Episode #740 – Who’s Gonna Drink All This? Your Adult Children May be to Blame!

While we’ve been busily worrying about the impact of global warming on the wine industry, it turns out that it is currently the least of the industry’s problems.  Despite catastrophic fires in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Greece, Spain, France, Portugal, Sicily, the list goes on and on… you would think that devastation of such immense magnitude around the globe, would mean a shortage of wine or at least significantly higher prices. Shockingly, these worldwide infernos have not resulted in any significant wine shortages. Moreover, they have not led to a decrease in the quality of wines produced in affected countries. Quite the opposite. Despite the roller coaster ride that the planet has been on for the past several years, bringing unfathomable amounts of rain or drought that make Death Valley look like the Amazon, the quality of wine today, right now, is beyond exceptional.  It may just be that the wine industry may have managed to dodge a barrage of bullets, but if you had to guess what the impact of climate change has been thus far, it’s safe to say that most guesses would be quite wrong.  Sadly, the loss of property and life caused by these cataclysmic events is nearly impossible to fully comprehend, which makes the resilience of wine regions around the globe even more remarkable.

In truth, the biggest story coming out of the wine world is a truly unimaginable catastrophe of a different kind.  The big story is a wine glut that is so immense that massive tracts of land planted in wine grapes are being returned to their natural state or converted to crops more necessary to our survival. Vine removal on an almost incomprehensible scale is a very real possibility. But it gets worse. Many growers will be leaving fruit on the vines this harvest season because wine storage is maxed out from prior years, and there is very little demand for the older juice on hand.  For some, it’s just better to walk away than to pile more potential losses on what already exists.

In Australia, they are using Olympic swimming pools as a unit of measure to describe the wine glut down under. Australia currently has the equivalent of 859 Olympic swimming pools worth of wine in storage. This excess wine amounts to about 2.8 billion bottles.  Australia may well be the hardest-hit wine-producing country in the world, and much of this is due to the enormous amount of wine they were selling to the Chinese just a few years ago. The Chinese appetite for wine was almost surreal when it hit its peak in 2017, but what many expected to be the new reality in Chinese beverage preferences is now contracting as quickly as it mushroomed. In six years, wine consumption in China has decreased by 50%, and Australia finds itself taking the biggest hit.

So, there are lots of theories about who is to blame for the wine glut and significantly decreasing demand around the world. China’s role is certainly a significant factor where the Australians are concerned… and most certainly, European producers have also taken a big hit for the same reason. In America and many other countries however, the cause of the glut may actually be the fault of one or more persons with your last name. Much to almost everyone’s surprise, the explosive growth in wine sales that was a direct result of young consumers bringing an insatiable appetite for wine to the marketplace this past decade has turned out to be one of the most disappointing non-events in many decades. Yes, your children are, in large part, to blame for lackluster wine sales. In fact, they continue to head for the exits almost as quickly as they became enamored with fermented fruit! Kids these days are so unpredictable!

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