Wine is getting much more expensive and I can prove it

A look back at what good wine used to cost 20 years ago from an old Wine Society price list.

Last month while staying in my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house, I came across my first ever Wine Society catalogue from winter 2003/2004.  It was fascinating seeing how the wine world had changed in the past 20 years. What was particularly striking was just how affordable some extremely prestigious wines used to be. 

From Châteauneuf-du-Pape big names like Château de Beaucastel and Vieux Télégraphe cost £15 and £18 respectively - that’s around three times the price of a nice Côtes du Rhône at the time. Beaucastel will now set you back £47 and Vieux Télégraphe  £56, so that’s about five times a nice CDR today. So these are comparatively more expensive but still the sort of thing that I could buy if I was splashing out.

Heading over to Bordeaux you can see the winners and losers from the influx of big money in the late 00s. From the excellent 1996 vintage The Wine Society lists Carruades de Lafite, the second wine of Château Lafite Rothschild, for a modest £25. They don’t stock it anymore but Hedonism has the 2000 for £350 a bottle. I was very surprised to see Cheval Blanc 1996 on the 2003 list for a then outrageous £120. The same bottle would be worth around £700 today while a 2020 would be about the same price. Meanwhile in 2004 you could buy Ormes de Pez 1996 for £22.50 a bottle. Fast forward 20 years and The Wine Society has the 2016 for £30. The price has barely budged. I am seriously tempted to buy some.

Heading over to Australia Penfolds Bin 389 was £14.95, it’s now £60 at Waitrose. The biggest shift, however, has been in Burgundy prices. 20 years ago Burgundy was generally bought by a small group of knowledgeable enthusiasts. It was considered a bit of a gamble. The Wine Society listed a rather nice sounding 2001 Savigny-lès-Beaune from Nicolas Potel for £16.50, something similar now would be around £37 now. 

We didn’t know it but we were living in a golden age

Also on that old list was a Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru Clos St Jacques 1994 from Armand Rousseau for £52. Very much a splashing out price but try to find a bottle of this now and you’re competing with oligarchs. Hedonism lists the 2020 of the same vineyard and producer for £1920, not for a case, but for a solitary bottle!

Meanwhile the price for everyday sherry has stayed remarkably low. The Society’s Fino was £4.75 and now it’s £7.25. So that’s about a 50% increase much of which can be put down to increases in duty and VAT. Nobody is making a killing in Jerez. The prices of ordinary Cotes du Rhones, Languedoc and Rioja wines etc have also thankfully, at least for me, remained low (read some recommendations from The Wine Society here) but still an everyday CDR has gone from £4.50 to £8.75. That’s nearly twice as much. 

To put all these price changes into some sort of perspective, back in 2003 I had an entry level job in publishing. I started on £17,500 in 2001, I doubt I was earning much more two years later. Today Oneworld publishers, who I used to work for in 2015, is currently auditioning for a publicity and marketing assistant at £24,000, just over a third more than I was earning. At the time I was living in a house share in Kensal Rise, so nearly Notting Hill, paying £330 a month. You would have to pay around three times this amount today for the equivalent. 

I’m sure other careers aren’t quite so badly paid but on the whole everything is a lot more expensive these days and people are not being paid anywhere near enough to make up for it. Wine has gone from a fairly affordable luxury back in 2003 to something I’d think twice about buying if I was in my 20s now.

I was doing all this number crunching while I had Simon Woolf’s recent article at the back of my mind. Apologies to Simon if I summarise it badly but what I think he is saying is that small producers of the kind that gets us wine bores all hot and bothered don’t need to worry about the decline of wine market overall because there’s always going to be strong demand for these much smaller production wines. I’d recommend reading the whole thing. He writes:

“My anecdotal evidence from visiting or meeting with hundreds of (mainly) European growers each year, and talking with importers, retailers and sommeliers is that the artisan or ‘craft’ end of the wine market is healthy in terms of sales. Its issues are not a lack of customers or declining consumption, but rather climate change, forest fires, shortage of harvest labour and the extraordinary rise in prices of commodities such as glass bottles and corks”.

It would be good if he was right but my worry is that the global wine boom of the last 30 years, the growth in interesting producers in Greece, France, Slovenia and beyond, depends on a prosperous, knowledgeable middle class able to pay £20 plus for wine. Artisan producers can be anti-growth but their customers can’t be. To support them you need a thriving economy of people working in tech, making things, selling things, and most of all cheap energy.  

Whenever wine cultures have existed in the past, they have depended on a prosperous middle class. Today, that class is shrinking. Graduates are unable to get jobs or homes. Wine’s best customers are ageing and not being replaced. 

Young people will continue to fall in love with wine but the cohort from which these young people come from, middle class, well-educated, is becoming poorer. It’s one of the reasons why I am deeply sceptical of premiumisation. Don't worry if our customer base is getting smaller, we’ll just get them to spend more! It sometimes feels like the whole drinks industry is at the Wile E. Coyote running in the air stage and about to plummet down the cliff. I hope I’m wrong.