be held on April 14 and 15, at the Montpellier congress center, in conjunction with Salon du Goût et des Saveurs d'Origine, organized by Slow Food France (April 13-16, Parc des Expositions de Montpellier).
Vignerons d’Europe will bring together 1,000 winegrowers from all over Europe for a meeting made vital by the urgent challenges imposed by an increasingly globalized market. The event is integral to the philosophy and history of the Slow Food association, which identifies issues and trends in the world of food and wine production and aims to catalyze ideas in a search for concrete solutions and proposals.
Last year as part of the second edition of Terra Madre, Slow Food brought 5,000 food producers from 150 countries together in Turin. The objective of Terra Madre was to create a network of information between food communities, helping them protect their rights: to an ecologically balanced environment, to food sovereignty and to decent living conditions.
Based on the experience it has earned over 20 years of activities in the world of international food and wine culture, Slow Food has now decided to bring together the vignerons of Europe. These are not the owners of large-scale wineries, but the winegrowers themselves, people with a strong connection to the earth, the vines and the terroir. They have a common history and have chosen to follow the same model.
Bringing together 1,000 winegrowers in Montpellier, during the centenary of the 1907 winemakers’ revolt in Languedoc and Roussillon, means opening up the debate about the current viticultural crisis, a crisis not just of economics but also of identity.
Wine’s image oscillates from the legend of a few big labels produced by the enological elite to its reduction to a simple alcoholic beverage, and the European legislation seems to support this limited view.
So who will be the winegrowers of tomorrow? Entrepreneurs, industrialists, or merely exiles from the market which matters? Today the concept of terroir is often reduced to an empty marketing formula. This has led to the weakness of wines of a terroir in respect to varietals. We must look to the past, without anachronistic nostalgia and with an awareness that we cannot turn back time but that applying industrial agricultural techniques to wine leads to a debasement of quality and value.
The Commission’s project of viticultural reform will have an historic impact on the sector. Slow Food is calling for an analysis of the document, a challenge to its criticizable aspects (the conception of wine as an agricultural commodity, deterritorialization) and a search for solutions to protect the diversity of the European vineyard. It is this diversity which represents its irreproducible wealth. |
|
| |
|
|
|
