The wine world is in crisis. One largely of its own making.
Consumers find themselves stuck between two worlds. On one side, the endless supermarket aisles and their characterless wines, mass-produced, optimised with additives and selected yeasts to guarantee yield, so smooth they have nothing left to say. On the other, specialist wine shops where, when you dare ask for advice, you receive a lecture on soil composition, grape varieties and the subtleties of an appellation. Information that may well be accurate, but does nothing to help you choose a bottle.
These two worlds appear to be opposites. Yet they produce the same result: the consumer is left alone with their decision.
Through my reading and reflection, I wanted to formulate my vision of wine. Like wine, these writings are bound to change and evolve over time. They may soften, or may sharpen. They reflect, nonetheless, a conviction: that the wine world could be different.
- Consumption habits have changed. You can’t deny it. But it is too easy to hide behind this fact to explain the crisis facing the wine world. Even as global consumption was stagnating and beginning to decline from the 1980s onwards, planting continued and at unreasonable levels. Producers were pushed to grow more when every signal pointed in the opposite direction. In Australia, tax concessions introduced in the 1990s and a wine tax rebate mechanism, the Wine Equalisation Tax Producer Rebate, massively subsidised the production of low-grade grapes in hot inland regions, creating a structural surplus the sector has still not recovered from.1 The European Union, through the Common Agricultural Policy, funded years of excess production at above-market prices, encouraging producers to overproduce low-quality wine without ever having to figure out if someone would actually buy it. The uprooting of vines across the world today is not a temporary setback, it is the consequence of decades of poor political decisions. This is not a consumption crisis, as the industry likes to repeat. It is a crisis of overproduction of wine nobody asked for. Yet the crisis is not uniform. It hits mass-market wines hardest, but the entire industry is affected to varying degrees. Wines without identity, produced on ordinary terroirs, are collapsing. Wines with genuine singularity, a distinct terroir, a producer with a vision are holding up. Not necessarily because their prices keep rising, but because they continue to find buyers. Because there is real demand for quality, typicity, authenticity, everything that volume wine cannot offer. When the market contracts, it is always anonymity that disappears first. Those who resist are the wines that have managed to embody what consumers are truly looking for.
- Wine has become an object of science. In itself, this is not a bad thing. Progress in viticulture and winemaking has helped eliminate a lot of bad wine, corked, oxidised, unstable. But somewhere along the way, science overstepped its role as a tool and became an end in itself. On one side, winemaking has become increasingly interventionist. Selected yeasts engineered to reproduce precise aromatic profiles. Corrections to acidity, colour, tannins. Wine is no longer the expression of a place. It is no longer guided, it is manufactured to meet a commercial brief. And this disconnection from the living, from the soil, from the work of the winemaker, produces exactly the wines nobody wants: smooth, predictable, interchangeable. On the other, this scientific obsession has contaminated the way we talk about wine. Wine is no longer described for the pleasure it gives, but by its technical markers: soil composition, grape variety, ageing, vintage,… A vocabulary precise for insiders, opaque for everyone else. And behind this apparent precision often lie approximations presented as truths. The idea that a wine’s minerality comes directly from the soil is the most glaring example. A seductive notion, widely held, and scientifically unproven. Wine is not unique in its botanical or agronomic complexity. There are 342 commercially cultivated hop varieties used in brewing.2 There are 7,500 apple varieties in the world.3 Different terroirs, fermentation methods and blending decisions influence the final product, just as they do in wine. Yet neither beer nor cider is presented through a scientific lens. Soil composition, altitude, ageing,… none of these markers are used to describe a beer or a cider, including within the craft beer movement, which has added a considerable layer of complexity with its IPAs, Pale Ales and Stouts. We talk about style, taste, experience. Never scientism. It is a choice. Not an inevitability.
- The wine investor is the antithesis of the wine lover. Everything separates them. The lover drinks, hunts, tastes. They are always on the lookout for the next hidden gem, and they appreciate wine for what it is. The investor looks at data, talks about market intelligence, stores their wine in a specialist warehouse they may never visit. They sometimes never even touch the bottle. Wine becomes just another asset. What matters is the name on the label, the rating, the liquidity on the secondary market. You could put any wine in the bottle and they would never know. This is precisely what Rudy Kurniawan demonstrated, a counterfeiter who for years deceived the world’s greatest collectors by reselling empty bottles filled with blended wine.⁴ Nobody had opened them. Nobody had drunk them. The label was enough. There is a necessary distinction to be made between two ways of keeping a bottle. Someone who buys a great wine to let it evolve, watch it mature, and open it one day at the moment they judge right, that person respects wine for what it is: a living product, in motion, with an optimal drinking window and an inevitable end. The investor ignores this dimension entirely. They buy to sell. The wine continues to evolve, alone, somewhere in a temperature-controlled warehouse, reduced to a lot number. Wine is the sum of a winemaker’s work. The work of the land, the vine. The choices that guided them. Decades of harvests, of refinement. The moment wine becomes a financial asset, it ceases to be the result of that work. It is a violence done to the winemaker’s efforts. What the bottle contains no longer matters. It is the label, the name. And when a bottle changes hands to end up in an investment portfolio, its contents continue to evolve towards their decline without ever revealing their singularity to anyone.
- We pass too much judgement on wine. We seek to dissect it, rank it, classify it. To determine that one wine is better than another. To the point of giving scores out of 100. A precise, authoritative, definitive number. Behind this apparent objectivity lies a far more fragile reality. The conditions under which wines are scored are rarely ideal. Hundreds of wines tasted over a few hours, sometimes in the producer’s own cellar. An opaque pre-selection that excludes part of the production from the outset. Tasters who sometimes know the name of the wine in their glass. Judges with uneven backgrounds depending on the competition. And behind all of this, a business. Medals are traded, scores are negotiated, labels adorned with awards whose criteria nobody knows. But the problem runs deeper than tasting conditions. It is physiological. The human palate perceives five basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami. Beyond that, perception becomes subjective, cultural, contextual. Saenz-Navaraz et al. (2013) demonstrated that the same wines are not perceived in the same way depending on the taster’s cultural background. Brochet (2001) showed that a simple colourant was enough to make expert tasters describe a white wine as a red. If the most trained palates are prisoners of their visual and cultural expectations, on what basis do we claim to score a wine out of 100 to the nearest point? This critique of scoring is not new. Robert Parker was long criticised for his preference for rich, high-alcohol wines, to the point where some producers began making wine specifically to match his palate, even when that was not what consumers were looking for. Nicolas Perullo, Italian philosopher and essayist, argues through his concept of epistoenology that taste does not exist in the glass. It exists in the encounter between the wine, the drinker and the context. The same wine drunk alone on a Tuesday evening or shared around a table on a celebratory night is not the same wine. No score can capture that. And perhaps that is precisely where the beauty of wine lies: in its refusal to be reduced to a number.
The wine world does not need to be defended. It needs to be rethought. Rethought in the way it is produced, discussed, sold and shared. This means challenging received wisdom, not taking for granted what has always been done, not trapping wine in categories inherited from another era. Above all, it means listening to those who drink, or who have stopped drinking, rather than reaching for convenient excuses in societal trends. Wine is a living, plural drink, capable of surprise. It asks only one thing: to be given the chance.
- KPMG, wine industry insights – Key Emerging Issues – September 2025 https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmgsites/au/pdf/2025/australian-wine-industry-insights-september-2025.pdf.coredownload.inline.pdf [↩]
- International Hop Growers Convention, Variety List 2025[↩]
- fruitexpert.co.uk[↩]