Maybe this time the pessimists are right

There have always been doom-mongers lurking on the fringes of the wine trade. But this time, suggests David Williams, the reasons to be fearful are there for all to see, mainly as a result of changes in duty and demographics

The British wine trade’s pessimists are always more vocal than its optimists, and their catastrophising tendencies will always find a subject to latch on to.

In my 25 years of reporting on what has, over that period, been a basically sound, and for most of that time, growing business, I’ve grown used to end-of-thewine-world warnings based on excessive discounting and excessive duty and on people drinking too much and not enough.

I’ve heard that wine is dangerously cheap and dangerously expensive and that it has been destroyed by both the baleful industrialising influence of the new world and the hidebound traditions of the old world.

There have been lectures about the damaging inflexibility of the British wine trade caused by EU membership and the red tape, increased costs and isolation of Brexit. Sometimes, the threat to wine has come from pandering to younger drinkers and alienating established ones, at others it’s been about not taking the youth vote seriously.

Despite all the dire, frequently contradictory, predictions, however, the

British wine world hasn’t come to an end. Moments that felt like they offered an existential threat have generally turned into moments of transformation, whether that’s the demise of the multiple specialist (which set the scene for the boom in independents) or the Covid years triggering a move into online and a boom in interest in wine education. The wineselling landscape may not be the same as it was pre-Covid, pre-Brexit, pre-2008 or whichever key historical date your political affiliations compel you to choose. But we still have one of the most diverse and vibrant wine scenes in the world.

For all that the lessons of recent wine trade history suggest we should try to ignore the weirdly alluring siren’s song of the pessimists whenever it strikes up, I have to say that’s never been more difficult than it has been over the past couple of months. It’s not just that the pessimists themselves have got bolder, louder, more masochistically sure of themselves. Sometimes, as I’ve made my way around various trade events in the spring and early summer, it’s seemed that that there were vastly more of them.

The pessimistic tone was there in this year’s Wine Merchant reader survey, published in the March edition, which saw a new high for respondents who are either fairly pessimistic (13%) or very pessimistic (2%) about the year ahead. It was also very much in evidence at the London Wine Fair in May: confined to a single floor, and with many key players absent, this was a downbeat affair that, when set against the thriving Prowein and Wine Paris trade fairs, felt, for many I spoke to, symbolic of a wider UK wine market malaise.

But it was at the recent round of supermarket tastings that I had the most strikingly downbeat conversations. Supermarket buyers are by their very nature pragmatists, attuned to making the most of situations, and with a politician’s skill for spinning any development into a good-news story. When even they are struggling to come up with a positive angle, it may be time to start worrying.

The following conversations, scribbled in the margins of my tasting books, give a flavour of the mood wherever I went.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever been more concerned about the future of wine in this country.”

“In August, we’re going to see the start of the most horrendous race to the bottom.”

“You can forget about buying trips, most wine buyers will get a trip to the bulk wine fair once or twice a year and that’ll be it.”

“I don’t think you can look at the current direction of travel and not worry that we’re going the way of tobacco over the next generation.”

“Young people just aren’t drinking wine anymore, and that old idea that they will switch to wine as they get older just isn’t happening … they’re just not.”

The worries here are a mix of the long-ish and the short term. As the ballooning size of their noand-low ranges (a development that was also very much in evidence at the LWF) shows, the supermarkets are taking falling consumption of alcohol, and the rise of outright teetotalism, particularly among younger drinkers, very seriously indeed. At the same time, I have yet to speak to a supermarket buyer responsible for no-low ranges who has the same enthusiasm for their no- or low-alcohol wine as they do for their beers and other drinks. Some are very much better than others. But there is a real need to finally crack the code and create no or low-alcohol wines that are genuinely indistinguishable from the normal-abv originals.

Concerns about a future in which alcohol consumption is increasingly regulated and socially unacceptable, while real enough, are rather less pressing than those caused by the imminent August duty hikes, however. What’s worrying the buyers I spoke to isn’t just the fact that the 44p rise is taking place during a cost-of-living crisis. It’s the way the rise is structured, which they believe will have a baleful effect on the quality and style of wine.

As Ben Cahill, a wine buyer at the Co-op, explained, one way of getting around the duty rise is to switch more of your wines to sub-11.5% abv, the point at which the higher duty rate kicks in (in 2025, things will get even more complicated).

There are of course, a couple of ways a producer who might normally produce wines in the 11.5% to 14.5% bracket could go about doing that. They could harvest radically early, before the sugars have accumulated, and therefore produce a wine that is much greener, leaner, and more acidic; or they can harvest at their usual moment of ripeness, but stop the fermentation at 11.5%, leaving several grams of sugar in the wine.

Neither is very appealing, says Cahill, and he says his business will look to other ways of keeping prices down. Speaking to other buyers, it seems that the expectation is that there will be an increased reliance on the bulk market as well as on less fashionable regions (tendencies, along with consistently higher degrees of residual sugar, that were all already in evidence at many of the supermarket tastings I attended). Either way, the implication is that supermarket wines are about to get a lot more expensive, and/or a lot less interesting.

Independents, meanwhile, with their £15.70 average price point floating high above the £6.35 market average, may feel all this mass-market mess is some way beneath them, their still-resilient market of connoisseurs happy to pay the extra for quality. But the path from supermarketusing beginner to independent-frequenting enthusiast is well-worn and vital to the health of the independent sector.

If a mixture of rising prices and falling quality leads, as many expect, to a dropoff in consumption, as drinkers switch to other categories or just never get the wine bug at all, it’s worth asking where the next generation of independent consumers will come from. And it’s hard, right now, to feel too optimistic about the answer.

SIGN UP NOW FOR