I have to admit that I was shocked when I saw the OIV data showing that we're drinking less wine as a planet than we were in the year when John F Kennedy became president and the Soviet Union put the first man into space. Okay, a fair proportion of the 5 billion extra people on earth since then don't drink alcohol for relilgious or cultural reasons, but spirits and beer consumption have doubled. And, while many are feeling the pinch right now, the global population is healthier, more literate, lives longer and has more money than it did 65 years ago.

I'm working on a book that analyses where wine went 'wrong' (well, it certainly didn't go 'right'), and, given the current uprooting of swathes of vines in several continents, and the range of headwinds facing wiine and other forms of alcohol, I'm also looking at where we may be heading on our way to 2050, when there will be 9.7 billion people on planet earth.

As part of that project, I asked a set of AI agents to model the next 24 years, taking into account climate change, labour shortages, health concerns, demographics and several other factors.

The result is an interactive chart that offers a set of scenarios, and the chance to play with them to see what might happen if one were to change some of the assumptions.

Without that tweaking, the three models show further falls in consumption of 25%, 48% or 63%. Strikingly, the second of these - nearly half - is the 'base' case scenario - the one that reflects most current thinking.

Wine consumption is set to halve over the next 25 years

Don't be scared

My latest Wine Thinking Substack includes a link to the chart as well as all of the assumptions that lie behind it - and the sources. My aim is not to depress or scare, or to claim that I have any kind of crystal ball. I simply used technology that is now available to almost everybody to do the kind of modelling that would previously have required a roomful of statisticians.

My reason for doing it sprang out of frustration with so much of the directionless discussion I've seen about the 14% fall in consumption over the last 4 years, and the finger pointing at WHO health scares, neo prohibitionists, Gen Z, 'Big Wine' and overpriced wine in restaurants. And the polyannaish line that "Wine has been around for 8,000 years; it'll be okay".

None of this is thought through. None of it knits together the factors I listed earlier, ranging from vines dying of thirst, to people 'zebra' drinking - giving up alcohol on weekdays to improve their sleep patterns.

And none of it looks at wine in the context of the other beverages people might be consuming (spoiler alert: beer and spirit consumption falls too, but not as quickly).

I'm not trying to be Nostradamus; there may be all sorts of reasons why these models are overly pessimistic. I just want to provoke better, more informed discussion in the wine industry, because if we'd had a bit more of that, maybe wine wouldn't have flatlined for the last 60 years.

Getting to create the chart has taken a lot of work, so I don't apologise for putting it behind the substack paywall,

but...

As Devil's Advocate readers/subscribers, you get a bit of VIP, Access All Areas treatment, in the form of a one-day free paid subscription. Simply use this URL

https://robertejoseph.substack.com/03616bf5

And then, please seriously consider subscribing. I think you'll find it's worth it.