Bordeaux: French wine capital and 'best city to visit'

Hello and thanks for joining us here on France 24 for France In Focus, this edition coming to you from the southwestern city of Bordeaux, a city famous the world over not just for its beauty but also for its wines, which it's producing here for more than 10 centuries. Well, the city is also home to an impressive new wine museum, which we'll be showing you around. We'll also find out more about the growing competition in this sector, plus we'll show you a rather unusual technique for producing wine. But let's start by looking at the changing habits of French consumers. France tops the list of the world's biggest wine-drinking nations. The French consume 47.7 litres of wine on average per capita, roughly 60 bottles every year. That's more than any other country in the world, but much less than it was 50 years ago. In the 1960s, the amount of wine consumed per head in France was 160 litres a year. 86% of French households bought wine in 2014, with every adult drinking on average half a glass every day. And the French know what's best for them. Nine out of ten bottles consumed in France are produced in France. Red wine is by far the most popular option, accounting for 54% of total bottles bought in the country. Rose comes second with 28%, and white wine is third with just 18%. Consumption habits have changed in recent years. Back in 1980, 51% of French adults were consuming wine on a daily basis. Today, that figure has fallen to 16%. This as young people are increasingly turning to other alcoholic beverages. A third of those under 30 now say their favourite drink is beer. This monument in the central Place de la Victoire is dedicated to wine. And it goes to show just how important wine is to the local economy. But it's not just important on a local level. Wine is important on a national level. Last year, it brought in 12 billion euros to the French coffers. But as we're about to see in this next report, and you can ask any wine producer in the region, the sector is facing competition like never before. The Château de la Verrière vineyard has been owned by the Besset family for over a century. Business has expanded in recent years. We had around 20 hectares of vines in the year 2000. We now have 75 spread out over several areas around our property. Expansion came as the vineyard built its export business with Japan and the United States. 70% of production goes abroad. However, the Château is an exception, not the rule, with French wine exports last year actually lower than a decade earlier. Alain Besset says the turning point for him was investing in technology. It was one way of being a little bit more competitive, giving better value. It has been really important to work on all aspects of production. And that has included giving the brand a makeover. This is a bottle with a label we used up to 2008. We changed our look that year. A design company created a much nicer label, and that helped us in accessing markets, especially the US, which had been difficult to get into. Some wine industry professionals fear such efforts are too little too late, as French wine loses out to wines from emerging markets, such as Chile. The Chileans have negotiated free trade agreements with China and a number of other countries. What we're seeing is that we are competing with countries which don't have to pay the tariffs we do. We are penalized, and that's a handicap. Wine growers say they're counting on 2015's exceptional vintage to maintain demand from around the world for Bordeaux. We're now at Bordeaux's newly opened Cité du Vin, a 50 meter tall museum dedicated solely to wine. It's on the banks of the river Garonne here in Bordeaux. It's frankly a place that would make the Roman god Bacchus impressed. We're going to take you now on a little look around. This is one museum that won't have trouble attracting visitors. It's La Cité du Vin, the first museum in the world dedicated to winemaking. Overlooking the Garonne River, the futuristic building is hard to miss. With its glass, aluminium and wood exterior that some say resemble a wine decanter, but for others looks more like a grapevine. We were inspired by things like the winding nature and colour of the Garonne River. If people want to see it as a grapevine, that's fine, but it wasn't our objective. La Cité du Vin took three years to build. It's covered with 900 glass panels, 2500 aluminium panels and a majestic wooden structure. The museum also boasts of an interactive exhibition featuring 120 multimedia programs. The goal is to understand the influence of wine through different civilizations. Wine is over 8,000 years old and yet it is unique. As soon as it is produced in a country, the landscape changes, the architecture changes, the economy changes. Our museum aims to talk about the civilization of wine. After coming here, the visitor no longer sees wine in the same way. Visitors can attend a workshop to smell the different aromas of wine. There's also, of course, tasting sessions, where people can sample one of the museum's 7,000 international wines. We're trying to take the hype away from wine tasting. Wine tasting is very simple, but people get intimidated because they think it's complicated. It's not. We all have the right to say and think what we want. Bordeaux is hoping the museum will draw 500,000 visitors a year and in the process stamp its mark as a wine capital of the world. Just over there is the Chartrand district of Bordeaux, which back in the day was home to some of the region's most important wine merchants. Well, fast forward to the present day, and the sales of French wines to China shot up some 20% during the course of last year. And with China's thirst for wine is also coming a thirst for knowledge, as we're about to see in this next report. A wine tasting starts the day at this business school. The students have to detect the vine varieties being used at a particular vineyard. It's specialized training, and more and more Chinese are interested in learning. They get to know about wine, and once they like it and have gained the know-how, they export. It's good news for Bordeaux to have ambassadors like these throughout such a huge country. French wine currently accounts for nearly half, 46%, of wine imports in China. I want to return to China and work as a buyer. If I have the chance in France, I would like to export to China. The Chinese are also producing wine in France. Wealthy investors from the Middle Kingdom are drawn by the lifestyle and savoir-faire in France's southwest. Half of this estate agent's clients are from China. A vineyard is not expensive. Buying a chateau for four million euros is the price you pay to buy a small flat in the center of Hong Kong. Drinking wine has become more popular in China in recent years. The country now ranks fifth in terms of wine consumption. We are here above all to produce wine. Wines that Chinese people will like. And then we also want to develop tourism. That's why we have a beautiful chateau with a pleasant French atmosphere that Chinese customers will like. The French wine industry is hoping interest will grow as the country's middle class develops. Forty million young Chinese will reach adult age in the next five years and could become consumers of the future. We're now about 35 kilometers north of Bordeaux, near the world-famous village of Saint-Emilion. And as we're about to discover, the techniques for producing wines are changing all the time. Well, there's one technique we don't hear very much about. It's called biodynamic wine. And we're going to meet now Alain Mouix, who is the owner of Chateau Fonroc, who produces specifically this type of wine. Very nice to meet you, Alain. Could you start by telling us, what exactly is biodynamic wine? Biodynamics is a holistic approach based on the idea that all elements interact with each other. It means we have to look at the vine's immediate environment, the soil, the plant itself. But we also look at other factors such as the influence of the moon and the stars. The reason for this is to try and strike a harmonious balance between earth, vines and the people who work here. What is the difference in taste? What is the difference for the consumer of buying a biodynamic wine versus an ordinary non-biodynamic wine? Biodynamic wines tend to have more delicate tannins. That's especially the case with red wines. The flavors are more intense. They're easy to drink and, in my opinion, they don't give you a headache. OK, we're going to go and have a look now at some of the techniques used in producing a biodynamic wine. So here we're making willow tea. We use it as fungicide. We just put willow leaves in some water and then we heat the whole thing. Tomorrow we'll have to dilute the tea and then we'll spray it onto the vines. So we're surrounded here by barrels. There are about 300 bottles of wine in each barrel. How much wine are you producing each year? Between 80,000 and 100,000 bottles. And where can we actually buy your wines? What are your main markets around the world? We sell our wines all around the world, but most of our exports go to countries where there is greater environmental awareness, in particular countries in northern Europe, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, even some parts of the US. Alain, this chateau has been in your family for four generations. You're the fourth generation. How did everybody react when you said you wanted to make this a biodynamic chateau? I didn't tell anyone about it. I just did it. Many people were a bit surprised, but then they realised after a couple of years that the vines were as healthy as before and that the quality of the wine was actually improving. So they embraced the concept. Well, that's it for this week's edition of France In Focus. We're going to leave you here amongst the vines in Bordeaux. Thanks for watching. See you again soon here on France 24.