This is never a particularly joyful month for the wine industry. Nobody is ever buying much just after Christmas. And these days, the festival of self-denying piousness that is Dry January casts a po-faced pall. Yet after a difficult 2024 (neo-prohibitionists advancing, teetotalism gaining ground, youngsters rejecting wine), this year has somehow started even worse.
Just three days into 2025 came the US Surgeon General’s shrill call for alcohol to carry cancer warnings. Six days later, Terry Smith told investors in his Fundsmith Equity fund that he had sold his holdings in drinks giant Diageo, on the grounds that the rise of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic would hit sales. And in the UK, changes to the duty system will next month put the boot into the drinks industry yet again, as the Labour government embraces one of the sillier ideas of the ousted Tories. Wine Society CEO Steve Finlan said last month that the new rates will cost the Society up to £3.5 million in additional costs this year.
Yet personally, I can’t help feeling optimistic about the wine world this January. This is partly because I’ve just got back from an inspiring research trip to California, meeting people doing daring things and making amazing wines. Because in fact, as we all see when we go out and meet winemakers anywhere, this is an industry alive with creativity.
Granted, the assault of the neo-prohibitionists will intensify. It remains to be seen whether Trump will endorse the farewell spasm of Biden’s Surgeon General over warning labels for alcohol. Vivek Murthy’s demand is as specious as most of the anti-booze brigade’s finger wagging: why not demand signs in all cars warning that driving measurably increases your risk of injury and death? But a more serious attack will come this year with the revision of US dietary guidelines. Journalist Felicity Carter’s brilliant reporting last year exposed the way that neo-prohibitionists linked to temperance extremists have infiltrated key committees.
That said, in 2020 the first Trump administration rejected a proposal for guidelines to recommend just one drink a day (the resulting current guidelines ended up with a two-drink limit.) Trump is teetotal and his conspiracy-theorist Health Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr, leads a miasmic “Make America Healthy Again” campaign making noises about obesity and chronic illness. But where it all ends up is anyone’s guess: one suspects that any moves against beer or junk food wouldn’t be well received by the burger-chomping, Coke-swilling XXL Americans at Trump’s rallies.
Meanwhile trends towards not drinking, especially among young people, will probably continue. Wine sales are down while those of insipid “no and lo”-alcohol drinks rise. But there’s evidence from the US, confirmed to me by winemakers on my recent visit, of millennials (those born 1981-96) now out-replacing boomer consumers, despite once having seemed uninterested in wine. This is an established generational cycle.
We should remember that when faced with crises, the wine world is surprisingly adaptable. Take how this supposedly stuffy industry responded to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Within weeks, wine merchants up and down the land were running wildly popular online tastings. Sales went up – OK, so people were trapped at home, but they got into Greek wine and cocktails rather than kombucha, thanks in large part to the efforts of merchants.
Or to take a far more critical threat than people choosing Sipsmith over Sauvignon Blanc, the wine industry is responding to the climate emergency and the demands of net zero. In California I saw evidence of large-scale trials (up to 24 hectares at a time) of regenerative viticulture at both Jackson Family Wines in Sonoma and O’Neill Wines in the Central Coast. They and other producers are racing ahead with efforts to decarbonise their electricity supplies, recycle water and cut their carbon footprint in other ways, such as reducing bottle weights. Producers like them have a good story to tell, especially to younger consumers.
More than anything, though, wine retains its innate ability to surprise and delight. In California I spent time in Paso Robles, which has made a big name for itself specialising in Rhône varietals, from a standing start, in less than a generation. If you’d told wine people 20 years ago that scores of Paso Robles boutique wineries would regularly sell out their production of bottles costing upwards of $50, most would have said, “Where?”
Closer to home we’ve seen the transformation of the Greek wine industry, as evidenced by this week’s brilliant Maltby & Greek tasting. From queasy memories of holiday retsina to Morrison’s stocking an own-brand Assyrtiko in little more than a decade: that’s wine’s dynamism.
And in England, thanks not just to climate change but to the ambition and sheer determination of winemakers, we’ve seen English wine catapulted in a similar timescale from joke status to undisputed, world-class quality. Here as in other hotspots around the world, ambitious, independent winemakers have no trouble selling their wine.
There are certainly sectors which are lagging badly and which desperately need to up their game. Entry-level Bordeaux and Languedoc reds urgently need to change to stay viable. The contrast is perhaps even more stark in Rioja, where forward-looking producers are selling brilliant, terroir-driven wines – as we will see at Tim’s “Best of Rioja” tasting next month – at the same time that low-quality, mass-produced Riojas haemorrhage sales in Spain and beyond. Sales trends suggest there is almost unavoidable pain ahead for many who work in such sectors.
But I think in a month of gloomy headlines and interminable no-and-lo blather, we should remember just how exciting and rapidly changing the world of wine can be. That’s part of what always attracted us to wine. It will do the same for others too. And that makes me hopeful.
Photo by Victor on Unsplash
Andy Neather blogs at https://aviewfrommytable.substack.com/. He is co-writing a book on wine and sustainability with Jane Masters MW, to be published this autumn by the Académie du Vin Library.