A sentence I encountered this week in a Wine Searcher article stopped me in my tracks: “Who knows what restaurants will be charging by-the-glass in 10 years? It’s already way too much.” Ten words. A verdict. And a truth: wine is too expensive in the United States.
In reality, it is too expensive everywhere in the world. Whether in Paris, Rome, Istanbul, Dubai, New Delhi, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, or countless other cities, my observation remains the same: the first step toward wine has, all too often, become insurmountable. I am not speaking of great wines. I am not speaking of mythical labels. No — I am speaking of the ordinary glass: the one at the restaurant where you go for a simple lunch, or the one shared around a table among friends.
For therein lies the heart of the matter: Wine may be a luxury — I have always maintained as much — but it must not be only a luxury.
What sets wine apart from the luxury handbag is the depth of its cultural rootedness. A Hermès can afford to do without ordinary customers. Wine cannot. Hermès may target the elite from the outset, building its allure upon scarcity and inaccessibility. It has no memory to betray, no popular history to disavow. Wine, by contrast, carries a history of democratisation. It is the drink of the family meal, of celebration, of the Italian trattoria, of the tapas bar in Madrid, of the Parisian zinc counter. In abandoning that space to join the march of sweeping premiumisation, the industry has sawn off the very branch upon which it had rested for centuries.
A product of exception that loses touch with the culture that gave it life ultimately loses its soul. And the consumer does not wait. He turns elsewhere — to a beer, a cocktail, an alcohol-free drink — bringing to that new choice the same curiosity and the same thirst for meaning he would have devoted to wine, had wine deigned to extend its hand to him. This is, in a sense, the cruel distillation of what this article tells us: not the death of wine, but its desertification from above.
Must we despair? No. And signals of hope do exist — precise, tangible ones. The spectacular rise of La Vieille Ferme across the world, and more particularly on the UK market in 2025, is one such signal: a wine priced at £8–9, offered in all three colours, carried by bold marketing built around the now-celebrated “Chicken wine” concept, and a genuine success — notably among younger generations — not because it is cheap, but because it is right. Right in price, right in tone, right in intention. In Asia, I have witnessed those same new generations, so often said to be indifferent to wine, crowding into tastings organised by critic James Suckling. They wish to learn. They wish to understand. They wish to be welcomed — beginning with an accessible entry point, rather than one already swathed in ultra-premiumisation.
Admittedly, taxes, customs duties, and the margins distributed along the supply chain lie beyond the domain’s control. But pricing strategy at the estate does not. And to build a sustainable market is to build a foundation — not merely a summit. Despite the difficulties we know today, I am convinced that things will change. I feel it. A new era of wine is taking shape — different from those that preceded it, carried by other codes, other narratives, other channels. But animated by the same desire, the same enthusiasm, the same fundamental humanity that wine has always known how to embody, when it consented to be, simply, within everyone’s reach. For there must be wine for all. At every price. That is what we had forgotten over the course of this past decade.
Contact Guillaume Jourdan via LinkedIn
