It is a through-the-looking-glass alternative to Australia, but not everything is fine in Swiss wine.
“Careful… CAREFUL!”
The bespeckled figure of Marie-Therese Chappaz moves across the cliff face of her alpine vineyard with a practised, sure-footed assurance, but she’s right to caution others.
Stumble, and you might find yourself crashing through rows of Gamay or the local Petit Arvine grape on the way to a minutes-long fall and perhaps a helicopter rescue.
It is a dramatic setting to grow grapes, and that’s just how the Swiss vigneron likes it.
“I don’t like the vineyard flat,” she says, from her winery near the small village of Fully.
“I like what is difficult.”
For a country famed for its neutrality, there are remarkable extremes to Swiss wine.
That it even has an industry — let alone one of such compelling quality — might come as a surprise.
Switzerland’s celebrated cheese and chocolate have a habit of turning up all around the world, yet scarcely a drop of its wine makes it outside the country.
Of the more than 100 million litres produced across a network of scenically jaw-dropping regions each year, only 1 per cent is exported.
It’s a through-the-looking-glass alternative to Australia’s billion-litre industry — where almost 60 per cent is sent to overseas markets.
As Australian winemakers this year found themselves in the desperate scenario of ripping up vines, due in part to the volatility of the Chinese market, Swiss producers have been forced to contend with a different suite of issues.
“We have no reputation for Swiss wine,” Ms Chappaz says.
“People don’t imagine in Switzerland there are vineyards.
“They think skiing, snow, raclette, cow — but not vineyards.
“I think the wine is very good. We can make a good reputation.
“But we are a little too late.”
Grape new world
The way José Vouillamoz tells it, the Swiss have an unusual combination of greediness and ambivalence toward their wine.
“We keep all of the best wines for us,” he says.
“But Swiss people are not proud of their wines.”
The grape geneticist and wine writer is, himself, far from apathetic.
He thinks the best of his country’s wines can compete with any in the world, and recalls with pride the time Swiss wines won a blind tasting competition against decorated French and Australian winemakers.
Still, he despairs at some of the quirks of his country’s industry.
“There are many restaurants here where you find zero Swiss wine on the list, because the wine is not considered good enough. Zero!”
If locals can be accused of taking their own wines for granted, they have nonetheless represented a reliable, if insular market.
The Swiss are prodigious wine drinkers, consuming 36 bottles per capita each year (a third more than Australians).
As with Australia, that figure is starting to decline, but perhaps more destabilising is the increasing arrival of wines from European neighbours France, Italy and Spain.
Switzerland’s famously high cost of, well, everything means it is difficult to compete on price.
“We have a saying in Switzerland: we make the most expensive cheap wines and the cheapest expensive wines,” Mr Vouillamoz says.
The nation’s parliament recently tripled the amount it spends on promoting Swiss wine to Swiss consumers to 9 million euros (around $15 million) in recognition of the changing dynamic.
Italy reportedly spends double that in its efforts to muscle in on the Swiss market.
“It’s a very big issue,” concedes the country’s director of the Federal Office for Agriculture, Christian Hofer.
The Swiss bureaucrat suggests the path forward for winemakers is to focus on quality — to celebrate the country’s enviable growing conditions through regionally specific wines.
Yet one unusual legacy of having such a hyper-localised market is the odd nature of the competition it has created.
Switzerland produces wines that can’t be found anywhere else in the world, but many wineries still plant dozens of imported varieties in the hopes of having a local point of difference at the cellar door.
Its growing area is a tenth of the size of Australia’s, yet Switzerland tries its hand at twice as many grape varieties — a confounding 252 over just 15,000 hectares.
“If you look at the picture of grape varieties in Switzerland, you go crazy,” Mr Vouillamoz says.
“We have a closed market, and the main competitor for a winery is the winery next door.
“So if I have a winery and you are my neighbour, I will plant Sangiovese because you don’t have it.
“I don’t know if the wine will be good, but you don’t have it. So if I have it, I win.
“For me, this is not a good long-term strategy.
“In my opinion, the main competitor is not your neighbour. It is wines from abroad.”
‘It can’t be like Universal studios’
The artist Prince was seemingly so moved when he travelled through the Swiss wine region of Lavaux (thought to be on his way to the Montreux Jazz Festival) that he penned a song in its honour.
Take me to the vineyards of Lavaux
Wanna see the mountains where the waters flow
Phillipe Bujard still blasts Lavaux out of his car speakers as he drives past the surreal terraced vineyards of his neighbourhood.
“It’s like a movie!” he beams.
With Lake Geneva sitting in calm, crystalline beauty at its feet, there is undoubtably a cinematic quality to the UNESCO cultural heritage region.
Every camera angle is captured by a steady stream of tourists, whose buses navigate narrow roads and sharp village corners.
As with much of Switzerland’s agricultural output, vineyard owners are paid subsidies by the government, in part to maintain the aesthetic qualities of the region.
For Mr Bujard, a winemaker and educator whose family have lived in the same village since 1535, the area must first and foremost focus on wine production, or risk becoming something of a movie set.
“The place of the tourist is very important, but it can’t be like Universal studios,” he says.
“About 200 families are involved in the wine production. It’s not like a museum where you pay some people who play a role in a drama.
“This balance is very important.”
It all forms part of the complex story Switzerland’s wine industry is trying to tell about itself.
At a natural wine festival in Zurich, down a graffitied alleyway and up a flight of industrial steps, a young crowd drinks their way through an array of brightly coloured, minimal intervention wines.
Former sommelier turned winemaker Benjamin Dupas pours some of his own, optimistic about where the industry is headed.
“It’s definitely, for me, the future of viticulture. We have grape varieties that are only in Switzerland,” he says.
“We should always have (local varieties) Chasselas or Petit Arvine on every wine list in the world.”
Just finding Swiss wines anywhere outside of Switzerland would be a start.
Up a mountain in the southern alps of Valais, accessed via a rickety private cable car, you can find one of the few winemakers who endeavour to do just that.
Marion Granges-Faiss was born in the valley below, and moved up the mountain when she married her late husband Jacques in 1971.
For decades, she and her family have clambered up and down vineyards (890m above sea level at their highest), at times with the aid of a beloved family donkey, making delicate, expressive wines.
The 77-year-old and her daughter Séverine continue to produce wine under the Domaine de Beudon label, which can be found around the world, including Australia — albeit in small quantities.
“When Switzerland imports so much wine, we [export] out,” she says.
“I sell the wine, and people like it. So if that’s in Australia, why not?”
Like other staunch advocates, she believes the best way to improve Swiss wine’s reputation within the country is to build its profile outside of it.
In the meantime, her focus is on creating wines that taste the way this region feels to her — something a country could be proud of.
“We are mountain wine growers,” Ms Granges-Faiss says.
“We don’t make it with tractors and cars.
“We go by foot.
“I am old. I have made big roots here.
“And I live here with those roots.
“I am like the wine and the wines are like I am.”
Jeremy Story Carter travelled to the 2024 IFAJ Congress in Switzerland as a winner of the National Rural Press Club awards.
Credits
Reporting, photography and digital production: Jeremy Story Carter
