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.