The wine so good the Swiss won't share it

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. 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." We need your help to stay independent Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism "One thing we learned early on is that the Swiss drink their own wine," Jeremy Sells, Chief Operating Officer of Rosenthal Wine Merchant, one of the first American importers to feature wines from the Valais and Vaud cantons, observes. Conversely, he says that the Swiss "don't drink a lot of wine from other parts of Europe, though I think they have respect for it and they appreciate it." "They have to export cheese because there's much so much cheese," she says, "but wine exportation was never really necessary.