6 Wine Industry Trends to Watch in 2022 – SevenFifty Daily

The wine industry is emerging from yet another chaotic year of conducting business in the middle of a global pandemic. Between catastrophic weather events (including California wildfires, devastating April frosts in France and Italy, and flooding in western Germany) and global supply chain disruptions, plus the growing threat of price inflation, instability has often felt like the only constant.

Despite it all, however, the outlook for 2022 is far from bleak. With restaurants steadily on the rebound and off-premise sales continuing their post-pandemic boom, the industry is once again proving its endless capacity for creativity, adaptability, and resilience. There are many reasons for optimism, says Ian Downey, the executive vice president of Winebow Imports. The market will be more responsive to the bold, the new, and the innovative in the year to come.

In that indomitable spirit, explore six key trends that will continue to shape the wine worlds trajectory in 2022whatever else the year may bring.

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Poll a cross-section of wine professionals across all sectors of the industry, and the consensus is unanimous: Supply chain issues will continue to disrupt all aspects of the trade in 2022, causing inevitable price inflation and shortages for familiar brands.

While weve already seen these issues impact the Champagne market, fueling fears of inevitable gaps through the holidays and beyond, experts expect the effects to be much more widespread. Our industry is no different than others that have been impacted by supply chain difficulties, and we are starting to see inflationary prices from our winery partners that will go into effect in 2022, explains Rocco Lombardo, the president of Wilson Daniels. Were definitely headed into an interesting time with regards to managing costs and margin structure.

Faced with rising prices, shipping delays, and limited inventory, buyers will increasingly be forced to look beyond the usual tried-and-true options. While thats bound to create no shortage of headaches, Christopher Struck, the beverage director for ililis New York and Washington, D.C. locations, predicts that the situation will incentivize restaurants to turn to boutique wholesalers that carry alternatives to the usual large brand names.

In my experience, smaller distributors will be more inclined to hustle and get you what you need, explains Struck. They also tend to work with independent, conscientious growers that better align with my ethos as a buyer.

Vanessa Conlin, MW, the chief wine officer at Wine Access, agrees. In her view, 2022 will set the stage for up-and-coming regions and producers to gain newfound visibility and market share. These shortages actually offer a chance to get lesser-known wines in front of consumers who would have otherwise reached for familiar things like Burgundy or Napa Cabernet. As these European benchmark items become more difficult to secure, were going to see other regions making a play to fill the gap, says Conlin. Thats welcome news for regions eager to break through.

The world of wine has long conformed to a fixed set of stylistic categories, grouped primarily according to color. But as a younger generation of boundary-pushing winemakers across the globe explore an array of alternative winemaking approaches and techniques, those once-stable classifications are beginning to blur.

Were seeing more and more people making these experimental wines that dont have a firm definition, explains Chris Leon, the owner of Leon & Son retail shop in Brooklyn, New York and Grand Rapids, Michigan. He draws a parallel between the previous fashion for genre-defying macerated whites, or orange wines, and a recent interest in co-ferments, produced by fermenting multiple grape varieties (both red and white alike) together in one vessel.

Bright, fresh, and eminently crushable, the resulting wines successfully blur the line between pale red and dark ros, but couldnt be more attuned to the current chillable red zeitgeist. According to Leon, we can expect to see more of this stylistic ambiguity in the future. The rise of this style of wine feels very apropos at a time when people are increasingly willing to sidestep strict classifications or labels and simply take things for what they are, he says.

There once was a time when the natural wine counterculture operated within a few clusters of activity confined to large coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. With a growing number of small-scale, natural-focused importers, however, the movement is quickly making inroads into parts of the country that had long been dominated by large national distributors and corporate-owned brands.

Case in point: the Raleigh-based distributor Kellogg Selections, run by former New York sommelier Jeff Kellogg. Emblematic of this larger shift, he moved south in 2017 with the goal of introducing independent and, in many cases, low-intervention producers (such as Beaujolais Mee Godard or Californias Birichino Winery) to consumers across the Carolinas.

I knew there was a real thirst among consumers here to drink things other than Napa as a category, but there werent enough people filling that void, explains Kellogg. My favorite part of selling these kinds of wines in the Carolinas is that Im able to introduce natural wines to people for the first time. I get to provide that experience all the time to buyers who were previously working in places that just made sure they were checking off the usual boxes of California Chardonnay or Argentinian Malbec.

