Whatever happened to the post-pandemic wine boom?

It’s looking less and less likely, as the pandemic economy continues to do what it wants – and not what we want it to do

Remember all those predictions for a Roaring’20s wine boom as we came out the pandemic? It may be time to forget about them.

More and more economic indicators are pointing to a gradual overall recovery, and wine seems to be even more gradual than that. For instance:

• The highly-regarded IWSR consultancy says consumption of wine costing $15 and more won’t reach 2019 levels until 2022.

• Wine depletions – a more encompassing term than wine sales – turned negative in March and April vs. a year ago. This compares to spirits depletions, which have shown steady growth for the past 12 months.

• Supply chain problems continue to plague wine producers, and especially imported wines.

No less than Silicon Valley Bank’s Rob McMillan, perhaps the leading wine analyst in the country, says he may have been wrong about the wine boom.

“I might have missed on a prediction that I made,” he wrote earlier this month. “But I underestimated the impact of a single fact. … I ignored the fact that still wine sales have been plagued by declining growth rates since 2017. Even before the Pandemic, growth was effectively zero for the category.”

So where does that leave us? McMillan – who I respect tremendously – was not the only one to see what hasn’t been there. But why not? The U.S. economic situation is unlike anything we’ve seen in a century, and that’s even before taking the pandemic into account. There are near-record disparities of wealth, a gig economy that masks actual unemployment, and supply chain snafus that most of us have never seen in our lives. Buying a bone-in chicken breast in Dallas often requires visits to two or three stores.

So even smart people can make mistakes. But that’s because wine still hasn’t solved the problems that have plagued it since the end of the recession – it’s too expensive and too confusing compared to beer and spirits; it’s seen as something old white people drink, and hence not especially relevant; and the wine business still puts too much emphasis on the Baby Boomers instead of marketing to their children and grandchildren.

The good news? The blog’s unofficial wine analyst isn’t quite as pessimistic as that. He says, despite all the bad news, there are some positive trends in all this gloom. “Core“ wine drinkers – those of us who drink wine at least once a week – are still buying wine. The losses have come from “marginal” wine drinkers, who is everyone else.

So let’s hold on to that, and try to figure out a way to wean the marginal wine drinkers off their craft beer and Manhattans.

Photo: “National Drink Wine Day” by steevithak is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0