And Now for Some Good News (About Wine)

The world is objectively bad right now. It’s February, the pit-iest pit of winter. We’re in the middle of a merciless election cycle. Border Patrol agents are about to flood sanctuary cities. Antarctica is melting. There will be no Fleabag season 3. Things feel pretty hopeless. On the bright side, apparently it’s now slightly cheaper to drink some of that hopelessness away.

CNN reports that the price of wine has started dropping thanks to a surplus of California grapes, and Rob McMillan, author of the annual State of the Wine Industry report, say wine drinkers in the United States can expect to see the “best wine retail values in 20 years,” which sounds like pretty good news in a year full of bad news.

Interestingly, the grape surplus is due to some bad news for the wine industry, which is that wine consumption seems to have dropped since 2016. This is confusing, as one might think certain world events might increase national wine consumption, although perhaps everyone’s merely swapped out the cabernet for straight shots of Fireball.

McMillan also suspects that millennials are killing wine, since there isn’t any industry out there my generation can’t be accused of murdering with our bare, underemployed, debt-plagued little hands. He worries that the wine industry isn’t “engaging with the millennial consumer, and boomers who have driven wine sales for the last 30 years won’t live forever,” though he also thinks lower wine prices will entice younger drinkers, which is probably true.

Then again, McMillan says wine prices will likely creep back up in a couple years once local wine-growers wise up to the grape surplus and start planting smaller crops, so actually everything still sucks, I guess.