We Have Enough Wine! Drink Up

All this week, I’ve been reading about how we’re on a brink of a global wine shortage, which was based on a report by Morgan Stanley Research and quickly made headlines (“Drink It While Your Can!” some headlines warned). Since booze and its costs is in our wheelhouse and is always relevant to our interests, I was going to do a little writeup about it, but wanted to wait until the rebuttal pieces came out.

Today, in a story succinctly titled “There’s No Global Wine Shortage,” Felix Salmon reexamines the data and writes:

Add it all up, and the OIV actually concludes, quite explicitly, that the production-consumption difference for wine will “be higher than the estimated industrial needs” in 2013, for the first time since 2007. In other words, far from entering a period of global wine shortage, it looks like the 2008–2012 period of shortage is actually ending.

This global wine shortage, then, just simply isn’t real. Don’t take my word for it: ask the wine trade. Stacy Finz of the San Francisco Chronicle asked a bunch of industry types about the Morgan Stanley report, and none of them took it seriously; Victoria Moore of the Telegraph conducted a similar operation in Europe, and came to much the same conclusion.

Let’s celebrate with a glass of your favorite bottle of wine tonight (or boxed — no judgement!).

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