Even if one removes non-alcohol factors from the equation, consumers overall are still leaning toward spirits and beer over wine. U.S. shares of the global alcohol market in 2023 found spirits and beer garnering 42% each of the total revenue share, with wine checking in at 16%, according to a February report by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. Of particular concern to McMillan is data showing responses to a survey question asking: What (alcohol beverage) would you most likely bring to share at a party? While wine and beer fared best among options including spirits, flavored malt beverage, hard seltzers and ready to drink (RTD) beverages such as ciders and alcopops, wine only separated itself from the pack as something to bring to a party with the 65-and-older set, 58% of which would bring wine to share. Wine’s numbers hovered around 30% for people aged 35 to 64—and finished fifth for those aged 21 to 34 at 16%. McMillan highlights this as an important data point. “The bottom line is for every consumer over 60 who stops consuming wine, they are replaced by younger consumers with a mindshare of wine half that of their elders.” Adds McMillan: “Time is not on our side.” He says the selling and marketing of wine must be better than it is today. “We understand the issues. However, we have been reluctant to change our tried-and-true methods,” he writes. “Success will come when we put more effort into attracting new consumers, promoting the various occasions where wine can be enjoyed, improving the number of occasions existing younger consumers consume wine, and
adapting to consumers with different values than the over- 60s crowd.”
Demand and consumption in U.S. and abroad The United States isn’t alone in seeing a decrease in wine consumption—worldwide wine consumption has been on a steady downward trend since 2017. As a result of that, vine acres are being pulled to reflect the lower demand. Hopes in the early 2000s that the burgeoning Chinese market would balance the scales failed to materialize when, “a [government] crack-down on displays of wealth in the early 2010s began a decade-long decline that continues today,” writes McMillan. The report points out that consumption trends are partly a story of the changing old-world versus new-world drinking patterns. Between 1960 and 2014, France, Germany and Italy reduced alcohol consumption by 41%. The new-world countries of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S. increased consumption in that span by 16%. Unfortunately, today the countries growing in consumption are not making up for the decline in the rest of the world, McMillan says. With birth rates and alcohol consumption on the decline in the largest-consuming nations, McMillan writes, perhaps wine marketing would have its best success in the nine countries expected to hold half the world’s population by 2050: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the U.S., Uganda and Indonesia. In the United States, meanwhile, wine-sales growth is forecasted to continue its decline further by volume,
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