Cheerleaders Won't Save the Wine Industry. Truth-Tellers Might

As consultants, Bouvard Moreton and I can hopefully help clients win individual skirmishes and battles, but we can't change the direction of the conflict.

Plenty of producers and regions need to develop better strategies and to improve their marketing, but their doing so will not achieve much for the fortunes of the wine industry as a whole. Wine doesn't need a million stories; it needs - far - fewer players, greater professionalism, and some fundamental changes in thinking.

Here, for what it's worth, is my own 'rant' in the shape of the changes that I think could help the wine industry as a whole reverse or at least its downward trend.

1) DITCH THE TEMPLATES We need to stop thinking there's a hierarchical set of stylistic templates into which all wine must fit. Dry red wine and late harvest white at the top; rosé and off-dry white and semi-sweet red at the bottom. As someone who's going to perform my role as one of the directors of the Mundus Vini competition in Neustadt this week, I'm not questioning the quality criteria of balance, complexity and typicity on which the wine industry has been built, but I will campaign against the negative/condescending attitude too many professionals take towards wine styles of which they disapprove: 'Ice' sweet Champagne; reds with over 10g/l of sugar' 'overpriced' rosé. So, in terms of 'leading by example', when our Polish distributors of le Grand Noir asked if we could supply them with a semi-sweet red, we said yes.

2) MORE TYPICITY As a firm supporter of freedom-of-expression in most parts of human life, I may surprise some by calling for a tightening of the typicity rules for appellations. Wine lovers may love diversity; 'normal' people want Chianti, Chablis and Marlborough Sauvignon to taste the way they expect it to; they don't want to play vinous Russian Roulette with the $20 or $30 they are paying for a bottle with one of these words on the label. (Which is why I struggle so hard with the new rules that allow red Bordeaux to contain 'up-to' 7g/l of RS without indicating the sweetness. And why I get annoyed with opinion formers saying "consumers won't notice"; some will). There should be two kinds of wine out there: the ones that conform to reasonable expectations created by the word on their label; and branded wines that have created their own styles and reputations.

3) BRAND FIRST Producers everywhere have to start thinking 'Brand First; Region/Grape Second. They have to get a lot better at imagining how likely the average non-involved wine drinker will be to remember the name of their brand and the look of the label. And be ready to change the packaging as radically as necessary until they believe it will stick

4) TALK TO AI They need to understand that, today, websites and general marketing are increasingly not aimed at human beings; they're also focused on getting an AI intermediary to recommend the product to that human being who may never be directly exposed to the website or marketing. So, less waffle (our wines express our terroir) and more original facts (our wine is different because it comes from here, is made like this, has won these medals and can be bought there). The keywords associated with traditional SEO are passé. Now marketing is about answering possible customers' questions in ways the bots understand but that don't look robotic to the human reader.

5) ACCEPT INNOVATION There needs to be readiness to embrace innovations that are currently unpalatable. Coffee purists had to accept instant coffee, decaffeination, pods, cappuccino and latte; tea traditionalists had to accept the arrival of the tea bag, flavoured tea, canned tea, bubble tea and, more recently, highly-priced matcha with milk. Tea and coffee sales have grown. Wine's have declined. Too many wine people are still wishing that 0.0 wine will simply go away.

6) BECOME AN INGREDIENT In most of these tea and coffees, the pure brew has become an ingredient - as Prosecco is in an Aperol Spritz and wine-based RTDs, and grape juice is in sparkling tea. It's time to open the doors and our minds to the mixologists so that the next global success is overtly one in which wine is the lead player rather than the stuff that's added to a best-selling spirit.

7) FEWER 75CL BOTTLES We have to free wine from the tyranny of the 75cl glass (or any other material) bottle. It's time to look seriously at smaller packaging, and serving wine on draft. And to stop simply saying that we can't because 'it's always been this way' or because of cost.

8) FEWER VINTAGES It's time to accept that, for most wine, most consumers are not looking for vintage variation; they want a glass of something that tastes the way it did last time; the kind of reliably repeatable experience that's offered by beer and spirits. The increasingly variable growing season we are already seeing will make non-vintage and multi-vintage a necessity. Why not embrace the concept now?

9) LESS TERROIR Most wine drinkers are also not bothered about most of the stuff they drink expressing any kind of specific 'somewhereness'. They like the idea of being able to find it as easily as possible. In other words, it needs to be scaleable. Vin de France gets applause from geeks because of the innovative small-scale wines it has helped to flourish. It, and the similar Spanish model, both deserve just as much - or more - recognition for allowing the creation and growth in sales of global best sellers like la Vieille Ferme and Mucho Mas. The industry needs to accept that brands like this matter as much to wine as Heineken and Absolut do to their sectors.

10) SMALLER RANGES In 1916, the British author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote a phrase in his book On the Art of Writing that should be familiar to any wordsmith: "Murder your darlings". What he meant was, 'edit ruthlessly' and place the reader's enjoyment and understanding above the rhetorical flourishes you may have enjoyed writing and feel most proud of. The same may have to be applied to your wines. Are they all working members of the ship's crew, or are they taking up space n the deck. Now's the time for some serious culling.

11) LESS FOCUS ON FOOD-MATCHING AND TOURISM Food and wine matching and special glassware are relevant to possibly 5% of the wine drinking most normal mortals do at home. And it's far less relevant to most of their restaurant-going than is usually imagined. What we need less of is advice of the kind I saw today: 'red wines to serve at a barbecue' which, even as I type it here looks like satire. Wine tourism is important - and very much so to limited-volume producers in ideal locations who can leverage it to build DTC sales. It is frankly irrelevant to the vast majority of wine and wine drinking. Chocolate and beer tourism have value, and so do the distillery visits on offer in Scotland. They are NOT something on which those industries rely.

12) COMMUNICATION & DISTRIBUTION Regretfully perhaps, like book publishers and movie producers, we have to acknowledge that quality - as perceived by experts - is only part of the picture. Most obviously, in the case of wine, price is a factor (tickets to watch 'good' and 'popular' movies cost the same), but so, crucially, are communication and distribution.

13) DON'T SHOOT THE MESSENGER Don't ignore the bad news, the downward sales graphs and predicted sales trends - when they are from credible sources. And don't grasp onto nuggets of apparently good news like a drowning man reaching for a liferaft - 'Gen Z says it's beginning to drink more alcohol' - especially when it's based on a single survey.

Which brings me back to English wine that, judging by the most recently available sales figures has done a fine job when it comes to quality and a poor one when persuading people to buy its wares.

I guess there are those who get all their news from Fox who may still swallow the US administration's official line that Iran is on the ropes, but their number must be shrinking. Government censorship actively prevents Russian civilians from knowing how 'their' war is going, but some must have their doubts. Most observers of the English wine scene, like Americans in the early days of the Vietnam war, however, are still being carried along by a celebratory, patriotic mood that leaves no space for dissent or questions.

If these are all big-picture comments that could be termed "telling the industry what it's getting wrong", I make no apology. I hope open-minded readers will find something of use and/or interest.

And, to remain true to form, here's what computer modelling offers as the the current best-case scenario for wine over the next 25 years: a reduction of wine consumption globally by a quarter. More radcal models, taking into account the possible impact of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, health concerns, lifestyle changes and climate change suggest that the decline could be 48% or, worse still, 63%