In the current issue of Fortune, Vivienne Walt paints a grim picture of the French wine industry facing a slew of crises—“from geopolitics and trade tensions to the changing tastes of younger consumers.”
Those changing tastes, and particularly Gen Z’s shift toward sobriety and moderation in alcohol consumption, are causing anxiety in Bordeaux: “Just 54% of American adults now drink alcohol—the lowest rate in 90 years, according to a recent Gallup poll,” Walt writes. “Even the French, who drink more wine than anyone else in Europe, are consuming 4.9% less than they did in 2000, and France’s professional winemakers association projects that consumption could fall another 20% over the next decade.”
All this leaves vintners facing a daunting conundrum: “Bound by tradition and lacking in scale, it’s difficult for these winemakers to pivot quickly to new strategies,” Walt writes. “They’re grappling with an unfamiliar question: Is a full comeback even feasible, or will they need to permanently overhaul their business models?”
Of course, circumstances can change. And French winemakers looking for evidence of that fundamental fact of life might be heartened to read a Fortunefeature from 1984 that declared, “The California wine boom has ended.”
“In wine-growing valleys, storage tanks and warehouses brim with unwanted wine,” wrote Gilbert T. Sewall, before going on to explain that a glut of cheap wine had led to a price war among American producers.
Fortune was hardly the only doomsayer: Time reported a few months later in 1984 on “California’s Grape Depression,” caused in part by a “temperance trend” and the rise of the cursed wine cooler—a pre-bottled blend of fruit juice, soda, and low-quality wine.
Spoiler alert: The Californian wine industry survived the era of wine coolers, and while the rapid growth of the 1960s and 1970s slowed somewhat, the sector has seen a steady upward trajectory since the 1980s—in production, revenue, and perhaps most importantly in the region’s reputation for producing increasingly quaffable high-end wine.
That’s a success story worth raising a glass to.
