The southern hemisphere wine calendar year starts — with some leeway timing-wise — in much the same way for every wine-producing country south of the equator. Depending on how far to the south the vineyards are, the harvest is more or less imminent. Naturally this is a period of stress, even if conditions have been perfect up to this moment. Weather is always a concern: you might have immaculate fruit until the day of the harvest and factors beyond your control — hail, high winds and bushfires — can wipe out the year’s work. Sometimes the mere presence of smoke just before the vintage is enough to contaminate the fruit.
There are also financial pressures: if the crop from the previous year has been selling slowly, you have to act. Either dispose of it in bulk and at a loss simply to clear tank space for the incoming harvest or bottle it — at a substantial investment in packaging. And if — as has been the case for the past few seasons, sales have declined year on year across most markets — there’s the nagging doubt that the halcyon days of the wine business are over.
Wine producers worldwide are rightly anxious. World wine consumption peaked in 2007 at 250-million hectolitres. By 2023 it was down to 220-million hectolitres. The decline for 2024 — when the figures are finalised — is likely to show a further 10-million hectolitres shaved from the numbers. Some of this reduction is directly attributable to lower consumption in China and the US. However, the pattern is evident across Western Europe, the Far East and the domestic market.
The pundits have offered several explanations for this pandemic of temperance. Most, if not all, are relatively well supported, either with hard evidence or anecdotally. Younger consumers are drinking less than their counterparts a generation ago; marijuana, now legal in many countries, is cannibalising alcohol sales; populations in developed economies are shrinking; rising living costs with college debt have limited discretionary spending in many so-called developed countries. The list is long, and all the suggested reasons sound to producers a little like a death knell — many of whom have reached these explanations themselves.
Most of the causes are structural: population shrinkage in the more economically advanced societies is real. If this is stressing wine producers, spare a thought for the pension fund managers, especially those running national funds in welfare states. There are glimmers of hope: as millennials/zoomers pay off their college debt they will start spending more money on wine; they may even overtake the contribution to wine sales accounted for by the boomer generation.
But one way that wine growers can actively engage in saving their patrimony is by rethinking the role they play in defining the now very unfashionable term of “wine culture”. Under pressure from marketers, they have consistently dumbed down messaging about wine — to not make wine inaccessible to newcomers, and not to appear elitist. Avoid suggesting that a wine needs to age; instead pretend that it offers the same instant gratification as other alcoholic beverages. Henry Jeffreys, a UK-based writer, offers an alternative view: if you want to engage in a conversation at the pub about last night’s football match, you need to understand the offside rule. If you want to join the club, you need to know the jargon.
True, much wine is consumed simply as a beverage — “a glass of white wine, please” at a bar or in an airport lounge. But fine wine is different: it improves with age. The nuances, once recognised, add to its value to the consumer. The rituals are important, as is the craft that produces what is fine about fine wine. To think of it as beer or hard seltzer is to miss the point. Nespresso succeeded because it offered coffee drinkers an emotionally more complex experience than a simple cup of Nescafé. Wine marketers forget this at their peril.
This article was first published in Business Day.
