Could some of the big names we grew up with in the world of fine wine disappear? Yes. It is tempting to read this as a loss of reverence for tradition. It is not. Status, craft and heritage still matter. What has changed is that customers no longer extend them unconditional credit.
The luxury goods industry spent the last decade teaching a lesson that the wine world has been slow to absorb. Aspirational consumers rarely walk away from a prestigious name because they stop admiring it. They walk away when the price becomes harder to defend than the product. As houses raised prices year after year, the distance between what a product costs to make, what it signals and what it asks of the buyer grew until a growing share of customers could no longer reconcile the three. When that happens, the buyer does not lower their ambitions. They redirect them.
And the real competitor is…discretionary capital. This is the point the industry most often misses. The occasional luxury buyer, the person making one significant purchase a year or one every few years, does not compare a prestigious bottle with another bottle. They compare it with a trip, a contribution to an investment account, a school fee, a mortgage overpayment or a cash reserve against an uncertain year. Wine’s competitor is not the producer across the road. It is every other claim on discretionary capital.
Seen this way, a price increase is not simply a margin decision. It is an invitation to compare, and the comparison is increasingly unfavourable. Hospitality offers an experience that is shared and remembered. Travel offers novelty. Wellness and technology offer visible, daily returns. Resale and collecting offer the feeling of an asset. A bottle that is consumed in an evening must make a more persuasive case than ever.
Spending patterns are shifting. A portion of that spending is moving toward contemporary brands that offer quality and image at a reasonable price. The big names that once benefited from prestige, expertise, and heritage are now being put to the test—or simply sidelined.
The commercial stakes are higher than they look, because the customer in question is the future of the business. The person who buys a first wine at 25 may be a significant client at 40. The buyer of an entry-level bottle can ascend through a house’s product architecture. Every rung depends on the one below it. Remove the bottom rung, or make it so expensive that it no longer feels like an entry point, and the ladder has no way for new customers to climb it. I would have liked to end by writing, “Food for thought,” except that the time for reflection is long past for those who have already figured out who tomorrow’s customers will be…
Contact Guillaume Jourdan via LinkedIn
