Mediterranean producers unite in the face of dire adversity

This year’s Mediterranean Wine Symposium hoped to offer some sense of pan-regional collaboration, bringing together a singular, future-forward philosophy

Waitrose No.1 Castillo Perelada Cava Brut, Spain NV (£11.99, Waitrose) At a time when the world is being pulled apart by aggressively idiotic nationalism, examples of multinational cooperation, however small, can feel particularly precious and poignant. Nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the Mediterranean, where the savagery of war in the east and the brutality of border enforcement in the north make a nihilistic mockery of the very idea of togetherness. At their inaugural event in Catalonia’s Empordà last month, the organisers of the Mediterranean Wine Symposium hoped to offer at least some sense of a different world of pan-regional collaboration, however. The event, which took place in the atmospheric medieval castle home of Catalan wine estate Castillo Perelada, saw producers from Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, Slovenia, and Turkey, and guests from around the world join the hosts – the well-run cellar behind Waitrose’s excellent and good value sparkling wine among other gems – for a largely fascinating programme of talks and tastings.

Planeta Cometa, Menfi, Sicily, Italy 2023 (£36, greatwine.co.uk) In the organisers’ words, the Symposium’s aim was to offer ‘a comprehensive mosaic of the “Mediterranean philosophy” of understanding life and consequently wine’ and to present ‘the Mediterranean as a single region, which is the source of all the cultures that emerged from it’. That may have been a little ambitious for a day’s work. But there’s no doubt the event proved effective in focusing minds on areas of potential collaboration – with one issue dominating above all. As a seminar presented by climate scientists Maria Snoussi from Morocco’s Mohamed V University and Nathalie Ollat, a researcher at France’s National Institute for Agricultural Research, made abundantly and terrifyingly clear, the Mediterranean is in the very eye of the storm of climate change, with temperatures rising 20% faster than the global average, posing an existential threat to wine production. No wonder, then, that so many of my conversations at the event focused on means of mitigation, with many hopes pinned on the resilience of indigenous Mediterranean grape varieties, such as southern Italy’s fiano, as seen at the event in Planeta’s gorgeously richly exotic but fluent white.