I had arrived in Switzerland fully prepared to be taken in by the clean water and extraordinary cheeses, the obsessive devotion to muesli and quite possibly the best chocolate in the world — and I definitely was. What I hadn't expected, however, was something else that struck me from my first trip to the gastronomic wonderland of my local supermarket. The Swiss, it turns out, make incredible wine. And they aren't too keen to share it.
For a nation that's so proud of its gadgety knives that let you always have a corkscrew handy, you think they'd be more forthcoming about what you can open with them. But though they produce nearly 150 million bottles of wine a year, as a 2022 feature in the alcohol industry magazine SevenFiftyDaily explains, "The Swiss maintain a time-honored tradition of consuming the bulk of their wine within their own borders, with fewer than two percent of the country's output earmarked for export."
