Wine - What it tells us about the world

Wine is both an agricultural product and a luxury product.  As an agricultural product, and a fairly delicate one at that, it is the "canary in the coal mine" for environmental concerns.  As a luxury product, it is the same sort of bird for economic concerns. So what does wine tell us about our world today.  In simple words, we're in big trouble.

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Global Warming

Our first worry comes to us courtesy of MSNBC, with the article Australia wine industry withers from warming. Australia has two different wine industries.  The first is good to great wine, the sort of wine you see on the upper shelves of American wine stores.  The second, though, is bulk wine.  A huge percentage of Australian wine is blended and packaged for quick drinking (as compared to long-term cellaring and aging) in cardboard boxes.  The big growers in the Australian interior produce the grapes that go into the bulk wine. They are hurting.  They are seeing the third straight year of drought, and water prices have tripled. Yields are down 30%, heat has withered the grapes on the vine, and changes in rain patterns damage the berries.  

Recent rains have bypassed the country's parched inland wine regions, and have fallen half-way through the harvest in eastern Australia, too late to help the berries and instead causing a mildew-like disease.

Scientists say Australia's vast inland winegrowing districts face the greatest degrees of warming.

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A landmark study by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) found these areas would warm by 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2030.

Last year was one of the warmest on record for southern Australia, where all of the nation's winegrowing regions lie, as well as one of the driest.

The effects of climate change on wine will not be immediately devastating.  In fact, some people think the amazing 2005 vintage in France, a banner year across Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Rhone, comes from warmer climate and reduced rainfall.  The point is not damage to wine or the wine industry. The point is that what happens to grapes today can happen to corn, wheat, or soy tomorrow.  

The Economy

I noted above that wine is a luxury item.  People don't actually NEED wine, and certainly don't need good wine.  It is something people buy after they pay the mortgage and the kids' tuition.  Is there something, then, that wine can tell us about the economy? Yes, I think there is.

This story comes to us courtesy of Fermentation - the Daily Wine Blog.  Wine clubs are a particular luxury.  If you join a wine club, it sends you a few bottles a year, usually quarterly, two to four bottles at a time.  A lot of smaller wineries have their own wine clubs, sending out their own product a few times a year.  This can be their bread and butter, offering a chance for people to become familiar with their wine, in hopes they will order follow-up cases.  The cool thing about this, from an economic point of view, is that cancellations usually come right before or after shipments, since it is not top of the mind at any other time.  Fermentation is pretty well plugged-in to the wine industry, and did an informal poll of wine clubs.  What did it find?

My informal survey of a few wineries shows that cancellations of wine club memberships has increased over the past two or three months to a rate not ever seen by some and to a point for others that correlates to times in the past that were clearly recessionary.

I found this very interesting.  Sure, we can look at the Consumer Confidence Index for a sense of what people are thinking, but drops in wine club memberships show real behavior, real decisions to start cutting out luxury items.

Conclusion

Wine can tell us a lot about the world.  In a glass of wine we can travel to France, Italy, or almost any other nation on the earth.  We can taste the terroir of a small village in Burgundy or an enormous vineyard in Australia, and over time.  But we should also listen to our wine, and the wine industry.  Right now it is telling us we are in deep trouble, and we better start paying attention today, or we will pay dearly tomorrow.