The disappearing middle
We see lots of cheap wine, lots of expensive wine, but what’s happened to all those mid-priced wines?
One of the things I’ve noticed about the wine market over the time that I’ve been a drinker is the way that the middle has been shrinking. (I should add, this is something I’ve noticed, but I don’t have any solid data to prove it.)
Thirty years ago, there were cheap wines, there were expensive wines, and then there were a lot of wines that were in-between. This ‘middle’ was a happy hunting ground. I began my drinking career with Australia, largely. This was because French wine was so inaccessible and complicated – and a bit of a minefield – and at this stage South Africa was mostly uninteresting, and we just had a lot of good Australian wine in the UK marketplace. And many of these wines were mid-priced, but really good.
Over time, though, the middle has shrunk noticeably. We are seeing a lot of cheap wines, and then we see fine wine (including what I call the new fine wines: interesting terroir-driven, authentic wines from non-classical countries), but there’s often not a lot in between.
Of course, you can still find wine at all prices. It’s just that there isn’t the concentration of really interesting mid-priced wines that there used to be.
I’m not completely sure why this is. Perhaps it is because cheap wine hasn’t got all that much more expensive over the last 30 years (I used to find Lindemans Bin 65 Chardonnay at £4.99 in the 1990s, and now you can still get it for not much more, for example), and this may have sucked the wind out of the sails of the mid-priced wines.
Maybe it is because it’s more expensive now to make wine and get it to market, and the business model for mid-priced wines isn’t viable in the way that it used to be.
Or perhaps (and I think this is the most likely explanation) it is because the middle classes are contracting. We are seeing increased wealth inequality in many countries, and the big, comfortably off middle class population is contracting.
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-47853444
- https://www.jrf.org.uk/narrative-change/changing-the-narrative-on-wealth-inequality
- https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/picture-income-inequality-and-middle-classes-across-eu
Thus it could be that the disappearing middle ground in wine is reflecting the shrinking of the middle classes in many of the target markets. And this is the slice of society that presumably drove the sales of mid-priced wine (although I recognize that there are some wealthy people who buy cheap wine, and some middle class people who buy expensive wine).
