In the peloton of the Tour de France, the most dreaded moment is not the ascent of Alpe d’Huez, nor the cobblestones of Flanders. It is that precise, fleeting, almost imperceptible instant when the elite climbers accelerate — and the group, until then compact, begins to stretch, to fracture, to die in silence. That moment, the global wine industry is living through right now. And I had it confirmed, over five days, at the heart of Vinexpo Hong Kong.
Three days in the field with importers and distributors across the Asia zone. Five days crossing paths with players from the Bordeaux Place, from Champagne, from Australia, Italy and the New World. This show has something irreplaceable: it brings together producers from every corner of the globe and buyers from a continent on which the wine world has such high (perhaps too high?) expectations. For those who know how to read it, it reveals the true state of the industry — without the usual filters of corporate communication.
The cellars are full. I heard this on a loop, in every language and at every level of the industry. It affects French producers as much as Australian ones, Bordeaux négociants as much as cooperative wineries in the Languedoc. It concerns Chinese, Korean, and American buyers alike. While some houses restructure their debt — Vranken-Pommery, González Byass… — others are searching for an exit, sometimes desperately. Low-alcohol and alcohol-free wine, that life raft brandished at every European trade show? Not a single Asian buyer mentioned it to me. Ground reality is often more sober than the trend reports.
It is against this backdrop of crisis that the splintering of the peloton becomes legible. Because what is playing out today in Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore and all over the world is not simply a market slowdown. It is a selection process. A merciless one — the kind that only high-mountain cycling knows how to produce.
The breakaway riders. They have been riding for a long time. Far out front. And it is no accident — they attacked fifteen, twenty years ago, when no one was yet looking at the horizon as anything more than a curiosity. Their common denominator? A single obsession: building brands. Not labels. Not appellations. Brands, in the full and modern sense of the word — universes of meaning, embodied promises, distribution networks built stone by stone, market by market. Today, when the pace accelerates and the peloton suffers, they ride hard and fast. The gap widens with every bend in the road.
The peloton. It is not dead. It responds to demand — and that demand, at Vinexpo Hong Kong 2026, was concentrated overwhelmingly on entry-level price points. The peloton knows sometimes how to produce competitive volume. But it is dense, undifferentiated, exhausting in its sameness. Some of its members attempt accelerations: brand extensions, wine tourism experiences, new product categories. Courageous bets, whose results will only be known in a few years — and only if they find a clientele…
The caravan. It waited. Patiently. For a visitor to pass by. And when someone did, only one criterion prevailed: the lowest price. In that race, there is no podium, no yellow jersey, no glory. Only attrition.
Cycling teaches us a truth that economists phrase differently: crises do not destroy the strong — they reveal them. The period the global wine industry is going through is painful, uncertain, and likely longer than anyone would wish. But it is performing a clarification. Strong brands and dense distribution networks are not luxuries for prosperous times. They are armour for times of war.
Nothing is ever guaranteed. The history of cycling is littered with favourites who cracked in the final kilometres. But those who had the vision to invest in brand and distribution, fifteen or twenty years ago, can now watch the race with a clear head — not the arrogance of the leader, but the clarity of the strategist who did their calculations long before the start gun fired. The global wine peloton is splintering. And the first breakaway riders have gone.
Contact Guillaume Jourdan via LinkedIn
