The start of a new year is when merchants take stock, debrief Christmas trading and look ahead. The prospects for 2026 don’t look good. Global wine consumption is declining and mature markets are becoming harder work for everyone. On-trade data suggests cocktails are gaining share, beer is holding steady and wine is increasingly squeezed.
While the preferred strategy for many is to blame Gen Z or the government, it is time for the industry to reflect on what it hasn’t done well. Back in 2024, I wrote about the inherent dangers of endless premiumisation for existing drinkers without engagement strategies for new drinkers. If pricing continues to alienate existing customers and ignore younger drinkers who are more interested in cocktails and craft beer than Cabernet, 2026 could be a year of reckoning.
Wine often seeks to position itself as a luxury product while being traded like a commodity. Branded goods, like iPhones, rely on disciplined pricing, predictability and a tiered ecosystem. Commodities, like oil, fluctuate, fragment and accept volatility. Wine tries to do both simultaneously. The result is mistrust and growing disengagement among enthusiastic drinkers who choose to explore beyond the supermarket aisles.
In wine, prices often rise because they rose last year, because a critic score landed well, or because a neighbour’s prices have gone up. This is pricing driven by fear, hope and jealousy. It is not the basis for a coherent commercial strategy.
Variable pricing by vintage has become standard practice, but the oddity is that the most expensive estates often raise prices in good vintages on grounds of quality and then raise them again in poor years on grounds of scarcity. By contrast, many producers retailing wines at between £10 and £30 from the same region hold their prices steady from one harvest to the next, despite facing the same weather and cost shocks as their neighbours.
When en primeur campaigns misfire, excuses are made and blame is shifted to merchants instead of recognising that the initial pricing was misjudged. Stock piles up. Plenty of 2021 Burgundy, recently touted as vanishingly rare, now appears on bin end lists. How many times can suppliers cry wolf before customers stop buying?
Pricing has to move away from short-term tactics and back to a long-term strategy. The priority should be loyalty and stability, not squeezing a good vintage for a quick win. When producers treat every release as a chance to push the ceiling higher, they train customers to either wait for discounts in due course or irritate them enough that they mentally unsubscribe.
Wineries must listen to what importers and agents in the UK are saying about market conditions, yet many do not treat these critical connections to their customer base with the respect they deserve. Merchants recognise the pattern: new labels arrive without consultation, prices are delivered as a fait accompli and sales targets are set more by vanity than market reality. Yet in most cases, a winery’s importer is its clearest line to what is really happening on the ground.
Wine is one of the few hobbies where you can quickly be priced out the thing (and the bottles) that first hooked you. In the space of a decade, that has been the story for many drinkers of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, Barolo and Brunello. The industry can keep pretending each new release justifies a fresh leap in price, or it can start rebuilding a market where people can afford to fall in love with wine and stay in love with it.
Pricing alone won’t save wine, but 2026 is the year to stop testing how far prices can stretch and start rebuilding the market on the basis of long-term value and lifelong engagement.
