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Here's a little exercise to play while reading yet another article or post from an American implying that their perspective of the wine world (cost of wine in restaurants, non-drinking Gen-Z, three-tier system etc) is all-important.

Imagine Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and the other largest American tech giants collectively losing two-thirds of their value.

That would mean the disappearance of nearly $20,000,000,000,000 — twenty trillion, the equivalent of around an eighth of the value of all the listed companies in the world. Or four times the GDP of Germany.

Of course it would be seen as an economic earthquake, even if it didn't happen overnight.

Now imagine something far bigger happening to wine.

Or, to be more precise, having happened to wine.

At the beginning of the 1960s, France, Italy, Spain and Argentina accounted for almost two-thirds of all the wine consumed in the world.

• France 25.7%
• Italy 24.0%
• Spain 8.3%
• Argentina 7.8%

(Anderson & Nelgen)

Add the USSR, Germany and Portugal and the cumulative figure goes up to 79.4%.

Set aside the bullshit about wine's place as an essential pillar of global civilisation.

Set aside the bullshit about wine's place as an essential pillar of global civilisation. Sixty years ago just 12% of the population of the planet drank 80% of the wine. The equivalent figures for beer and spirits were 35% and 64%. The people who drank these beverages were, presumably, far less civilised.

Sixty years ago just 12% of the population of the planet drank 80% of the wine

Then something dramatic happened. Over the last six decades, the four heavy wine drinking nations halved their consumption - in France's case the fall was over two thirds. The wine they stopped drinking was equivalent to more than one in three bottles of all the wine sold in the early 1960s.

Thanks to relatively booming economies and human boomers, the rest of the world took up the slack. Wine consumption everywhere outside those four countries more than doubled, though often from very low bases. Britain, Germany, the United States, Canada, Australia, northern Europe and, later, parts of Asia developed wine cultures almost from scratch. (Yes, I know the wealthy in some of these nations had a wine culture, but it was little more relevant to the rest of the populace of their countries than tech bros' taste in yachts is to the average American today.)

Yet all that was achieved by almost all of that growth was the replacement of the extraordinary quantities being abandoned by the old wine-drinking nations in the days when French schoolkids were routinely being given wine with their lunch.

Six decades later, as the result of plummetting consumption over the last four years, the world still drinks slightly less wine than it did in the early 1960s.

It is as though the rest of the world's stock markets would have to enjoy decades of unprecedented growth merely to compensate for a collapse of America's technology giants.

But, of course, any such scenario is quite inconceivable.

Isn't it?