Wine as System - How a Global Industry Got Made, Got Rich, and Started Breaking - Volume 3 of 3

On 15 April 2025, in a video conference broadcast from Paris, John Barker — Director General of the International Organization of Vine and Wine — read out a number that broke a record nobody wanted broken. World wine production in 2024 had fallen to 225.8 million hectoliters—the lowest level since 1961. Two months later, the consumption number arrived: 214.2 million hectoliters, also the lowest since 1961. The previous record had been set during a year of catastrophic spring frosts across southern Europe. The new one was being set with no single catastrophe to point at.

Something was happening to wine. Not in the way that always happens to wine — bad vintages, regional shifts, generational tastes — but something larger and more structural. Production had been falling for four straight years. Consumption had been falling for six years. Fifteen of the world’s top twenty markets were down year on year. China was down 19.3 percent in a single year. Argentina’s per-capita consumption was at its lowest since 1942, when Juan Perón was still a colonel. The 2024 figures were not a bad year; they were the surface reading of an industry-wide condition that had been building for a decade and was now visible in the data.

If you read Book One of this series, you understand what wine is — culturally, biologically, and economically. If you read Book Two, you know how to use that understanding in the situations where wine actually shows up. This third book is the wider lens: the global system that produces every bottle you have ever encountered, who controls it, what is happening to it right now, and where it is going.