Only by looking at global consumer trends and how the so called Gen Z are behaving and spending their money in key markets around the world does the wine industry have any chance of truly understanding what all this means for the wine sector. Here Ross Sleet, chief executive of South African producer Boland Cellar, explains why things are nowhere near as bad as those headlines might claim and why there are still huge opportunities for those wine brands and businesses that know how to connect and be relevant to consumers across all age groups.
If you have been paying attention to the global drinks wine press in the last four to five years one of the consistent narratives that has played out is that millennials and Gen Z are not drinking as much as previous generations, most notably Gen X and boomers.
This narrative was backed by data sourced from esteemed publications such as the Silicon Valley Bank’s annual report which in 2021 which claimed: “The wine industry will need a marketing organisation to deliver a unified national consumer message as wine sales across all price segments have been in decline over the past few years.”
In its 2022 report it said: “In prior reports, we noted that the falling interest in wine among younger consumers, coupled with the encroaching retirement and decreasing consumption of baby boomers, poses a primary threat to the business. That issue has yet to be addressed or solved, and the negative consequences are increasingly evident.”
Fast forward to 2026 and again its report says: “The older, wine-focused cohort is aging out, and younger adults aren’t replacing them at the same rate. Millennial and Gen Z drinkers are spread across more categories and drinking less overall, particularly under age 29.”
In 1994 the New Scientist examined the concept of nominative determinism, which is the view that people tend to “become” who they are based on their names.
Have we in the drinks trade similarly talked our way into believing that the sky is falling on our collective heads? Have we adopted Chicken Little syndrome without trying to figure out exactly what is happening with consumers and wine consumption per se? Have we fallen into the trap of looking at a few trends and then believing them to be universal not further interpreted them?
Many who have heard the “evidence” without actually reading the facts, have stuck their head in the sand and blamed the “woke” youth for their downward sales trends, or more worryingly, done nothing.
The simple fact is that consumers who drink alcohol’s habits have changed, and the drinks, and wine industry especially, has been painfully slow to realise this and adjust their own brand and sales behaviour accordingly.
The prosecution
For the prosecution, Moven International’s well researched November 2025 report regarding “Big Alcohol” had the seismic headline that “more than $830 billion in market value has evaporated since 2021 – a staggering 46% decline in just four years.”
Numerous additional commentators including one from venerable Morgan Stanley added to this tone, which appeared to be backed up the WHO’s statement that “there is no safe level of alcohol use concerning cancer risk”.
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