The wine world is in crisis. And it is largely responsible for its own demise.
Consumers find themselves stuck between two worlds. On one side, the endless supermarket aisles and their boring wines, mass-produced, polished with additives and selected yeasts to guarantee yield. Wines that are so smooth, they forget to tell you something. On the other side, the specialist wine shops where, when you get the courage to ask for advice, you receive a lecture on the geology, climatology, biology of the vines, extensive list of descriptors of the grape, and all the subtleties of the appellation. Information that, even if correct, does nothing to help you choose a bottle.
These two worlds seem to be complete 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 will most likely change over time. I expect them to evolve. They may soften, or they may sharpen. But they reflect one conviction: the wine world could be different.
- Consumption habits have changed. You can’t deny it. But I find it too easy for the industry to try to brush its own mistakes under the carpet to avoid facing the reality of the wine crisis. Even at a time when the global consumption was stagnating and began to decline from the 1980s (yes, that far back), the planting of new vines continued and at unreasonable levels in some already popular regions. And producers planted not because they wanted, but because they were encouraged to do it. And they did it despite every signal pointing in the opposite direction. Take the example of Australia. In 1993, an accelerated depreciation for grapevine plantings is introduced allowing producers to split their costs over 4 years for tax purposes. On top of this, they added the Managed Investments Schemes (MIS) which allows up-front costs to be 100% deductible for investors income tax. These suddenly made vineyard investment a lot more attractive and a sudden boom happen. We’re talking about 100K+ hectares of new vineyards over a period of 15 years. Australia is already producing too much wine. But rather than adjusting it, the government introduced in 2004 the Wine Equalisation Tax (WET) which allowed producers to reclaim taxes on up to $290K per year (later extended to $500K in 2006). Intended to be used by small wineries, this turned instead into large businesses creating artificial structures to claim multiple rebates, encouraged the overproduction of wine that normally wouldn’t exist because unprofitable, suddenly turned into hundreds of thousands of tax rebates. It encouraged wineries to produced low-quality bulk wine to get the tax rebate. 1 We’re not better in the European Union. For years, the Common Agricultural Policy funded years of excess production at above-market prices. This also led producers to overproduce low-quality wine without having to worry if someone would buy it. The uprooting of vines across the world is not a temporary setback. It is the consequence of decades of poor political decisions. I know it’s fashionable to blame consumers for changing their habits. To blame young people for not drinking any alcohol. But let’s face it: it’s a crisis of overproduction of wine nobody asked for. Companies that are hit the hardest are mass-market wines. Wines without identity, produced on ordinary terroirs are struggling the most. Wines with genuine singularity, a distinct terroir, a producer with a vision, are doing well. Not necessarily because their prices keep going up. But because they keep finding buyers. There is a real demand for quality, typicity, authenticity. Everything that mass-market wine cannot offer. When the market shrinks, it is always anonymity that disappears first. Those who resist are the ones that have managed to embody what consumers are truly looking for.
- Wine has become an object of science. It’s not that it is a bad thing. Sure, progress in viticulture and winemaking has helped to eliminate a lot of bad wines: the corked ones, the oxidised ones (even if you could argue that oxidisation can be good when controlled like in Madeira or Sherry), the unstable ones (again, natural wines can be unstable yet producing fantastic wines). But you get my point. Science has helped a lot winemaking. But, somewhere along the way, science has overstepped a bit too much its role and has become an end. Winemaking can be incredibly interventionist. Selected yeasts engineered to reproduce precise aromatic profiles. Any correction is possible now, from acidity, colours, tannins. Wine is no longer the expression of a place. It is no longer guided; it is manufactured to meet a commercial brief. Wine can be so disconnected from the living, the soil, from the work of a winemaker that they end up producing exactly the wines nobody wants: smooth, predictable, interchangeable. The scientific obsession has also contaminated the way we talk about wine. Wine is no longer described for the pleasure it gives. We talk about wine by its technical markers: soil composition, grape variety, ageing, vintage,.. This precise vocabulary favours the insiders, but it makes it absolutely opaque for everyone else. And it’s worth noting that behind this apparent scientific precision lies approximations presented as truths. For example, something in vogue is that a wine’s minerality comes directly from the soil. Experts even tell you to suck rocks to truly experience the minerality of a wine. And I can understand the sexiness of such a claim, trying to explain the uniqueness of a wine being derived directly from its ground. Except it’s false. Studies have been made and it remains to this date 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 opposes them. The wine lover hunts, tastes, drinks wine. They are always on the lookout for the next hidden gem, the bottle that will blow their mind, and they appreciate wine for what it is. The investor, on the other hand, looks at data. He talks about market intelligence, stores his wine in a bonded warehouse waiting patiently for prices to rise to make a profit. He trades wine like if it was a painting. They most of the time don’t even touch the bottle or visit the warehouse where the wine sits at. Wine is just another asset in a portfolio. 