“There’s no doubt that the anti-alcohol people are winning. This has been going on for four years and there’s no indication that 2026 is going to become the year that it turns around,” says John Gillespie bluntly.
Gillespie is the founder of Wine Opinions, a research business founded in 2005. For more than 20 years, he’s run an annual survey that takes the temperature of consumer sentiment in the valuable US wine market.
This year’s survey, involving 1,351 respondents and released at the end of March, asked people who are drinking less why they’re doing it. The answer was clear: Gillespie said the biggest response came because people were either cutting back on alcohol in general, or “cutting back because of health concerns.”
And the numbers aren’t small. Although the majority (54%) of frequent wine drinkers still drink about the same as usual, 20% of regular wine drinkers said they were drinking less frequently, while 33% of occasional wine drinkers were lowering their consumption.
Gen Z echoes the past
Gillespie said what surprised him is that it’s home consumption that’s falling the most. “When they go out, they’re not cutting back,” he said, suggesting that people might be sticking to established habits like date nights.
He also said that fears of young people turning their back on wine didn’t show up in the data; what is true, he said, is that Gen Z are behaving more like Gen X did at the same age, rather than like Millennials.
“The first wave of Millennials, both male and female, were all on board with wine,” said Gillespie, recalling when the first Millennial consumption figures emerged a decade ago. “I remember looking at that and thinking, ‘This is great for the wine industry.’” At the time, he was struck by the fact that so many more women were drinking wine than had been true for the Baby Boomer and Gen X cohorts.
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