OIV Director General John Barker says wine is “not making people drink more, but to share in a cultural experience.”
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Italian Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida had a simple message for a packed hall at Vinitaly, the world’s largest wine and spirits exhibition: A bottle of wine is not a bottle of alcohol.
“Dentro quella bottiglia di vino c’è terra, cultura, lavoro, impresa, identità, tradizione [Inside that bottle of wine there is land, culture, work, enterprise, identity, tradition],” he said.
That a sitting agriculture minister felt the need to say so — in front of an EU commissioner, three foreign counterparts and the head of the global wine sector’s scientific body — is the news.
The April 13, 2026, roundtable, co-hosted by the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV) and Italy’s Ministry of Agriculture, was titled “Recognizing the cultural value of vine and wine.” With younger consumers drinking less and warning-label proposals advancing across Europe, the session was a coordinated argument that wine deserves to be defended as something other than fungible alcohol — and, more consequentially, that the case should be taken to UNESCO for cultural heritage protection.
“Wine is a lifestyle and philosophy, not just a liquid alcoholic beverage.”
Italian Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida had a simple message for a packed hall at Vinitaly, the world’s largest wine and spirits exhibition: A bottle of wine is not a bottle of alcohol.
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OIV Director General John Barker opened by framing the stakes. Wine, he said, is “not simply an economic commodity” but a cultural asset that has “been part of the history of humanity for more than 8,000 years.” With consumption habits shifting, the question is how to “share what is precious while empowering the next generation to adapt and grow this cultural asset.”
Lollobrigida was less diplomatic. He turned to the warning-label question that has dominated European wine politics.
“Il vino non è una sostanza pericolosa. L’alcol contenuto all’interno di molti prodotti, tra i quali il vino, ha delle caratteristiche di pericolosità, ma il vino è molto altro [Wine is not a dangerous substance. The alcohol contained in many products, including wine, has characteristics of danger, but wine is much more],” he said. Dismissing Brussels label proposals as the work of “a bureaucrat,” he argued that despite the headlines, alarmist labeling is “not on the agenda.”
Georgian Minister of Environmental Protection and Agriculture David Songulashvili, speaking in English, pushed the argument further than any European on the panel. “Wine is a lifestyle and philosophy, not just a liquid alcoholic beverage,” he said. “I’m coming from the country which has 8,000 years of history with wine making. Wine in Georgia is part of DNA.”
He cited Georgia’s 500 indigenous grape varieties and the qvevri tradition, inscribed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013. Then he made the day’s most direct rebuttal. “There is some kind of campaign against wine,” he said. “Look at us — we are 8,000 years.”
Serbia’s Dragan Glamočić traced his country’s viticulture to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Probus, who promoted vine planting on the slopes of Fruška Gora in the third century. Serbia, he announced, has begun the procedure to inscribe the historic Negotin wine cellars on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
Wine in Serbia, he said in Italian, is “espressione di identità, testimonianza della storia e risultato di un rapporto complesso tra uomo, natura e cultura [an expression of identity, testimony of history, and the result of a complex relationship between humans, nature and culture].”
Sandro Sartor, president of Wine in Moderation, said, “è bevuto, guarda caso, in un modo moderato, in un modo consapevole, anche quotidiano, ma sicuramente responsabile [it is consumed, as it happens, in a moderate, conscious, even daily, but certainly responsible way].”
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Marzia Varvaglione, president of the Comité Européen des Entreprises Vins (CEEV), made the producers’ case bluntly: “Il vino è cultura [Wine is culture].”
She pointed to 15 million wine tourists who visited European producers last year, generating over $17 billion, and to nearly 1,700 European protected designations already linking each bottle to a place and family. UNESCO recognition, she argued, would amplify that system at a moment when the next generation pays close attention to lifestyle.
Sandro Sartor, president of Wine in Moderation, made a poignant distinction for American readers. In countries where wine has been embedded in daily life for millennia, he said, “è bevuto, guarda caso, in un modo moderato, in un modo consapevole, anche quotidiano, ma sicuramente responsabile [it is consumed, as it happens, in a moderate, conscious, even daily, but certainly responsible way].”
Where wine isn’t culturally rooted, he said, consumption tends to be occasional and often not responsible. Cultural recognition matters, he argued, because it places wine in a frame other than what Lollobrigida had just rejected: not, in Sartor’s phrase, “un vettore della molecola di etanolo [a vector for the ethanol molecule].”
The most consequential takeaway came in Barker’s closing summary. The OIV will pursue “a more global recognition for the culture of wine,” he said, explicitly raising UNESCO as the framework. Italy’s recent inscription of its cuisine on UNESCO’s heritage list is the obvious template.
For American wine drinkers, the implications are closer to home than they may seem. In January 2025, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory calling for cancer warning labels on alcoholic beverages — the same kind of labeling Lollobrigida was attacking in Verona.
A year later, on January 7, 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services and USDA released the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, dropping the long-standing one-drink-for-women, two-drinks-for-men ceiling and replacing it with the broader directive to “consume less alcohol for better health.”
In other words, the policy current the OIV is pushing back against is not just a European phenomenon. It is the same current shaping what the bottle of California Cabernet Sauvignon, Oregon Pinot Noir or Texas Tempranillo on your table will eventually be required to say about itself — and how the next generation of American drinkers will be told to think about it.
A formal UNESCO designation would not change U.S. labeling law overnight. But it would change the global conversation in which that law gets written. It would give policymakers a framework in which wine is heritage to be transmitted, not just alcohol to be regulated. Whether that argument lands depends less on ministers in Verona than on what happens, glass by glass, in the rooms where Americans actually drink.
Barker’s closing line is the one worth remembering. Recognizing wine as culture, he said, is “not making people drink more, but to share in a cultural experience.”
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