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. Take the example of Rudy Kurniawan. The counterfeiter who for years deceived the world’s greatest collectors by reselling empty bottles filled with blended wine. And it took years before a producer started to notice bottles he had never produced. Nobody had opened them. Nobody had drunk them. The label was enough. Even if it was wrong. There is a necessary distinction to be made between to way of keeping a bottle. Someone who buys a great wine to let it evolve; watch it age gracefully and open it one day at the moment they think is 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 entirely this dimension. They buy to sell. The wine continues to evolve, alone. No one to look at it, no one to remember the excitement of the purchase, no one to count the years left before the best time to open arrives. Alone somewhere in a temperature-controlled warehouse, reduced to a lot number, in a case, on a pallet surrounded by thousands of other wines that are following the same fate. And when a bottle changes hands to end up in an investment portfolio, its content will continue to evolve towards its decline without ever revealing their singularity to anyone.
- We are too harsh with wine. And I’m the first one to be guilty of this culprit. We try to dissect it, some try to rank it, classify it. Some try to determine which one is better than the other. To a point where they start giving scores out of 100. A precise, authoritative, definitive number that will follow forever a wine. Not only, this feels like denying the opportunity for a wine to evolve, change and get better over time as some wines are even scored en primeur, not even 6 months after they’ve been bottled despite the fact that they will reach their prime in 20 years. But behind this apparent objectivity, lies a far more fragile reality around the ratings. The conditions under which wines are scored are rarely ideal. Hundreds of wines are often tasted over a few hours only. Sometimes even directly in the producer’s own cellar. An opaque pre-selection that excludes part of the production from the outset, which can be understandable based on the number of different wines produced each year but that question who gets rated and if some don’t get prime access to reviewers. Tasters sometimes know the name of the wine in their glass which question the objectivity of the process. Judges with uneven backgrounds depending on the competition. And most of the time, behind all of this, a business. Medals are traded, scores are negotiated, labels adorned with awards that producers have to pay to display with rating criteria that nobody knows. But the problem runs deeper than tasting conditions and pay-to-win competitions. It’s physiological. The human palate perceives five basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami. Beyond that, perception becomes subjective, cultural, contextual. Numerous studies have shown it. Take for example Saenz-Navaraz et al. (2013) who demonstrated that the same wines, the same flavours are not perceived in the same way depending on the taster’s cultural background. Brochet (2001) showed that a simple colourant was enough during their study to make expert tasters describe a white wine as a red one. If the most trained palates are prisoners of their visual and cultural backgrounds, on what basis do we claim to score a wine out of 100 to the nearest point. This critique of scoring isn’t new. And the bias in wine tasting as well. Robert Parker was long criticised for his preference for rich, high-alcohol wines. To a point where some producers began making wine specifically to match his palate to get high scores, even when that was not what consumers were looking for. Nicolas Perullo, the 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 in which the wine is drunk. The same wine drunk alone on a Tuesday evening or shared around a table on a party night is not the same wine. And 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.
I believe the wine world needs to be rethought. Rethought in the way we approach wine. Rethought in the way it is produced, discussed, sold and shared. This means challenging common wisdom and not taking for granted what has always been done just because it’s always been like that. Enjoy wine the way you want. Add ice to your glass. Actually, don’t even use a glass, drink directly from the bottle. Enjoy wine. Don’t worry about what experts say (including myself). But above all for the people working in the trade, it means listening to those who drink, or those who have stopped drinking, rather than reaching for convenient excuses in societal trends. Wine is a living drink. Wine is a plural drink. Wine is capable of surprises. It asks only one thing: to be given the chance. Exactly like people who drink wine.
- 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[↩]