Mike Veseth's Blog, page 18

Flashback: Spanish Wine Challenges & Opportunities

I am in virtual Madrid today to talk about the changing global wine market on a program that also includes OIV director general Pau Roca and Dorian Tang of ASC Fine Wine in China. Zoom brings the three of us together from across the global wine map to talk with our on-line audience in Spain, Portugal, and many other places.

Preparing for this talk got me thinking about the lessons I took away from a trip to Spain five years ago for an in-person wine industry meeting in Valladolid. I think the me...

Wine, Stagflation, and the Strong Dollar Syndrome

The U.S. dollar has surged in value on foreign exchange markets in the last year and especially the last few weeks, as this graph of the dollar versus the euro makes clear. It once took about $1.30 to purchase a euro, but some analysts believe that USD-EUR parity — a dollar per euro — is on the cards for later this year.

The story differs country-by-country, but the overall trend is clear. Just as in the 1980s, when the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy to fight inflation, the dollar ha...

Wine & Stagflation: What Will Happen When Wine Prices Rise?

The conventional wisdom is that we are likely entering the first significant period of stagflation — inflation + stagnant economic growth — in several decades.  We have experienced recessions in the recent past, but not rising inflation, and not the two of them at once.

Inflation is in the headlines every day, but unemployment is very low — so why worry about slow growth or a recession? The answer is that while Federal Reserve policies will try to finesse the situation and bring inflation down t...

Wine and Inflation: Will the Rising Tide Lift Wine’s Boat?

The U.S. is experiencing the highest inflation rates since the 1980s and cost-of-living increases are on everyone’s mind here and around the world. The Federal Reserve has signaled that it will speed up monetary tightening to try to reverse rising inflationary expectations — too little and too late, according to   the Economist newspaper (The Federal Reserve Has Made a Historic Mistake on Inflation).

I am very concerned about how higher inflation will impact the wine industry, especially when c...

Countdown to Wine Wars II

Here at Wine Economist World Headquarters we have started counting down the days until the release of Wine Wars II: The Global Battle for the Soul of Wine.  The book’s official release date is July 1, 2022, but it is not too soon to put in your pre-order at Amazon.com or Rowman & Littlefield. Wine Wars II will be available in paperback, e-book format, and (eventually) audio-book, too.

Wine Wars II is a major revision of my best-selling 2011 book Wine Wars. I’ll be honest — I wasn’t really planni...

Flashback: Global Rosé Market Q&A

Spring is here and summer is just around the corner, so it is time to Think Pink. Here is a Flashback column from 2019 that is still relevant today. We tend to assume that we know how the Rosé market breaks down, but the details might still surprise you.

One thing has changed: Rosé sales are not growing at the double-digit rates of three years ago, but then overall wine sales growth has been stalled in recent months. Keep an eye on store shelves in the coming weeks — I think you’ll see pretty pi...

Here Be Dragons: Wine and the Economy Enter Uncharted Waters

The International Monetary Fund is expected to announce today revised global economic forecasts –– slower growth, higher inflation, and increased uncertainty due to war in Ukraine plus (although I don’t know if it will feature in the IMF report) massive  covid lockdowns in China. Here be Dragons, indeed!

As much as we all would like to think that economic conditions and the global wine market will soon return to what we used to call “normal,” I think it is important to realize that we have actua...

Charting Chile & Argentina Wine Strategy for the U.S. Market

These are challenging times for the U.S. wine market. NielsenIQ data reported in the April 2022 issues of Wine Business Monthly shows the wine market declining overall in value and volume terms. The picture isn’t perfectly clear, of course, because NielsenIQ numbers miss some sales vectors and it is hard to know what base to pay attention to given covid sales channel distortions. But there is plenty of cause for concern about U.S. wine market growth.

The situation is even worse for wine imports,...

Wine Book Review: Britain, Imperialism, and the Wine World They Created

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World. University of California Press, 2022.

Imperial Wine is a serious academic study of how imperial economic, political, and social relations between Great Britain and three of its colonies — South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand — shaped their wine industries and New World wine more generally from the time of the first plantings through to today.

This is an argument that I am glad to see examined in depth. In m...

We Don’t Talk About Abruzzo … But We Should!

The thing about Bruno, a character in the Disney film Encanto, is that everyone talks about not talking about him. Or at least that’s the gist of the wildly popular song “We Don’t About Bruno.”

The Abruzzo Syndrome

For a long time this situation kind of applied to Abruzzo, the under-appreciated Italian region you reach by flying to Rome and driving east over the Apennine mountains to the Adriatic. My well-worn 1998 Knopf Guide to Italy, for example, devotes more than 500 colorful pages to touri...