Watch people grow and consume their own psilocybin over drinking alcohol. We might see the Emerald Triangle revival if THC ban really passed on national level.
Nah. All that hemp is coming from Kentucky and Texas…..
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Yeah that genie ain’t going back in the bottle. Turns out people of all political persuasions like smoking weed and like having it legally available. If anything I suspect we will see it legalized in more and more states until the federal ban becomes pointless.
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This has been going on for at least a century. Even when wine consumption was growing, many Languedoc growers were making wine that nobody wanted, and demanding government support.
The situation now is obviously worse than 20 years ago… even better quality will not be able to save some growers in a flooded market.
I don’t think this ~5000 year old industry is going to disappear, but it is going to shrink for the foreseeable future.
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Maybe there is no solution. Maybe, like jazz, opera, bowling or playing manual musical instruments, wine is done. It wont completely disappear but its relevance diminishes. It continues to be a niche product of great interest to a smaller and smaller market. There is no wave of younger consumers heading this way. There are far more reliable intoxicates available that carry none of wine’s baggage. I think we are in a place where we should enjoy the opportunity to drink well as prices fall. Let’s face the music and dance.
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As a former jazz musician, I just want to say that wine isn’t even close to as dead as jazz.
20 billion+ bottles of wine are consumed around the globe annually, where the average person listens to approximately 0 minutes of jazz per year.
Jazz wouldn’t exist (even more than it doesn’t really exist now) without what is essentially philanthropy and charity, and its consumption is diminishing even further. Jazz would feel fortunate to be in wine’s shoes!
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I’m of two minds on this. The optimistic part of me looks at the course of human history, and the fact that people have been imbibing alcoholic beverages for millennia. Preferences to different sub-categories will wax and wane, some will suffer while others see a resurgence of interest, but in the long run and with a broad perspective things aren’t really going to change significantly. The current circumstances are not ideal, but this too shall pass.
On the other hand, public health campaigns and legislation/regulation can certainly result in a paradigm shift in the minds of consumers. Let’s take tobacco, for instance:
It’s worth considering whether we have passed “peak wine”, and whether that’s a good thing or not.
The history of alcoholic beverages may stretch back far into time, but the ‘fine wine industry’ as we know it is a 20th century phenomenon, so there is no reason to expect things to stay that way forever.
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Absolutely. I’m mostly here parroting what others are saying about the current downturn. I believe Russell Bevan while interviewed on Adam Casto’s podcast made a similar argument or appeal to history. FWIW, I’m not so sanguine.
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ummmm…
"and here drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.”
Samuel Pepys, 1666
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What do you mean by that? Pretty sure the British were drinking claret in the 17th century.
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I think the alcohol industry was in slightly more dire straits 100 years ago.
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Just because there were ‘high-end’ wines in the 17th century doesn’t mean they had anything like the diversity of bottlings and stability of production that emerged in the 20th century. Sales looked very different as well. It’s always evolved.
As I noted above to @Dan_Kravitz, the market for wine developed and became much more global with all the 20th century technological advances. Rising incomes also helped spread the production of ‘fine wine’ across regions beyond a few outposts like BDX.
This stuff always moves, so we should never expect our current reality to be the end of history.
There obviously was a ‘fine wine’ industry in 1666.
In 0092 Falernum was considered a first growth.
The ‘fine wine’ industry existed at least in Roman times, probably in Greek times.
No, it wasn’t the same ‘fine wine’ industry as today. And there will probably be a ‘fine wine’ industry 2000 years from now. I’m pissed off that I won’t be able to participate! With terraforming, there might be vineyards on Mars that blow away Romanee-Conti.
But let’s not get silly.
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AD 32 Marawi was off the chain, though the early pressings were a little thin.
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Petronius has some mention of this in The Satyricon, serving up"Falernian of Opimius’ vintage, one hundred years old." It wasn’t really to say that this particular wine was great, but that it was perceived as “fine wine” because of its age and origin and so the new rich lapped it up with glee.
Submitted another large batch of not-too-old bottles today to auction, primarily Bordeaux, with meaningful numbers of rioja, napa and italian. Man if there are buyers out there, now is 100% the time to buy. So many amazing wines selling at 25%+ off release price, especially cult Napa wines. Wondering how much further down these wines will go… 100% bitter pill to swallow, I had convinced myself that I can always sell if I bought too much and not have to worry about meaningful depreciation. that obviously didn’t work out!
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