This holiday season, that glass of wine on your table comes with a surprising backstory. Global wine consumption is down. And the reasons are far more complicated than you might expect. The industry is facing a convergence of challenges unlike anything in recent memory. In this episode of , UC Davis experts unpack what’s behind the trend, what it means for growers, and whether wine’s place on the holiday table is changing.
In this episode:
- , agricultural economist with the UC Davis Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
- , microbiologist and chair of the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology
Learn more about UC Davis wine sales at
Transcript
Transcribed using AI. May contain errors.
Kat Kerlin
Amy, what are you doing?
Kat Kerlin
What does it look like?
Kat Kerlin
It looks like you're about to drink a bottle of wine.
Amy Quinton
Well, not an entire bottle, but I am pouring a glass. Want one?
Kat Kerlin
Why not? We are at UC Davis. We are known for our wine school.
Amy Quinton
Out Viticulture and Enology Department. We grow wine grapes. We make wine. We teach the next generation of grape growers and winemakers.
Kat Kerlin
And now UC Davis can finally sell wine to anyone old enough to drink it, legally.
Amy Quinton
Including the wine made by students. Before this, our perfectly good wines were poured down the drain because it was illegal to sell them, not without a specific exemption in state law. Believe it or not.
Kat Kerlin
Wow, what a waste and not very sustainable
Amy Quinton
Exactly. It took more than a decade to fix. Honestly, you could say it took 145 years, because that's how long the department's been around.
Kat Kerlin
Really?
Amy Quinton
Yeah, did you know that?
Kat Kerlin
No, I don't. I mean, how long has UC Davis even been around? That's longer than UC Davis.
Amy Quinton
It is. We were UC Berkeley. We were Cal. Anyway. And I'm pouring this nice cabernet sauvignon, the most widely planted grape in the world, not just because the holidays are coming and well, wine goes with everything but...
Kat Kerlin
Because we're going to be talking about wine in this episode of Unfold.
Amy Quinton
Yeah, and here's something I just learned, cabernet sauvignon is a cross between cabernet franc and sauvignon blanc.
Kat Kerlin
Is it franc or franc?
Amy Quinton
Is it franc?
Kat Kerlin
I do not know.
Amy Quinton
Cabernet? Tomato. Tomato?
Kat Kerlin
Sure.
Amy Quinton
Vase. Vase. It's a UC Davis discovery, though it was discovered back in the 1990s
Kat Kerlin
That's awesome. So besides the holiday meals, why are we talking about wine now?
Amy Quinton
Do we need an excuse?
Kat Kerlin
Fair? But I have heard that Gen Z isn't drinking as much, and the wine industry is feeling it.
Amy Quinton
Yeah, you mean the low, no alcohol movement, as it's called.
Kat Kerlin
Well, I didn't know it had a name.
Amy Quinton
Oh, yes.
Kat Kerlin
And I keep seeing headlines saying any amount of alcohol is bad for you. And on top of that, some farmers in California are actually ripping out vineyards.
Amy Quinton
Yeah, so as the holidays approach, it does make you wonder what's happening to the wine on our tables.
Kat Kerlin
Let's pour a glass and find out.
Amy Quinton
Coming to you from UC Davis, this is Unfold. I'm Amy Quinton
Kat Kerlin
And I'm Kat Kerlin.
Amy Quinton
Kat, I read that global wine consumption has fallen to a six decade low.
Kat Kerlin
Where'd you get that figure?
Amy Quinton
From the International Organization of Vine and Wine? You don't check that every day? No?
Kat Kerlin
Not most days.
Amy Quinton
Okay, well, and U.S. wine consumption has dipped almost 6% so I asked UC Davis agricultural economist Daniel Sumner, what's going on.
Daniel Sumner
Wine consumption per capita has been going down for a long time, and just recently it's dipped even further down. We don't know if that's a long run phenomenon in that is the recent dip is just a dip and it'll come back, or whether it's an acceleration of the decline.
Kat Kerlin
So why is it declining?
Amy Quinton
Lots of reasons, and they're more tangled than you'd think.
Kat Kerlin
Of course.
Amy Quinton
But let's start close to home, California bottled wine. It's taken a big hit
Kat Kerlin
Like how big?
Amy Quinton
Pretty much a collapse in one of our biggest markets.
Daniel Sumner
One of the things that's happened here this year for California is that Canada has just decided they're not buying California wine, and it wasn't tariffs. It wasn't the tariffs were put on. It was that there's been an anti-U.S. sentiment.
Kat Kerlin
So blame Canada?
Amy Quinton
Or blame politics. Canada is normally our biggest export market for bottled wine, and US exports to Canada dropped an estimated 91% this year.
Daniel Sumner
It's hard to get Canadians mad at you, but we succeeded, and they said to heck with you.
Kat Kerlin
Okay, Canada can't be the whole story.
Amy Quinton
No, there's a lot more, and it's worrisome. Ben Montpetit, the chair of the UC Davis Viticulture and Enology Department says the wine industry is being hit from all sides.
Ben Montpetit
There are pressures on the industry from things like wildfires and viruses and pests and disease in vineyards. California is thought to slightly be oversupplied right now in wine. So any of these individual things the industry has dealt with before, but for whatever reason, they've all decided to happen now at the same time.
Amy Quinton
He also says wine is competing with newer alcohol products.
Kat Kerlin
Right, like hard seltzers, hard teas and canned cocktails.
