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The wines, they are a-changin'

09.10.25

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4 min read

By Tom Banham

Young people don't drink. The French don't drink. Middle-aged people have stopped drinking. They're closing the pubs. The offies are going extinct. The Californians are sitting on lakes of Syrah. Wine is dying, snuffed out by a changing climate and shifting palates. Pour one out.

Nonsense, clearly. Winemaking has survived more than 8,000 years, and it won't be "fickle gen Zs" who cause its demise. But beneath the shrieking headlines, there is a truth. The wines, they are a-changin'.

You've noticed this, no doubt, on wine lists and high streets, TikTok and Sunday supplements (delete according to your birth decade). The collapse of certain strictures, looser rules around what to drink when and with what. New regions, new buzzwords, new grapes. More colours, on the bottle and inside it. Is wine struggling, or surging? Is this revolution a triumph or a tragedy? As always, that depends which side of the barricades you're standing.

The numbers are enough to keep chateau owners up at night. Last year saw the industry's lowest production since 1961, and that's not all about weather; consumption is also plummeting – 2024 saw a 3.3% fall globally, from figures that were already historically low.

Scary stuff, but far from the whole picture. Organic wines are forecast to increase their market share by 10% over the next five years. Oranges are also booming, predicted to grow sales by more than 50% between 2022 and 2032. Fine wines were also recovering after a few years of decline, at least until Trump's tariffs began to batter European winemakers (an effort, perhaps, to Make Merlot Great Again).

From where I'm standing, these shifts all point to an overriding, and optimism-inducing truth: people are drinking less, but they're drinking better. They're starting to think about what they drink, rather than drinking out of habit.

Perhaps you recognise this in your own buying. When I speak to store owners and sommeliers, they note an increased inquisitiveness from their customers. The first question asked is no longer about price, one told me. It's about how a wine is made, or whether or notit's low-intervention, or even for suggestions around lighter and low-ABV options. Fewer bottles change hands, but the bottles that do are higher-quality, more complex, and often more challenging.

Partly, that's a kick against things becoming too easy. Wine has been growing more democratic for decades, with the supermarket revolution making half-decent, predictably drinkable wines available to everyone. But by the middle of the 2010s, supermarkets had become so dominant – gobbling up more than three-quarters of the UK wine market – that the landscape had become stagnant. Shelf after shelf of by-numbers plonk, produced in industrial quantities, to industrial standards. Never terrible, but never exciting.

Hence the mushrooming of independent wine bars and stores, each with a distinct identity, who can now speak to customers beyond their postcode through social media. Hedonism feels different to Noble Rot feels different to Top Cuvée feels different to Bench. Wine-lovers wear merch like football kits, showing allegiance to funky pet nats or small-run Bordeaux via branded tote bags and logoed waiter's friends. They want weird wines with wild labels. They want to drink the wines no one else is drinking. They're not looking for predictability, they're after individuality. Because we're all individuals, dammit. And it's always nice to show your followers just how individual you are, ideally via thumb-stopping bottles on Instagram (link to buy in bio!).

That's not meant to sound snide. This embrace of indie has made all kinds of wonderful flavours available to anyone with an internet connection. From new natural wines to ancient Georgian amphoras, this explosion in variety is as seismic as the New World wine earthquake in the Nineties, when drinkers fell for fruit bombs and fun branding, because they were revolutionary to anyone raised on inconsistent French claret with inscrutable labels.

Embrace it while it lasts. Already, the shift from your local wine bar to your local supermarket is starting. Oranges – albeit safe, whites-with-some-skin-contact versions – are gaining shelf space. Waitrose has launched its own rosorange, a response to Aldi's attention-grabbing own-brand bottle, which debuted in 2024 (viral, but unthreatening, its only real value is to show suspicious parents that orange wines don't all taste like vinegar).

Not that these shifts are all about all wine consumers becoming oenophiles overnight. The less-but-better trend is as much about our health, and our pockets. Gen Z prioritises wellness over decadence, and years of inflation have put pressure on leisure spending. Tough economies drove previous generations to supermarket discount shelves. Today's young people are more likely to eschew the drinks aisles entirely. Some are spending what little money they have on better wine, to share with friends and followers. Some are abstaining entirely. More power to them.

Instead of worrying about what the young people are doing, and what it means for the wine industry more widely, I think more about those who went full-bore in the boom years, filling cellars that they assumed would only appreciate, for their palate and their wallet. Do they gaze on all those Chateauneufs and Chassagne-Montrachets and weep, knowing that what they're really jonesing for that evening is a funky biodynamic, harvested by French punks and juiced by foot during a full moon?