Thread

1. dluan · 1790650752 · focus · HN ↗

   Because of years of trade war, American wine industry is taking a beating around the world and a lot of Australia, NZ, and South Africa is picking up that slack. Even niche producers like Chinese and Japanese wine industry are very quickly maturing into real home-grown industries. The biggest market for California has always been Asia, and it's been near impossible to stumble into Opus One the way you used to be able to in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, etc.

   Old world has always been able to be flexible, eating these kinds of punches by pivoting into NA or brandy during gluts, and demand has less fluctuations. This contraction, like a lot of everything else happening in the US, maybe was already coming because of some trends overlapping, but policy threw gasoline onto a combustible and fragile situation.

   1. hattmall · 1790651047 · focus · HN ↗

      Ok, so does this mean prices in the US will go down? I keep seeing stuff about countries shifting away from US goods but prices seem to continue to rise.

      1. askjdfksdbfhk · 1790659755 · focus · HN ↗

         >Ok, so does this mean prices in the US will go down? I keep seeing stuff about countries shifting away from US goods but prices seem to continue to rise.

         The actual answer is yes, at least when it comes to wine (although I will note that the trade war stuff is only part of the picture--it has certainly hurt a number of wineries that previously relied on exports, but the wine industry is experiencing a much broader downturn than just this).

         Not all wine, of course, but some wine is indeed seeing prices drop. There have been some great deals to be had in the past few years in certain corners, both big and small. Costco has had increasingly good deals on wine lately and other large retailers are having more and more as well.

         There's a lot of price stickiness with wine, with wineries not wanting to lower sticker prices (since price is closely tied to branding and market positioning), so there's also been this fascinating trend of wine increasingly being bulked out to online retailers that operate on a rotating flash sale model (companies like Last Bottle or Wine Access), or to third parties who relabel it and sell it under an NDA on the original brand. These segments of the market are only going to continue to grow in the coming years as the glut of wine continues.

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