Harvests downgraded; buyers largely unmoved The recent downgrading of Italy’s 2025 crush-size forecast means that none of this year’s major Northern Hemisphere winegrape harvests are now projected to reach their five-year averages. At least three, in fact, are expected to fall considerably short, due to climatic conditions but also vineyard removals and mothballing. As this month’s Italy page points out, this raises the possibility that “global wine output in 2025 will come in lower than in 2024”, a year that – according to the International Organisation of Vine & Wine – saw the lowest wine production since 1961. Indicative of demand pressure at the retail end, or the lack of it, the response of bulk wine buyers has mainly been to sit back and assess rather than jump onto the market, especially where wine prices have risen. As one of our European pages states this month: “Suppliers were understandably pushing for pricing in line with

Afternoon Brief: California Grapegrowers Race to Beat the Heat

Trucks full of wine grapes clogged roads all over northern California wine country this week as wineries raced to get their precious cargo into tanks before a brutal heatwave shriveled them to raisins...

Afternoon Brief, August 14th

Maui Wildfires Kill Dozens and Devastate Communities and Hospitality Businesses: The historic town of Lahaina, popular with tourists, has lost hundreds of buildings, including restaurants like Fleetwood's on Front St., owned by musician Mick Fleetwood...

Afternoon Brief, February 8th

Has U.S. Wine Industry Consolidation Gone Too Far?: Is the U.S. wine industry becoming too concentrated, with just a few big firms dominating the marketplace? That, more or less, was one of the questions we were asked at the press conference that followed the annual “State of the Industry” session at last month’s Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento, California...

The Northern Hemisphere harvests are now complete and all have come in lighter than average, though the shortfalls in Italy and Spain (both estimated by OIV to be -9% versus the five-year average) are not dramatic in an historical context, unlike France’s very light 34 million hectolitres, down 27% since 2020. We estimate California’s crop to be short of the 4-million-ton mark that could be said to be the approximate state ‘average’, though not as short as 2020’s 3.4 million tons.  These short crops north of the equator have ensured this year’s global wine production will be – according to the OIV – “extremely low” at 247.1-253.5 million hectolitres, down from a provisional figure for 2020 of 262 million and 7% down from the 20-year average. However, it ought to be noted that the OIV also identified the 2021 Southern Hemisphere as having had a “record-high” crop, up 19% versus 2020, with only New Zealand seein