As traditional wine markets stagnate, producers continue to chase shrinking demand in Europe and North America. Benjamin Jack argues that the industry’s greatest long-term opportunity lies in Africa – and those who delay risk arriving too late.
There is a particular quality to a good lunch in the European sunshine that makes the serious things feel manageable. After touring a Port lodge owned by a friend, somewhere between the starters and a second bottle of Vinho Verde, the discussion drifted, as it often does, to Africa.
It happens more often than you might expect. Conversations that begin with wine inevitably end up on logistics, distribution margins and the buying habits of Lagos’s emerging professional class. Africa has a habit of pulling the discussion back to itself for anyone thinking about where the drinks industry is heading rather than where it has been.
Perhaps that is because I am from the continent. Or perhaps Europeans are simply looking in the wrong place.
Africa is the overlooked growth market
We all know the western wine market is under pressure. European consumption is declining and the American market, long the industry’s great prize, is softening. The consumers the industry has spent decades cultivating are ageing, drinking less, and being told with increasing fervour by a wellness culture that whatever they are drinking is too much.
The industry’s response, broadly, has been to look inward, to “premiumise”, to produce alcohol-free alternatives, to chase the same shrinking pool of consumers with more sophisticated marketing. Few seem to be looking south.
The African Development Bank estimates that over 350 million Africans now fall into a global-equivalent of middle class, a figure that is expanding faster than anywhere else in the world, concentrated in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and Côte d’Ivoire. That number is projected to surpass 500 million by 2030. Africa’s urban population, 45% of the continent today, is forecast to double to 1.4 billion by 2050, making it home to one of the world’s largest urban populations. Each year, urban Africa grows by an estimated 24 million people. Twenty-four million people, every year, moving into cities, many entering the consumer class, and developing the tastes and aspirations that go with urban professional life.
Wine has arguably been a city drink since Roman times. In Africa wine follows urbanisation, disposable income, and aspiration the way water follows gravity. The conditions that created wine’s rise in the developed world, a growing middle class with money to spend and a desire to signal their arrival in society, are now assembling themselves across an entire continent, at speed, and on a scale that dwarfs anything the European or American markets offered, even at their peak.
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