With interest in the category steadily expanding across the United StatesWe dont see interest in natural wine slowing down at all in 2022, observes Sally Stewart of Colorados Denver Wine Merchantthe movement has officially passed from fringe to an essential pillar of wines new mainstream. As that evolution continues to unfold, the naturalist gospel is poised to convert a whole new demographic of consumers, many of whom never considered themselves wine drinkers. If were talking about the market in our region, so many people are coming to wine from other beverage categories, especially craft beer, says Kellogg. In my mind, natural wine has so much more room to grow.

According to off-premise sales data from Nielsen, the sparkling wine category grew by more than 13 percent among American drinkers over the past two yearsan upward momentum that shows no sign of abating anytime soon, even with the threat of Champagne shortages and price hikes.

Unsurprisingly, Champagne sales have dominated the premium sector of the sparkling market, with sales between January and August jumping 11.9 percent compared to the same period in 2019, according to Reuters. But value-driven options have fueled much of the categorys surge in popularity. Were seeing the same dynamism with our Prosecco Superiore, our Crmant dAlsace, and our premium domestic sparkling wine, reports Lombardo.

As drinkers gravitate towards these more affordable forms of fizz, theyre finally knocking the category off its holidays and special occasions pedestal and reclaiming bubbles as part of the everyday drinking repertoire. Though still extremely niche in terms of national sales, one alternative sparkling wine style has played an outsize symbolic role in that transformation: cloudy, crown-capped ptillant-natural.

Theres been a steady interest in pet-net throughout the year, not just on holidays,says Eric Moorer, the sales director at Washington, D.C.s natural-focused Domestique Wine. If his experience on the sales floor had taught him anything, its that the categorys appeal has yet to peak, helping to make the wider bubbly landscape more democratic. As somebody who has always championed sparkling wine as an everyday wine, pt nat has made that conversation much easier for me, he says. People no longer believe that sparkling wine is for Fridays and Saturday nights; theyre popping open bottles of pt-nat on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Even as the world has largely reopened, online wine sales have remained strong. But the future of the ecommerce sector now faces an important challenge: namely, how to find creative ways to drive digital engagement and retain their recently acquired customer base.

The key to maintaining that growth? Convincing customers that shopping for wine online can be every bit as gratifying as seeking recommendations from a trusted neighborhood wine merchant. We gained a lot of new customers during the pandemic, so a lot of what we did over the past year was try to set ourselves up to deliver a better experience than customers were able to get in a traditional store or retail environment, says AJ Resnick, the chief experience officer at Wine Access.

Critically, as Joshua Lincoln, the senior commercial directorEurope, for Vivino, points out, digital platforms enjoy a distinct advantage: a treasure trove of data with which to customize the consumers experience. To him, capitalizing on that ability will be the wave of the future for the ecommerce space. Weve got more data than any store manager could ever keep in their head, so we can actually be way more personalized than any single individual, he explains. The real winners in the e-commerce space over the coming five to 10 years will be the ones like us, who focus heavily on this aspect of personalization.

With prices rapidly rising, the pre-pandemic trend of smaller, more focused wine lists will surely extend into 2022. At the same time, though, we can also expect beverage programs to become exponentially more experimental, moving beyond the established templates and reference points that were once considered the industrys standard. In particular, as sommeliers feel increasingly empowered to depart from expectations, theyre radically reconsidering conventional wisdom about what it means to run a successful by-the-glass program.

To Dallas-based sommelier Tiffany Tobey, the glass pours she offers function as a critical form of research and development, allowing customers to explore more obscure expressions in a non-threatening and cost-effective format. My by-the-glass program is geared towards a completely different compilation of regions and off-the-beaten-path stuff, she explains. Im offering stuff by the glass that people have never heard of before, but theyre still willing to try it because the rest of my list still contains plenty of the familiar favorites that make them feel comfortable.

At the two restaurants he oversees, Struck has adopted a similar approach. I think theres too many self-fulfilling prophecies with beverage directors who insist that you set yourself up for failure if you dont offer certain specific reference points by the glass, he says. That may have been true in the past, but not so anymore. I mean, weve already entered a whole new era of dining, havent we?

Zachary Sussman is a Brooklyn-based wine writer whose work has appeared in Saveur, Wine & Spirits, The World of Fine Wine, Food & Wine, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine, among many others. A regular contributor to Punch, he was formerly selected as the Champagne Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year. He is the author of The Essential Wine Book (2020) and Sparkling Wine for Modern Times (November, 2021) from Ten Speed Press.

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6 Wine Industry Trends to Watch in 2022 - SevenFifty Daily