A glimpse into the future. Trends for 2024 (Photo: Image generated by OpenAI's DALL-E, based on a description provided by Anja Zimmer)
It’s been a wild year for the world of wine, from inflationary pressures driving consumers to moderate their drinking or trade down, to a steep slowdown in the fine wine market.
Some of what’s happening simply reflects the economy. But there are deeper trends happening that could flip wine on its head. Here are seven of them.
The collapse of boundaries
There are emerging signs that consumers, particularly younger ones, no longer think of themselves as ‘wine drinkers’, ‘beer drinkers’ or ‘cocktail drinkers’. According to Bryan Roth, analyst with the Feel Goods Company in the USA, the lines between categories are now blurring. “Right now, we are talking and drinking a non-alc craft soda made by a brewery,” he gave as an example in a recent interview. “Nobody cares about your base fermentable,” he added, meaning consumers care less about whether they’re drinking beer or wine. What they care about is whether it tastes good.
It was inevitable. Flavour choices have exploded in the past 25 years, as consumer brands have sought to secure market share with more and more varieties. Think of potato chips, which went from a handful of classics like salt and vinegar, to hundreds of different flavours.
People now expect endless styles to choose from. This isn’t simply a North American phenomenon — it’s being reported as far afield as Australia.
“We're seeing category blurring — we’re starting to see wine do it with spritzes,” said Andrew Shedden, Head of Fine Wine at Dan Murphy’s retail chain in Australia, who was speaking at the WISA Impact conference in Adelaide last November.
There has been some of this happening in wine in the past decade, with producers fermenting red wines in Sherry, whiskey and bourbon barrels. Then there was, briefly, a trend for aromatised wines. And right now, as Liz Thach MW reported in Forbes, Stella Rosa has had success with wines that are infused with spice.
“We just heard from Nielsen that our Stella Rosa Pineapple & Chili wine became the number one best-selling new SKU wine of the year in the US,” Steve Riboli, CEO of Riboli Family Vineyards, the company behind Stella Rosa, told her.
For most wine producers, adding fruits or spices to their wine is an anathema.
But at the artisanal end, there are a growing number of co-ferments, where grapes are fermented with fruits. Expect more of these on the way, as boundary-blurring wines become more and more profitable.
Cans
Boundaries aren’t just blurring between categories, but also between occasions. It used to be that sports meant beer, and dinner meant wine, but that’s changing, particularly among younger drinkers, who are actively seeking canned drinks to take to different occasions — regardless of whether it’s a canned cocktail, a non-alc beer, or a canned wine.
According to Grand View Research, the global canned wine market will grow at a compound rate of 12.3% to 2028 — to a market size of $571.8m or more by 2028.
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