The wine consumer as alibi

What the sector already knew There he is again: the changing wine consumer as alibi. The moment the wine market stumbles, he shows up as

Reinier O. Broeks

September 6, 2026

Two wine consumers presented as suspects in a police line-up, illustrating how the wine industry uses the consumer as an alibi.

What the sector already knew

There he is again: the changing wine consumer as alibi. The moment the wine market stumbles, he shows up as the suspect. The explanation sits outside the sector, so the sector never has to look at itself first.

The list is familiar by now. Gen Z drinks less wine. Millennials choose differently. Health weighs heavier. Alcohol is less of a given. Meals grew more casual, households smaller, and the range of alternatives kept expanding.

The sector reads that list as a request for different qualities: crisper, lighter, lower in alcohol, more often white or rosé, easier to reach for and sometimes cheaper too. Other drinks and wine styles simply fit new moments and habits better.

Much of that holds up. But it mostly describes what the consumer does and what he responds to. It does not explain why the wine world lost touch with that changing consumer in the first place.

The slow zeitgeist of the consumer

Consumers, moreover, rarely change overnight. I call this the slow zeitgeist of the consumer: a gradual accumulation of shifts in health, income, lifestyle, eating habits and social custom, which eventually reshape taste and preference too. What looks today like a fresh consumer trend can be the result of changes that have been building for years, sometimes decades.

Yet, the consumer makes a convenient, anonymous third party for the sector to point to whenever results decline. The consumer changed, so the market changed. That is a comfortable, self-confirming piece of reasoning. When something works, it confirms the quality of the product and the strategy. When it doesn’t, the consumer changed. It resembles what psychology calls the self-serving bias: crediting success to your own choices, blaming setbacks on outside circumstances. The question whether the sector itself lost relevance slips out of view as a result. I saw the same pattern earlier in ‘Overconfidence broke the wine market. Climate just gets the blame’: a market that, in truth, could no longer stomach the price, hiding behind the weather instead.

Across analyses of falling wine consumption, the same explanations keep resurfacing: generational change, health, economics, shifting eating habits, competition from other drinks. All of them can explain part of the development. But one question stays unanswered: why didn’t the wine sector anticipate this earlier, and more fundamentally?

Sixty years of slow change is not a sudden trend

In France, wine consumption fell from more than 120 litres per person per year in 1960 to under 40 litres in 2020. Bernard Farges (CNIV) and Samuel Montgermont (Vin & Société) cited that figure at a press conference in December 2022. The official French government publication confirms the trend for the more recent period: from 92 litres per inhabitant in 1980 to 40 litres in 2019.

Sixty years of declining wine consumption is not a recent consumer trend. It is a societal shift spanning several generations. Over those sixty years, the long lunch grew shorter. Households grew smaller. Drink-driving became socially unacceptable. Beer, cocktails, no- and low-alcohol drinks, and later ready-to-drink cocktails, each claimed their own place and their own moments.

The OIV (Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin) sees the same long-running movement worldwide. It estimates global wine consumption in 2025 at 208 million hectolitres, down 2.7 percent from 2024. Sharp swings in the chart may reflect inflation or a pandemic. The underlying consumer behaviour, mostly, does not.

The sector saw the shift coming

In December 2022, CNIV and Vin & Société sounded the alarm over that same déconsommation. The organisations described a set of deep societal changes. Meals lost their fixed rituals, habits passed less naturally within families, households changed shape, and more people lived alone. They also pointed to what they called a ‘small but active anti-wine movement.’ By that, CNIV and Vin & Société mean, among others, ANPAA, renamed Addictions France in 2025, an organisation funded predominantly by public money.

There’s a striking contradiction there: the public sector funds alcohol prevention while simultaneously propping up the wine sector with economic support measures. For this analysis, though, something else matters more: how the sector itself explained the decline. The causes lay largely outside the sector, with society, changing families, and the anti-wine and anti-alcohol lobby. Whether the product, the pricing, the distribution, or the marketing itself had contributed to this loss of relevance received far less attention.

