Opinion | Wine consultants help salvage a poor harvest in France

If you happen to be in a French wine region this October, you may want to avoid narrow roads.

If you do take a picturesque track that steers you alongside vineyards heavy with fruit, your reward will most likely be trailing behind a slow truck loaded with crates of grapes, or sitting nerve-wrenchingly close to a harvesting machine that will wave its oversized arms towards the bonnet of your car as you pointlessly beep your horn and look for a safe place to overtake.

There is, however, a little sport that you can indulge in while you're sitting in this particularly seasonal traffic jam. Try to count the four-wheel-drive vehicles that waste no time in deftly manoeuvring their shiny flanks around any obstacles in the road, leaving both harvest machine and hapless tourist in their dust.

Behind the wheel is likely to be a wine consultant, the last line of defence against a wasted year in the vine, and a cog in the wheel of the grape harvest that is every bit as important (they would have you believe) as the optical sorting machine and the shiny pneumatic press.

"Consultants can of course overstate their importance," says author and winemaker Alain Aviotte with a wry smile. "They make a difference if winemakers let them, which means if they take their advice. But the consultants themselves have to take into account the individual requirements of each client and not ride roughshod over their knowledge of their own wines."

Wine consultancy has proliferated over the past few decades, and there is no region so small in France today to be exempt. In France, the title of oenologist dates back to 1955 when the trade was officially recognised by law. There are now 2,000 professionals working in vineyards, research centres and laboratories in the country.

The trade tends to be split between local experts who stay close to home - Bertrand Daulny in the Loire Valley, Kyriakos Kynigopoulos in Burgundy - and others who travel widely, both across France and internationally.