Amy Quinton
Exactly. They're fun, different. In cans, so they're easy to toss in a cooler.
Kat Kerlin
And there are so many flavors.
Amy Quinton
Yeah, I like to call them alcohol pops. They're my unofficial term. I know.
Kat Kerlin
Are they in your freezer?
Amy Quinton
Because they taste so sweet. Ben says wine can sometimes seem less accessible, right? It's sometimes more expensive. Something you save for a special occasion.
Kat Kerlin
Like sparkling wine during the holidays.
Amy Quinton
Yeah, the other problem demographics are also shifting. Baby Boomers are aging, and people tend to drink less as they get older. That hasn't happened with me though. I'm just waiting.
Kat Kerlin
Yeah, give me another couple decades, maybe it'll get there. Well, and Gen Z isn't drinking much at all. Plus all these
Amy Quinton
Yeah, Daniel says we still don't know which factor is having the biggest impact.
Daniel Sumner
No economic research, serious econometric research, has yet teased all of that out. There's lots of us thinking about it and working on it, but as you can imagine, separating how much of it is this generation versus that generation, how much of it of the demand shift is a tariff versus people in Canada weren't going to drink as much wine anyway. All of these things are hard.
Kat Kerlin
So we've got shifting demographics, anti-U.S. sentiment, tariffs, new products, declining alcohol use. No wonder farmers are ripping out vines.
Amy Quinton
Nearly 40,000 acres this year, about 7% of California's wine grape acreage,
Kat Kerlin
But the cultural shift away from alcohol seems like the biggest threat. I saw a Gallup poll that found only 54% of Americans drink alcohol at all. Mainly because they believe even moderate drinking is unhealthy.
Amy Quinton
Well, we'll get to the health piece in a minute. But first I asked Ben about the low and no alcohol movement, and he thinks it could be an opportunity.
Ben Montpetit
One could look at the no or low alcohol product as a alternative beverage that these grapes can go into. So our farmers can continue to grow grapes, they can continue to harvest these grapes, and now they have another product,
Amy Quinton
Which makes me wonder, how do you make a no alcohol wine? Right? It's fermentation.
Kat Kerlin
Yeah, like, isn't that just grape juice?
Amy Quinton
That's what I thought. But Ben says, When yeast ferments grape juice, it does a lot more than just convert all that sugar in the grape into ethanol. It changes uses and adds many other compounds to ultimately make something that doesn't taste like juice at all, or as Ben, also a microbiologist, put it
Ben Montpetit
That magical conversion that happens through the action of microbiology.
Kat Kerlin
Sounds like a guy who likes his work. Okay, so how do you get the alcohol out?
Amy Quinton
Exactly what I asked.
Ben Montpetit
The ethanol has certain chemical characteristics, its size, polarity, solubility, other things, boiling point, etc, and you can use those characteristics to remove ethanol. It's a chemical engineering problem, kind of of sorts. So there are vacuum distillation technologies or filtration technologies that can remove that compound,
Amy Quinton
Which sounds a little expensive, but Ben says you can't remove only the ethanol.
Ben Montpetit
So what ends up happening is you remove a family of compounds that have similar characteristics, and that includes some of those flavor compounds.
Kat Kerlin
So it doesn't taste the same.
Amy Quinton
It may not have all the flavors and sensory characteristics of regular wine.
Kat Kerlin
Another challenge for the wine industry,
Amy Quinton
Yeah. And then there's the health question, and a lot of confusion around it,
Kat Kerlin
Right. We know excessive amounts of alcohol can be unhealthy.
Amy Quinton
Yeah, and we don't even need to list everything - but I will: high blood pressure, heart and liver disease, strokes, a weakened immune system. But let's talk about moderate amounts. That's one drink or fewer for women per day, or two or fewer for men.
Kat Kerlin
I've heard no amount of alcohol is healthy.
Amy Quinton
Ben says what the science shows, at least so far, is that it depends.
Ben Montpetit
So if you consider heart health, it . But it has a documented when it comes to rates of breast cancer in men and women.
Amy Quinton
Research shows moderate drinking raises breast cancer risk by about 5% for women, 3% for men, but a found that moderate drinkers tend to live slightly longer on average, than people who never drink.
Kat Kerlin
Sorry, my first, my first thought was, like, cool. That's me. But that is confusing.
Amy Quinton
It is. Most of these studies rely on people self reporting how much they drink, and we haven't had any major , so it's hard to draw firm conclusions. But what I take from it, and what Ben says as well, is this: whether moderate drinking is right for you, is a conversation you should have with your doctor.
Kat Kerlin
Totally. I mean, that makes sense. I imagine wine, low alcohol, no alcohol or regular will still be on holiday tables.
Amy Quinton
Or maybe even UC Davis student-made wine. It is for sale now and proceeds go to student scholarships.
Kat Kerlin
Nice. You can find out more about at our website, ucdavis.edu/unfold
Amy Quinton
We'll also provide links to some of those studies, and you can find them there. I'm Amy Quinton
Kat Kerlin
And I'm Kat Kerlin. Thanks for listening. And have a wonderful holiday season.
Amy Quinton
Cheerful. And cheers.
Kat Kerlin
Salud!
Andy Fell
Unfold is a production of UC Davis. Original Music for Unfold comes from Damien Verrett and Curtis Jerome Haynes. Additional music comes from Blue Dot sessions.