The state of wine in 2023 — Jancis Robinson’s year in review

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My leading impression of this year has been that prices of mainstream wine seem suddenly to have gone through the roof. Of course, there is general inflation to take into account. For a while, wine producers absorbed increased costs of, for example, bottles and equipment. They now seem to have decided en masse to pass them on to us consumers. And in the UK, since August 1, we have had the additional imposition of a new and complex duty system tied to alcohol content which has added 44p a bottle to most still wines.

At the same time, UK duty on sparkling wines actually went down, by 19p a bottle, but I have seen no sign of this being passed on to those of us who buy it. Over the past year or two, champagne prices seem to have risen even more steeply than those of still wines. This was perhaps fuelled by the fact that investing in champagne (and, incidentally, whisky) has become a thing.

All these price rises come, contrarily, at a time when wine consumption is plummeting in key markets such as the US and UK. It is the first time in my long professional life that this has happened. There’s competition from abstinence and cannabis but also alternative alcoholic drinks, which are so much more interesting now than they were when a handful of mass-produced brands of beer and spirits ruled the world. And in these difficult economic times, it is becoming painfully clear to those who produce and sell it that wine is a discretionary purchase.

Even those who can afford Domaine de la Romanée-Conti burgundies have stopped buying wine at the rate they did a few years ago. According to Gary Boom, CEO of global fine wine merchants Bordeaux Index, "People are definitely becoming more health conscious. We are finding even some of our favourite billionaires are drinking less." As proof of softening demand, the Liv-ex price index of trophy wines peaked about a year ago and has been in steady decline ever since, with Champagne and Burgundy showing the steepest falls. Now that interest rates have risen, wine is no longer of such interest as an investment and London’s nucleus of fine wine traders have been twiddling their thumbs for some time now.

Wine consumption has been falling steadily in Europe’s main wine-producing countries for decades but things are really serious now. The French drink almost as much rosé as red wine today, and this has had a catastrophic effect on predominantly red wine regions such as the Rhône and Bordeaux, where surplus wine is being distilled into industrial alcohol. The French government has been bounced into providing subsidies for growers prepared to pull out vines. The problem is particularly acute in the Entre-Deux-Mers and the northern Médoc, where there was widescale conversion from mixed farming to viticulture at the end of the last century.

Growers all over the world are getting used to warmer and warmer summers, earlier and earlier harvests, increasing incidence of wildfires and long-term concerns about the availability of water, not just in California but even in Burgundy, where some celebrated producers wonder whether they will be able to make wine at all in 20 years’ time. But 2023 was distinguished by rain — and floods that proved fatal in Romagna in Italy and Hawke’s Bay in New Zealand. Much of Europe saw so much rain during the growing season that it led to mildew so rampant that some producers who had carefully adopted organic methods, eschewing agrochemicals, were tempted to return to the convenience of spraying with fungicides.

We consumers can only benefit from an era when an increasing number of ambitious, clever people want to make wine, even if they aren’t necessarily very good at selling it

The wet weather turned many vineyards into jungles, especially the increasing proportion with other plants grown between the rows of vines. It must have been tempting to turn to herbicides such as glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup), which has just been approved by the EU for up to another 10 years. The California wine-growing certification body Napa Green on the other hand has just announced that it will require its members to phase out the use of glyphosate by January 1 2026.

But perhaps the biggest shock in American wine circles in 2023 was what looked like the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March. Wine may not have been nearly as important as tech to SVB but SVB was vital to vintners all over the country and especially in the leading wine state California. Although it was rescued by First Citizens Bank later in the month, the failure shook the confidence of the whole industry.

Another important wine industry has had its confidence shaken. Australian wine exports, once the envy of the wine world, are in the doldrums, the most important market — China — having been wiped out overnight by the imposition of retaliatory tariffs two years ago. There are frequent rumours of a detente but the Australians have taken the precaution of negotiating a trade agreement with India that excludes Australia from the punitive taxes that have long hampered the ability of India’s growing middle class to get their hands on imported wine. Australia is now the leading exporter of wine to India with a 42 per cent share of the 10 million bottles imported last year.

All this doom and gloom comes at a time when the average quality of wine, at almost all levels except the most industrial brands, is higher than it’s ever been. And we consumers can only benefit from an era when an increasing number of ambitious, clever people want to make wine, even if they aren’t necessarily very good at selling it.

Awareness of the need to save our planet is increasing in the wine world. More and more wine bottlers now realise that wine’s biggest carbon footprint is the production and transport of glass bottles and barely a week goes by without some producer emailing me with news of their "lightweighting" of bottles.

In October, a group of retailers announced an important accord to reduce the average weight of the 75cl wine bottles they sell to 420g by the end of 2026. The powerful Scandinavian alcohol monopolies are already on board, as are Whole Foods Market; Naked Wines; The Wine Society; Laithwaites; Lidl GB; Virgin Wines and Waitrose. Several other major retailers are nearly there.

The global fine wine group Jackson Family Wines has been busy reducing bottle weights across the board and is testing a 397g bottle on the line responsible for 90 per cent of its production. The Crimson Wine Group in the US is aiming to reduce bottle weight to 400g by 2028.

One brand new development came into force earlier this month. Any wine produced after December 8 2023 now has to spell out what’s in it either on the label or, more likely, via a QR code. Your phone will now be able to tell you not just how your wine was scored but which additives it contains. Good news for those of us who are both curious and thirsty.

For full reviews of these books, see Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com

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