Since time in memoriam this time of the year (around August by our calendars) has been the time of the grape harvest. As is always the way with early history, precisely who was the first person to hit on the idea that, if left to stand, grape juice would turn into something altogether different has been forgotten by time. However there are indications that China was in the business of wine production at around 7000BC, while Georgia started at around 6000BC.

In this week’s edition of The Malta Business Weekly we include a special edition focusing on Malta’s wine industry. In his interview, Roderick Galdes, the Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries, and Animal Rights, outlined Malta’s recent history of wine making. While it is easy to blame Europe for the malaise that existed in Malta’s wine industry before and then shortly after Malta joined the European Union’s open markets, this criticism would be misplaced.

Europe is blessed with the World’s finest wine producers, producing premium products from across the continent, including Chianti from Italy, Bordeaux from France, Rioja from Spain, and Riesling from Germany (to choose only a few examples). With their economies of scale, and depth of experience in viticulture, mainland European wine producers were able to sell wines of a higher quality, yet at a cheaper price, than could local producers; and that is despite the fact that Maltese wine producers have the luxury of not actually having to transport the finished product to their local market.

Certainly life would have been easier for local producers in the short-term without the arrival of foreign competition, but only in the sense that they could have continued to produce a highly generic form of table wine, with few if any distinguishing merits other than that it was cheap. Apparently the British should bear some culpability for the neglect of Malta’s winemaking tradition by their peculiar preference for beer (particularly peculiar in the days before widespread availability of refrigeration when such ale would have been drunk warm).

Speculating a little, it is easy to imagine that before the arrival of the English, the French (including the Provençal and Auvergnese), German, Italian, and Aragonese langues all introduced their own wines and wine making traditions to these islands to create a peculiar concentration of winemaking technologies. As is examined in the special edition, going even further back, there is historical evidence of wine making dating back to Punic times, in the form of wine (and olive) presses cut into the very bedrock of Gozo. So if thousands of years of wine making expertise had been neglected in reflection of the ephemeral preferences of the British, then it was EU accession that actually reconnected Malta to its mainland European winemaking heritage.

Motivated by competition, and inspired by necessity, since 2004 Maltese wine producers have innovated. Economic common sense has corrected the strategic drift that was wafting Maltese wine production towards the rocky shoals of market failure as local vintners, without the benefits of economies of scale, produced an undifferentiated, and low value-added, vin ordinaire, targeted solely at the local market, to compete with highly efficient, and even heavily mechanised wine producing countries not only in Europe, but around the World. Import tariffs and duties were relied-on to make up for an uncompetitive market offering.

The lesson that Maltese producers took from this sobering dose of competition was that the way forward was through branding and the development of a more premium product. Consequently the Maltese wine industry has initiated a number of measures both to develop the quality of local wines, but also to define their distinctiveness. The quality of the local root stock has been buttressed with the introduction of foreign grapes varieties (a trend, in fairness, that started in the 1980s). At the same time the introduction of the IGT and DOK wine denominations has helped define a Maltese product with a clear identity.

This market differentiation has continued with research into and the refinement of Malta’s two indigenous wine varieties: the red Gellewza and white Ghirgentina. With more sophisticated branding the Maltese wine industry has created a narrative in its wine production that identifies the drink closely with the culture, civilisation, history and environment of the islands that produce it.

The lesson here is that faced with the challenge of adapting or dying, the Maltese wine industry has adapted, much to the benefit of the local consumer. Not only can Maltese wine drinkers enjoy the benefits, through the importation of better cheap wines, but they can also benefit from a far more refined local drink that now contributes to the prestige of Malta as an historical and cultural tourist destination.