Wine Sales May Be Down, but Here's Why a Veteran Wine Writer Is Keeping the Faith

Hello Pros,

You've got Ray Isle, Food & Wine's executive wine editor this week. So, you know, this one is going to be about wine. And though it's a complicated time for wine, people have been making and drinking the stuff for over 8,000 years so I'm not ready to bring down the curtain on it. I have faith that it'll bounce back.

Even so, the annual Silicon Valley Bank Wine Report came out a couple of weeks ago, and it was daunting reading if you're in the wine biz in any way. (Note: the optimistic stuff comes after this part.) The report, always worth reading, notes a number of dark trends. Total wine volumes were down 2.4% in 2024 and they're likely to continue to decline this year. There are a bunch of reasons — wholesale inventory oversupply; an irritatingly robust, global, anti-alcohol movement; Millennials and Gen Z people particularly preferring other beverages or substances (hello, cannabis) or just abstaining in toto. There's also the threat of tariffs, which is bad for importers of European wines but in the case of a possible trade tit-for-tat with Canada, it's bad for U.S. wineries as well.

Dorothy: "Toto, I have this feeling we're not in Kansas anymore!"
Toto: "No, kid, we're not. We're in wine sales hell."

Well, that's a joyous start to the vinous year. But I found a refreshing counterbalance to that recently at the annual Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento, CA, when I interviewed winemaker Alecia Moore of Two Wolves Wine onstage for an industry audience. Wine is Moore's bonus career, of course. She garnered a fair amount of attention in her first (and ongoing) career as a singer. In that realm you know her as P!nk.

Moore is a serious vigneron who fell in love with wine when she was 21, eventually took winemaker courses at U.C. Davis, and now works hands-on in her vineyards and winery together with co-winemaker Alison Thomson and a team of five women who she referred to as "badasses who work their butts off."

She sees this as an opportunity to bring her fans — who may never have bought wine — along the same path she took. "I've been really careful about the intersection of P!nk and wine," she told the audience. "Even if it's just on Instagram, showing them thoughtful pruning and teaching them, I thought, I'm going to take them along. Walk with me and talk with me while I go on this beautiful journey. Because it's really fun to see someone be empowered by someone's story about a bottle of wine."

You can read more about our conversation here.

Maybe it's because I'm a writer, but it's always seemed to me that stories are what we live by, through, and in. That's perhaps something that Martine Saunier felt as well; I'd like to think so. Saunier, who died this week at the age of 91, was an iconic figure in wine. She was a groundbreaking importer who first brought the wines of Henri Jayer, Château Rayas, and Domaine Leroy to the U.S., among many, many other great producers. Moreover, she did so as a woman in the overwhelmingly male wine business in the 1960s and 1970s, blazing a trail for any number of talented women who followed in her path. I met her only twice. She was direct, brilliant, charismatic, and truly passionate about wine. She told great stories as well. I am sure she and Alecia Moore would have gotten along great.

More stories below,

Ray