Follow-up: SVB wine report 2023

The wine business’s house is on fire. Why doesn’t anyone in the wine business notice?

This year’s 22nd annual Silicon Valley Bank state of the wine industry report reminded me (with many apologies to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) of the story about the neighbor’s house catching fire. Study author Rob McMillan wants to lend the neighbor his garden hose, in the form of a wine industry marketing campaign. It might not be enough to put the fire out, but it's better than what the wine business wants to do – wait for the fire to put itself out, assuming there even is a fire.

Because wine’s house is on fire -- people younger than 60 have pretty much given up on wine, according to the report.

“I don’t know what the wine business is doing to drive growth among younger consumers,” McMillan told the report’s webinar audience. “But they’d better stop, since it isn’t working.”

Two charts from the report demonstrate this. The first, at the top of the post, shows the booze people bring to a party, based on their age. And the only people much interested in bringing wine are ready for Social Security. Click here to see a larger version. The second, which is here, shows that people who don’t start drinking wine when they’re young don’t magically start drinking it as they get older.

Talk about a fire.

McMillan’s proposed WineRamp marketing plan, which was similar to the California Raisins and “Beef: It’s what for dinner” campaigns, was shelved last year after considerable resistance from the wine industry. Serious division remains about whether it was needed, let alone whether it would work. But anyone who questions the need for more and better wine marketing is living in 1990 and waiting for “60 Minutes” to air its French paradox story. Which, of course, isn’t going to happen.

And I can’t speak to whether something like the Raisins would work; several wine marketers I respect insist it would be a huge and costly failure. But I can see the house next door is burning down, and if my garden hose is the only thing handy to put it out, then I will use my garden hose. Because I know the fire isn’t going to put itself out.