Mike Veseth's Blog, page 35

Wine & Climate Change: Groundhogs, Gulliver & the Porto Summit Challenge

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Porto will host a global gathering next week devoted to the topic of Climate Change Leadership: Solutions for the Wine Industry. Sue and I will attend the meetings, including a session on “Economics & Efficiency: A Call to Action” where I will speak along with Stephen Rannekleiv of Rabobank and Robert Swaak of PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

The program is a who’s who of wine industry leaders who have chosen to have a dog in the climate change fight. The list begins with Adrian Bridge, CEO of Taylor...

Flashback Friday: OTBN 2010 Revisited

Tomorrow is one of my favorite days of the year, Open That Bottle Night! It is a holiday invented especially for wine lovers.

In honor of OTBN, here is a Flashback Friday column excerpt that returns to a rather fantastic celebration in 2010. Enjoy! (And use the comments section to let everyone know what bottle you uncorked this year!)

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The last Saturday of February is a holiday for wine lovers: Open That Bottle Night (OTBN). It’s the evening when wine enthusiasts come together to share...

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Deconstructing Rosé: Simplicity is Complicated

[image error]“Here in France, restaurant wine lists now have a separate rosé section. And this is not confined to Provence … The world seems to have gone pink, perhaps one small sign of an increasing desire for simplicity when we sit down to eat and drink.”

(Peter Mayle, My Twenty-Five Years in Provence, 2018 – emphasis added.)

The world does seem to have gone pink, as Peter Mayle says. Rosé wine is the fastest growing wine category by far here in the United States and Rosé is now transcending the idea of...

Ch-Ch-Changes: Unified Wine & Grape Symposium 2019 Field Notes

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The times they are a-changing. In fact, they have already changed, so the wine industry needs to change, too. That was the over-arching theme of the just-concluded 2019 edition of the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium. More that 14,000 wine industry participants from 27 countries came Sacramento to assess the evolving landscape and debate appropriate strategies.

There were so many informative sessions that even working together Sue and I could not attend them all. I am especially sorry we mis...

Global Wine’s Lost Decade

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One of the great puzzles of wine is captured in this OIV chart, which shows global wine consumption from 2000 to 2017. Consumption peaked in 2007-2008, just as the global financial crisis struck. Wine consumption fell sharply after that, as you would expect.

But then the economic recovery began and total wine consumption increased back to its old level and kept rising, right? No, not at all. In fact, wine consumption continued to fall, albeit much more slowly and unevenly, and even the small...

Global Wine Market: Storm Clouds Gathering?

What a difference a year makes! I am preparing remarks for the State of the Industry session at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento at the end of the month and I’m struck by how much the global wine market environment has changed in just a year. Last year’s relatively hopeful situation has given way to threatening storm clouds. Here’s a sneak preview.

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#1: Global Shortage to Surplus

2017 was a terrible year for global wine production. There are always a few regions where wine pro...

What’s Ahead for 2019? Wine Economist World Tour Update

[image error]The Wine Economist World tour continues in 2019 and I thought you might  be interested in the who/what/when/where because I think my speaking schedule reflects some important issues and concerns in the  global wine business. Here’s an annotated itinerary.

Unified Wine and Grape Symposium

The Unified Wine & Grape Symposium is the Big Show, the largest wine industry gathering in the hemisphere. About 14,000 people will come to Sacramento for the sessions, trade show, and networking opportunitie...

Wine Economist Top 5 of 2018

[image error]This week’s Wine Economist looks back at the five columns first published in 2018 that captured the most interest among the wine industry audience that frequents this page.

Sometimes it is difficult to find a common thread among the top columns, but not this year. Readers were concerned about U.S. wine sales and they focused on analysis that they hoped might give them insights into the changing market place and especially how to deal with the changing wine consumer base. Take a look at the To...

What’s Ahead for Romanian Wine?

[image error]Sue and I did our best to learn all we could about the Romanian wine industry during our visit to participate in the International Wine Competition Bucharest in Iasi, but inevitably we only scratched the surface. Romania is a diverse country with a complicated wine industry. Impossible to understand with confidence on the basis of just a few days.

A Wine Region in Motion

So we are operating on first impressions, not detailed analysis, but first impressions can be important. One strong impress...

Misunderstanding Romanian Wine

It is easy to misunderstand Romania and its wine industry.

Romania is a very old culture but a surprisingly young nation-state. The Great Unification of 1918 finally brought all the historical provinces together under one roof a hundred years ago, an act that Romanians celebrated on December 1, their Great Union Day.

Contemporary Romania is even younger, dating to the end of the Soviet era in 1989. It entered the European Union in 2007 — another important date. Romania is a country with deep...