Angela Merkel Wants You to Drink More Riesling in New German Wine Push

(Bloomberg) -- Germany has fallen behind European competitors in grabbing its share of growing wine exports and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government wants to address that by aggressively marketing top products like Riesling.

In the first revamp of its marketing strategy in a quarter of a century, Germany will roll out a “pyramid” of protection labels that link wines more closely to specific regions, Agriculture Minister Julia Kloeckner said Wednesday in Berlin. Top wines like Mosel Valley Riesling will sit atop the pyramid, which follows the principle of “the smaller the origin, the higher the quality,” she said.

The aim is to sharpen consumers’ association of quality wines with origin to help boost sales, said Kloeckner, who hails from a family of vintners in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. She was named Germany’s Wine Queen in 1995.

“We want to give consumers better orientation when surveying the wine shelves,” said Kloeckner. Germany’s reputation for quality suffers in regions like the U.K., where consumers lack help in differentiating wines and typically see German ones as “sweet” and white, she said.

Between 2008 and 2018, the European Union increased wine exports outside the bloc to 11.6 billion euros ($13.8 billion), from 6.1 billion euros, according to the German agriculture ministry. Germany’s export share declined to 307 million euros from 434 million during that period.

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