There were 12 presentations in all and, unusually for a conference, everyone got straight to the point. With just 15 minutes each, the speakers had to be punchy.
The theme of the 2025 Meininger’s Wine Conference, held the day before ProWein, was wine sales, with talks on everything from appealing to new demographics to finding new markets. The room was crowded, as the topic obviously held high appeal.
When will the good times come back?
Bourcard Nesin was the first to acknowledge that times are tricky. “It’s a tough moment, perhaps a historically difficult moment,” he said. “Instead of talking about what’s happening, I want to talk about why — and how long could this last?”
Nesin, the VP of Research Beverages at Rabobank, put up a slide showing the evolution of wine consumption over the past 55 years in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy. The lines all trended down.
“Consumption is basically half of what it was in 1970,” he said, noting there had been a 30% growth in population since then.
Much of that loss was, of course, offset by the growth of export markets. “The US market is two times bigger than it was in the 1970s,” he said. “But, unfortunately, 10 or 15 years ago, they definitely stopped growing.”
Sales flattened after the Global Financial Crisis in 2007. Around 2017 and 2018, “we started to see global wine consumption start to crater. My question is why did this stuff happen?”
Learning from the 1980s
To try and understand what’s happening today, Nesin decided to take a look at what happened in the 1980s, the last time there was a major slump in wine consumption. He started with newspaper reports from the time.
He read out some of the quotes he’d found:
- “It’s pretty clear to me that we have entered a kind of neo-temperance, neo-prohibitionist phase of activity.”
New York Times, 1985
- “In the early 1980’s when Americans started switching from Scotch to Seltzer, it seemed to be just another ebbing in the cycle of rising and falling consumption of alcohol. But what seemed to be a passing fancy now appears to have taken root as a fundamental change in American culture.”
New York Times, 1991
“You do not understand the delight I felt at seeing these quotes from the 1980s and seeing that you could copy and paste every single one of these comments into an article about the current wine consumption trends,” he said.
Nesin discovered the 1980s had other similarities to today — demographics, as the biggest consumers at the time was the cohort born between the Great Depression and World War II, the smallest generation in modern history. Then there was new regulation, particularly the crackdown on drink driving, and new taxes on alcohol.
Today’s wine market is grappling with somewhat similar challenges, from the rise of Ozempic, to warnings about alcohol and cancer. Nesin says that seeing all these similarities makes him “nervous about what’s happening because it makes me feel it’s more structural,” he said. “When you see something structural, you need to be clear eyed about what’s actually happening in the world.”
Focus on what you can control
Yet, paradoxically, he advised the audience not to worry about any of these trends, because they can’t do anything about them. “Interestingly, the things that the wine industry tends to talk about most are the things they can do least about,” he said.
Instead, he proposed that wine people should think about how spirits tackled their volume decline in the 1980, when they lost close to 50% of volume.
“In 1996, the trade group that controls spirits businesses in the United States removed a voluntary ban on TV marketing and advertising,” he said. “From 2001 to 2006, the spirits industry went from spending $5 million a year in advertising to $150 million. Today, they spend over half a billion. These guys didn’t need a health halo to be successful.”
While he acknowledged that “the wine industry doesn’t have the margins to do this” at anything like the same scale, he reminded the audience that internet marketing is available to everyone.
“We forget that we have some agency in this process,” he said.
New audiences in the US
Christian Miller, Research Director of the Wine Market Council (WMC) in the US also had plenty to say about how previous booms and busts in the US market could shed light on what’s happening today, particularly in markets like the UK and Canada, which are most similar to the US.
He noted that the introduction of classic table wine created a boom in the 1960s and 1970s. Then came the “rather extraordinary period of growth from the early ‘90s into the early 2000s. This was a time when wine sales outgrew by far almost any other drink category in the US — and it came to an end with a flattening of the market around 2016 or 2018.” Since then, there’s been a decline in sales.
So what caused the second boom? “There was a radical change in food and drink culture in the US. Almost every category of food or drink increased in intensity, flavour and the amount of money you could spend on the upper-high end,” he explained. Consumers had endless new choices in the coffees, cheeses, olive oils and condiments they were being offered — and wine folded neatly into that trend.
“The beer industry in the 1980s had gone in the exact opposite direction, simplifying, reducing the number of offerings and reducing the amount of flavour — and it lost a lot of market share during this period.” This was also a period when the Baby Boomers entered their peak spending years.
Not to forget, said Miller, that there was plenty of good news about wine in the media, from the famous 60 Minutes broadcast about the French Paradox, to stories about the benefits of the Mediterranean lifestyle and the news that red wine was good for cardiovascular health.
Distribution had also expanded. “The number of off-premise licenses in the US went up 37% between 2004 and 2015,” he said. “And finally, you also have the high income and education skew of wine consumers in the US. These consumers have more money to spend on discretionary purchases like wine.”
How things have changed
While any number of things have been blamed for the wine decline from inflation to wellness to changing incomes, Miller says it’s hard to disentangle everything.