The proposed solutions followed the same pattern. Clearer labels, a better image, more organic wine, renewed promotion of wine as a product of pleasure and togetherness. None of that is wrong, but these are mostly answers about communication, presentation, and reputation.

Among younger drinkers, the problem was already visible in the sector’s own numbers. Between 2014 and 2021, still wine’s share of alcohol purchases for home consumption among 18- to 35-year-olds fell from 31 to 23 percent, measured in units of alcohol. Beer rose over the same period from 24 to 39 percent.

That decline doesn’t mean wine lost its cultural meaning too. In an Ifop survey, 96 percent of the French said wine is part of French cultural identity. Cultural meaning and market relevance, it turns out, are not the same thing.

The sector knew the numbers and saw the societal shifts. Even so, the dominant question stayed largely about how to sell wine more appealingly, and far less about what place wine still held in changing lives.

The same pattern beyond France

The pattern isn’t French alone. In the United States too, the sector has held detailed consumer data for years. The Wine Market Council has measured, since 1997, how many Americans drink wine at least once every two to three months. That share fell from 34 percent in 2023 to 29 percent in 2025, against a peak of 42 percent in 2012. That’s roughly 76 million Americans, nine million fewer than two years earlier.

The numbers have been there for years. What’s missing is the translation.

From signal to product, over and over

Less alcohol becomes a NoLo line. The demand for transparency becomes an ingredient list. Sometimes a producer goes further still. Josh Cellars developed its still white Seaswept specifically for the more casual drinking occasions where wine had been losing ground to other drinks. According to Josh Cellars, Seaswept grew 64 percent in 2025 and delivered well over three hundred thousand cases to trade.

That’s interesting, precisely because the thinking here doesn’t start from the bottle alone. But one brand strategy says little about an entire sector.

The consumer often starts from entirely different questions: do I feel like alcohol tonight, is this a proper meal or just snacks, does wine even fit this company? Only at the very end of that reasoning does a more or less specific bottle of wine appear, if at all. The sector starts from the other end: which wine do we make, how do we package it, through which channel do we sell it?

The sector is perfectly capable of following visible consumer signals. Rosé, natural wine, sparkling, cocktails and low alcohol were all picked up in time. But that’s reactive product management: a visible signal gets translated into a new product, a different style, different packaging. That’s still something else than understanding why, when and for what purpose the consumer chooses wine at all.

The wine world lost touch with the consumer.

The system looks out from the bottle

This product-first thinking doesn’t sit only with producers and marketers. Traditional wine criticism starts from the bottle too.

Chinese wine critic Alexandre Ma put it sharply in an interview with Vino Joy on 30 July 2026. The old model of wine criticism, he said, was simple: ‘I taste, I tell you what I think, and you listen.’ That worked in an era of vast information asymmetry between critic and consumer.

Ma sets a heavier standard now. A critic only becomes valuable when a consumer can say: this bottle genuinely tastes good, and it’s exactly what I was looking for. Without that function, Ma argues, critics mostly talk to each other and serve a need that no longer exists.

What Ma says about wine criticism applies to the commercial chain too? Value arises once a bottle takes on a function for the person buying it. Whether the bottle is good on its own terms matters less. The first question to a customer isn’t which wine he’s looking for, but what he’s trying to achieve. The second question is how he’s already tried to solve that himself. Only the third question is about the bottle.

Not an alibi, a blind spot

The consumer really has changed. He drinks less, eats differently, has more alternatives. That explains a substantial part of the shift in the wine market. It doesn’t explain why the wine world finds it so hard to answer that shift.

The consumer too easily becomes the endpoint of the analysis. When he should really be the starting point.

The wine world keeps asking why the consumer drinks less wine. It asks far less often why its wine should still hold a place in his life.

Sources

This article first appeared in Dutch on Winecastr.com: . Translated into English with the help of AI, checked and edited by the author.

This article first appeared in Dutch on Winecastr.com: De wijnconsument als alibi. The English version was previously published on The Wine Shift’s Substack. Translated with the help of AI, checked and edited by the author.

Last updated: 7 September 2026

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