It’s been a wild year for the world of wine, from inflationary pressures driving consumers to moderate their drinking or trade down, to a steep slowdown in the fine wine market.
Some of what’s happening simply reflects the economy. But there are deeper trends happening that could flip wine on its head. Here are seven of them.
The collapse of boundaries
There are emerging signs that consumers, particularly younger ones, no longer think of themselves as ‘wine drinkers’, ‘beer drinkers’ or ‘cocktail drinkers’. According to Bryan Roth, analyst with the Feel Goods Company in the USA, the lines between categories are now blurring. “Right now, we are talking and drinking a non-alc craft soda made by a brewery,” he gave as an example in a recent interview. “Nobody cares about your base fermentable,” he added, meaning consumers care less about whether they’re drinking beer or wine. What they care about is whether it tastes good.
It was inevitable. Flavour choices have exploded in the past 25 years, as consumer brands have sought to secure market share with more and more varieties. Think of potato chips, which went from a handful of classics like salt and vinegar, to hundreds of different flavours.
People now expect endless styles to choose from. This isn’t simply a North American phenomenon — it’s being reported as far afield as Australia.
“We're seeing category blurring — we’re starting to see wine do it with spritzes,” said Andrew Shedden, Head of Fine Wine at Dan Murphy’s retail chain in Australia, who was speaking at the WISA Impact conference in Adelaide last November.
There has been some of this happening in wine in the past decade, with producers fermenting red wines in Sherry, whiskey and bourbon barrels. Then there was, briefly, a trend for aromatised wines. And right now, as Liz Thach MW reported in Forbes, Stella Rosa has had success with wines that are infused with spice.
“We just heard from Nielsen that our Stella Rosa Pineapple & Chili wine became the number one best-selling new SKU wine of the year in the US,” Steve Riboli, CEO of Riboli Family Vineyards, the company behind Stella Rosa, told her.
For most wine producers, adding fruits or spices to their wine is an anathema.
But at the artisanal end, there are a growing number of co-ferments, where grapes are fermented with fruits. Expect more of these on the way, as boundary-blurring wines become more and more profitable.
Cans
Boundaries aren’t just blurring between categories, but also between occasions. It used to be that sports meant beer, and dinner meant wine, but that’s changing, particularly among younger drinkers, who are actively seeking canned drinks to take to different occasions — regardless of whether it’s a canned cocktail, a non-alc beer, or a canned wine.
According to Grand View Research, the global canned wine market will grow at a compound rate of 12.3% to 2028 — to a market size of $571.8m or more by 2028. The report says it’s being driven by the “rising demand for convenient, portable, and single-serve beverages.”
It’s not just easy drinking wines that stand to benefit from this move to cans.
Maker Wine, a canned wine brand that was co-founded in the US in 2019 by two women, Sarah Hoffman and Kendra Kawala, has built an enthusiastic DtC audience of 40,000 wine lovers. “The company has done over $5 million in total sales since launch, sold over 350,000 cans last year and is the number one online retailer of canned wine,” according to a recent interview.
Maker can’t keep up with demand, and have to limit how many cans they send to subscribers. According to co-founder Sarah Hoffman, the main reason that club members drop out is because they’re pregnant.
To attract a new audience to wine, producers should think about cans.
Low- and No-Alcohol
Nobody will be surprised to hear that there has been a dramatic growth in the low- and no-alcohol sector in recent years, particularly in the key markets of the US, UK, Germany, Spain and France, as well as Australia and Japan.
According to IWSR data, sales in the no- and low-alcohol category have already reached $11 billion, and are expected to surpass $24 billion by 2032.
This rush to embrace the non-alc sector is showing up in the number of stores specialising in non-alc drinks that are emerging: Nix & Nix in Holland; Boisson in the USA; and Club Soda in the UK. And all of them report that non-alc wines are among their most popular products.
The big alcohol companies are so certain that non-alc is the future, that they are investing in them heavily: Boisson recently received $5 million in bridging investment from Pernod Ricard’s Convivialite Ventures.
Distell Ventures, the incubator arm of Distell, is also investing in the non-alc category.
Where the big players go, the smaller ones should follow. The non-alc category is only going to grow.
White wines are supplanting reds
In 2023, Meininger’s reported that the Rhône Valley had set itself the goal of transforming its image from that of a red wine area to a major white wine producer.
The Rhône Valley is not alone, as other formerly red regions turn to white. The reason is simple — red wine consumption is falling, as consumers reach for fresher styles, particularly white and sparkling wines; in France, consumption of red wine has dropped by 32% in the last decade.
Some of this is the result of global warming — as the weather warms and summer increases in length, red wines are less appealing.
According to a report on the global white wine market by Fact.MR, sales of white wine increased globally by nearly 5% to the end of 2022, to a total value of $39 billion. Their analysts say the market will keep expanding, to reach around $67 billion by the end of 2033.
But big bold reds are still strong
Back in 2000, when Dave Phinney created his red blend The Prisoner, he probably had no idea he was creating a whole new genre of wine. Until then, ‘red blend’ had generally meant a defined regional blend such as, say, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc from Bordeaux.
Today, ‘red blend’ can also refer to blends of different red grapes, which are high in alcohol and generally high in residual sugar.
This style came into being in the decade after The Prisoner, when the big wine companies realised that this new style was a hit with Millennial men. What also appealed is that any red grapes could be blended in, without having to adhere to a strict regional playbook.
The next big blockbuster was Gallo’s Apothic, followed by Treasury Wine Estate’s 19 Crimes. And then came red wines fermented in bourbon barrels, to give them a smoky appeal that might convince whisky lovers to try them. The ploy worked. Go to Google and type in ‘bourbon barrel wine’ and what will pop up are dozens and dozens of them — and they’re all selling at relatively high prices.
Florian Ceschi, the Director of Ciatti Europe, calls these wines “faster and stronger” and says they’re still roaring ahead: “It’s something making a lot of money at the moment.”
Wine Tourism
Good Housekeeping magazine reports that there has been a 70% increase in travellers booking wine with a food and wine focus, and forecasts that travellers will make food and wine a top priority in 2024.
Euromonitor forecasts that travel and tourism is going to outpace the global economy, though at a slower pace than 2023: “growth is forecast to slow to 16% in 2024, as the heady days of ‘revenge travel’ fade and rising prices gradually eat into consumer appetite for taking a trip.”
Paradoxically, two major wine trends are currently colliding with one another: there are anecdotal reports from wine regions of more visits from non-drinkers, who want to learn about wine and hear how it’s made, but who don’t actually want to drink it.
Health
Dry January has come around, once again, and more people than ever are signing up for it; last year, a whopping 15% of adult Americans pledged to go dry for the month, though there is no record of how many actually did it.
As reported in Meininger’s, the World Health Organisation has kept up a steady drumbeat of messaging about the dangers of alcohol, and consumers are responding by lowering their consumption, or giving up altogether.
This is already having a dramatic effect on the wine trade, with reports of wineries closing and people selling up.
It is, far and away, the number one issue facing the wine world at the moment. And there don’t seem to be many easy solutions to hand.
The problem is that the research around wine and health is extremely nuanced and complex, and it doesn’t translate easily into media sound bites.
In the end, the only thing the wine trade can do is model moderate consumption at all times. Have copious amounts of water available at cellar doors and at consumer tastings; make people comfortable with spitting; showcase wine with food, wherever possible.
And wait. Things are likely to get tougher in the short term, but it’s also true that it’s never wise to bet against something that’s eight thousand years old. If wine has remained part of civilisation for that long, it obviously has something profound going for it.