But after doing in-depth research that separated out each of these factors, he says the WMC has come to the conclusion that the number one reason people are drinking less wine is because they’re drinking less alcohol in general.
“We did a rather elaborate study. We asked questions about what they drank, how often, where, with whom, health perceptions, you name it.” And they found that reducing alcohol across categories was the strongest predictor of reducing wine consumption, regardless of demographic, drink type preferences or finances.
“Alcohol is discretionary spending,” said Miller. “It’s kind of a luxury even at the prosaic, everyday consumption level.”
The WMC also found that “38% of those reducing wine said alcohol affects them more than it used to; 28% said it’s not healthy in general.” These same people were also cutting back on sugar.
“The expense of wine versus other options was more prominent for those in their 20s and 30s, whereas drinking less alcohol was more prominent for those in their 60s and 70s, despite all the press about young abstainers,” he said.
“So why are Millennials doing better with wine than GenZ? We get some clues from our various surveys.” Miller said that GenZ are more likely to have heard negative health messages about wine and alcohol. “Cost is more prominent to them.”
For Hispanic and black consumers in their 20s, beers and spirits are perceived as being more connected to their lifestyle, culture and drinking occasions. “Drinking occasions are more related to energy, fun, inebriation, losing inhibitions, being outdoors and doing physical activity,” he said.
There’s a gender divide as well. For women, casual occasions are elevated by wine, whereas prestige resonates more with young men.
There are new consumers appearing
“The next wave of people who will consume wine — or not — are going to be 50% non-Hispanic white, 25% Hispanic, 13% non-Hispanic black and 11% the rest,” said Miller. “It matters because historically, Hispanic and non-white consumers in the US have lagged in their wine consumption.”
The good news is that wine is winning among younger black Americans. “A higher percentage of them report wine consumption increasing than decreasing,” he said. And they’re more willing to splurge, with 46% of black core wine consumers spending more than $20 a bottle.
“They have higher purchase rates for smaller formats and boxed wines, for fruit and flavoured wines and for wine cocktails. They’re just more diverse and open-minded about different forms of wine.” They also have a stronger belief in the health benefits of moderate wine consumption — but what they mean by that is that it’s easier to stay in control with wine versus other drinks.
This, he said, “is an example of wine winning and it’s happening in several segments. For God’s sake, take advantage and try to leverage it”.
Here’s how to appeal to GenZ
Dr Stephanie Rumpff flashed some social media accounts on the screen and asked the audience for a show of hands. “Who knows one of these three?”
Almost no hands shot up.
The three women — Charli D’Amelo, Emma Chamberlain and Molly-Mae Hague — Dr Rumpff explained, are GenZ media influencers.
Dr Rumpff is Head of Industry Business Development, Consumer Markets EMEA at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and she shared their research on the characteristics, values and consumption patterns of GenZ.
“They pretty much represent what GenZ is interested in,” Dr Rumpff continued. “Charli started off with dancing videos. Emma started off with just sharing some of her daily lifestyle. And Molly Mae is very much into beauty and fashion routines.”
Between them, they have more than 66m followers on Instagram alone. “Everyone looking at this generation should look into what social media is offering,” she says, noting that GenZ are known as ‘digital natives’ for a reason — they grew up in the digital world from the very beginning of their lives.
5 essentials that make GenZ different
Born between 1995 and 2009, GenZ is a heterogeneous group that includes people still at school and people who are now buying homes. “Still, when we’ve looked at what actually shaped GenZ, we see five essential developments,” said Dr Rumpff:
- the rise of social media and mobile first;
- climate change and environmental activism;
- the pandemic;
- an embrace of gender equality and LGBT+, and
- economic uncertainty and political polarisation.
“They’re used to instant access to information and instant gratification,” she went on; online stores that take more than 15 seconds to lose will lose this group instantly.
GenZ also knows immediately if something happens. If an earthquake happens on the other side of the world, they’ll know about it, making them very alive to trends — they know the minute something becomes hot.
“Across the entire customer journey, 73% discover brands on social media,” she said, adding that 50% have been persuaded to buy things because of influencers. “Also, half of them buy directly on social media. So with the TikTok shop now arriving in Europe, it’s a really relevant channel.”
Nutritional information is also important, “because whatever is related to health is important”.
Despite economic precarity, GenZ are also willing to pay a premium for better quality products or services, particularly when it’s related to lifestyle.“For instance, around 60% say they want to pay more for beauty, fashion and health than for all other generations.”
Once they find something they love, they will stick to it — “only 35% are saying they would try out new brands if they offer better value than their favourite brand” compared to 50% for other generations.
Dr Rumpff ended her talk by coming back to the three influencers, all of which have been multi-millionaires by parlaying their social media presence into businesses from fashion to coffee. For anybody wanting to understand this generation, she finished, it was critical to be on social media.
And, as other speakers repeatedly said throughout the day — don’t study young people like they’re science experiments. Go out and hire them instead.
This is the first in a two-part series showcasing some of the presentations at the Meininger Conference 2025.
