The world is drinking less wine, and the trend is accelerating in ways that are beginning to reshape an industry that has defined culture, landscape, and livelihoods across centuries of civilisation.
Global wine consumption fell to 208 million hectolitres in 2025 — a 2.7 percent drop from the year before and a 14 percent decline from 2018, when the long slide began in earnest. The figures, published by the International Organisation of Vine and Wine, confirm that what initially looked like a cyclical wobble has become a structural reckoning. Nine of the world’s ten largest wine markets recorded falling demand last year. The industry is not in a bad patch. It is in a transformation.
The numbers across individual markets tell the story with uncomfortable clarity. China, once the great hope for wine’s global expansion, saw consumption fall 13 percent — continuing a retreat that has now wiped out years of market development investment by European exporters who had staked significant resources on Chinese demand. The United States, the world’s single largest wine market, recorded a 4.3 percent decline. France, the country most synonymous with wine as a cultural institution, fell 3.2 percent. Italy dropped 9.4 percent. Germany 4.3 percent. The exceptions — Portugal up 5.6 percent, Brazil surging 41.9 percent, Japan rising 6.8 percent — are real but insufficient to offset losses of this scale.
Three forces are driving the decline simultaneously, and their convergence is what makes the current moment different from earlier downturns. The first is generational. Research from IWSR, the drinks industry data firm, found that 67 percent of legal-drinking-age Generation Z consumers say they have reduced their alcohol consumption — a figure that compares with 43 percent among Baby Boomers. Young people, across most major markets, are simply drinking less alcohol than any previous generation. The second force is economic. Three consecutive years of relatively low wine production pushed prices higher at precisely the moment that inflation was squeezing household budgets, pricing out casual consumers and pushing others to cheaper alternatives. The third is health consciousness — a broad cultural shift toward mindful drinking that has created genuine commercial space for low- and no-alcohol alternatives that did not meaningfully exist a decade ago.
The OIV’s own director general, John Barker, acknowledged that tariff disruptions added another layer of pressure to an already stressed sector in 2025 — a reference to the trade friction generated by the Trump administration’s tariff policies, which complicated export routes and added cost uncertainty for producers dependent on American buyers.
The vineyard itself is contracting in response. Global vineyard area fell for the sixth consecutive year in 2025, declining 0.8 percent to seven million hectares as producers in France, Spain, and elsewhere pulled vines from ground that is no longer economically viable to farm for wine. The European Commission, in its Agricultural Outlook published last year, projected that EU wine consumption will continue falling by roughly 0.9 percent annually through 2035 — a forecast that, if accurate, means the industry has not yet seen the bottom.
What survives and what thrives in this environment will look different from what came before. Premium wines, curated experiences, tasting rooms, wine club memberships, and sustainability credentials are all showing relative resilience. Volume is not. The producers who have invested in being interesting rather than being abundant are weathering the storm better than those who built their businesses on scale. One casualty of the latter approach, Vintage Wine Estates, entered bankruptcy last year after an acquisition-led expansion strategy left it exposed when demand softened.
The wine industry has navigated upheaval before — phylloxera, prohibition, war, recession. What it has not faced in living memory is a generation that views wine not as a default pleasure but as a considered choice — one it is increasingly choosing not to make.
