Bringing the 2024 Wine Industry Into Focus

The key issues that will drive industry development in 2024

This time of the year asks us to both look back and look forward. I want to use this space to look forward to 2024 and anticipate the most important issues and developments that will impact the American wine industry. Some large and important movements are going to impact every sector of the industry.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & WINE
It is here with a vengeance, impacting every single sector of the economy, changing how we do our work, and presenting us with new tools that should make us far more efficient.

Artificial intelligence has already come to wine. It is being incorporated into email platforms, analytics and data services, vineyard monitoring, winemaking, and even wine fraud detection. But even beyond these wine-specific services, I believe it is the general AI tools that will have the larger impact.

Chat GPT, Google Bard, Dall-e Image generator, Microsoft Bing, and the daily multiplying collection of AI-powered tools change the way we work. Writing, research, learning, image creation, data analysis, project management, and web programming and design are things we do every day in the wine industry and each of these tasks is being revolutionized via AI tools.

It is not too much to say that Artificial intelligence will have as big an impact on the wine industry as the emergence of email had, and probably an even bigger impact. The emergence of AI is more akin to the emergence of the Internet than the rise of email. It’s a paradigm change. And I suspect that 2024 will be the year we see the first important impact on the industry take hold.

HEALTH AND ALCOHOL
It appears that the wine industry is just now coming around to the idea that there are some very powerful forces working to diminish the sale of wine in the service of improving the health of the U.S. population. At the heart of this effort is the notion that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption—a message that is being promulgated by the World Health Organization and propelled by a billion-dollar budget. The claim is untrue. But its lack of veracity will not dull the impact this messaging will have on wine consumption around the world and in the U.S.

Most recently, WHO called for significantly increased taxes on alcohol, including wine, saying that “taxes that increase alcohol prices by 50% would help avert over 21 million deaths over 50 years and generate nearly US$17 trillion in additional revenues. This is equivalent to the total government revenue of eight of the world's largest economies in one year.”

The American wine industry must fight this effort to demonize wine and my sources tell me that there is in fact an effort to do just this. That effort should get off the ground in 2024.

For my part, I will continue to report on the efforts to label wine an “unhealthy” beverage, the reasons to fight back against this effort, and highlight moves in the industry to address this thread—just-as-I-have-all-this-year.

POLITICS’ NEGATIVE IMPACT ON WINE
The likely appearance of Donald Trump on the 2024 presidential ballot is going to suck up so much oxygen that even the wine industry in the United States is going to have a hard time breathing.

I believe we can look forward to a very high degree of vitriol filtering down into the wine industry and among friends due to the cataclysmic amount of fear and loathing likely to accompany this election. We can look forward to doxxing, condemnations, cancellations, and a good deal of unpleasantness in the wine industry due to this man’s polarizing impact. And this is a very bad thing. I think most people while agreeing that Trump is polarizing, don’t fully appreciate the kind of havoc this can have on business and industry relations.

Artificial Intelligence, Wine & Health, and Politics I believe will be the primary drivers of development and change in the U.S. wine industry in 2024. But this is not to say that little else stands to move the industry.

Interest Rates: While I expect the Fed to move them down slowly in 2024, it’s not impossible they could continue to rise, which could slow the economy into recession.

Litigation: I’m currently watching 10 different lawsuits that address discriminatory state laws. It is entirely possible that a series of court decisions in 2024 could lead to significant change for consumers and the industry.

Alternative Varieties: I’m convinced that we will see a slow, but continuous increase in interest in alternative varieties (and unsung wine-growing regions). Think hybrid grapes, native American grapes, wine from Mexico, etc. We live in an age where consumers want something new and the industry is increasingly willing to try to give it to them.

Fragmenting Wine Media: The Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast Wine & Spirits and Decanter are the primary Old Guard wine publications that remain, They do a very good job giving their audiences what they want. But I expect to see a continued fragmentation of the wine media to smaller and smaller voices, meaning fewer publications or media able to move the market. The question that sticks with me is just how fragmented and diminished will the wine media become.

It’s always difficult to make specific predictions. But by looking back, we can usually have a good idea of what’s coming.