These strange times in wine

Or how we’ll learn to stop worrying and embrace the change

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News in wine hasn’t been good as of late as even people who don’t follow the wine scene have probably heard that sales are down and people are drinking less wine.

It’s understandably-easy to run around with a sky-is-falling mentality with unpleasant figures of a 2-4% decline.

What’s really crucial of course is to look to larger trends as while humanity has overall been drinking less wine in recent years, does the big dip in 2023 signify a larger change? After all, there are those who believe that sales in 2024 will ultimately go back up and in fact, some countries saw an increase in wine consumption in 2023 such as Spain, which grew 2%, (ES) thus bucking larger trends.

Whatever may be the actual case, the irony is that somehow wine production is oddly keeping pace what with a 10% reduction in 2023 due to various global issues, but primarily Climate Change. Again, that large picture view is important given that during another bout of sky-is-falling journalism in 2013, it was predicted that there would be a wine shortage, which seemed as silly back then as it does now.