Occasionally I like a gentle rant, and I was inspired to spout forth on this topic, the price of wine, by a few very different recent experiences. By “wine”, of course I mean the kind of artisan, especially natural, wines which most of my readers are buying. Like every story, it has two sides, and this one is not only about the significant price increases you and I are paying for the lovingly crafted bottles we are buying, or perhaps not buying. It is also about the struggles of the people making the wine, importing it and selling it.

Let’s start at the top. The fact is, although few people in the trade are openly discussing it, that the wines we were buying for, say, £20+ during Covid are now all up there in the thirties. Wines we paid in the thirties for are now frequently in the fifties. Let me give two examples. Excuse me if I’m not specific but I don’t want to appear to single out individual importers.

First, a German wine which I recently paid around £30 for in the UK. This wine, same vintage, was for sale, retail, in France for 16€. That French retailer purchased it direct from the winemaker, using his own transport, but he paid just less than half that price trade, per bottle, to the producer. This highlights the extra costs faced by UK importers.

Second, a wine I was quoted £35/36 for last week. I believe during Covid I bought some of an earlier vintage of this wine (2019) in 2021 or ‘22 from an online wine shop for £19.

So, what are the reasons for these mega-increases in prices? I want to say right away that it is emphatically not importers being greedy. Okay, we know there isn’t a rule as to how much margin an importer (or retailer) takes, but even if a few take a little more than others, no one is getting rich selling wine in the UK. If they were, then we wouldn’t see realignment of stocks, where some producers’ wines take longer than they used to come back in, or as we notice with some importers, the rate at which they take on new producers has noticeably slowed down.

On the retail side, although there are notable exceptions with those shops that specialise in organic, biodynamic and natural wines still shining like beacons if their customer base still has the ability to pay, you might find the range at other shops slightly diminished, with more “value” end wines and some of the more expensive wines discounted more frequently, or delisted.

What is causing this pressure? Brexit was the beginning, I guess. It has put a very much increased administrative burden on both those exporting wine and those importing it here. These extra costs coincided with a time when fuel prices rose dramatically, making transport over long distance by road significantly more expensive.

Then there’s inflation. All of Europe experienced inflation which seemed to peak in 2022, but in the UK it reached 9.1% in June that year, the highest since 1982, and the highest in any of the G7 nations over the same period. Inflation fell to around 2.5% here in late 2024, but is currently running around 3%. Inflation has fallen, but that only means prices are now increasingly more slowly. They are very unlikely to come down in the wine sector.

Of course, there is one other factor affecting wine prices, and that is duty. The UK has a regime for duty on alcohol which is significantly more onerous than that which pertains in the European Union. The latest increases in alcohol duty, initiated by the previous government but being put into law by the current one, see an obvious attempt to penalise wines stronger in alcohol, but the complexity of the rules is mind-bending enough (no other country has such complex rules as the new UK ones), without the increases in prices resulting from them.

The result is a storm from which the consumer benefits not one bit. However, this isn’t all. Before your UK importer places an order for wine from a producer he may have shown loyalty to for many vintages, he or she will be faced with price increases at the cellar door caused by pretty much similar issues to the ones I have already discussed. Energy prices didn’t increase in France and Germany as much as they did in the UK, but those winemakers are still paying more for energy, and, thanks to general inflation, more for their new barrels, presses, steel fermenters, trellising posts, horseshoes, in fact everything they need to make the wine.

As an aside, the ridiculous nature of American tariffs becomes clear when one thinks about all those Austrian Stockinger Casks, Italian concrete eggs, French vertical presses and German tractors the finest US wine producers import, not to mention the expensive harvesting machines they will need to replace their cheap Mexican grape pickers.

American producers are also made to use the same distribution system as for imported wine, so any impact on those distributors will knock back on the home -grown wines. I think the prices of American wines even on their home market will be negatively (for the consumer) impacted by the Trump tariffs. The result could easily be shrinkage in both home production and the home market in the USA.

I’ve talked about UK-side costs, costs which the UK importer’s small margins won’t allow to be absorbed, even when it becomes obvious that sales are impacted. London is a vibrant, and to a degree a resilient, market. Such pressure on sales is possibly more obvious outside of London, initially, where incomes are generally less and the hospitality industry in general is suffering as well. This latter issue can be catastrophic for wine wholesalers who may be waiting for payment on delivered stock. Failure to pay on time destroys cash flow. Failure to pay at all destroys supliers if they are not careful.

I’ve also touched on producer-side costs. How are these impacting sales? Any evidence tends to be anecdotal. Few producers will openly talk about the situation, but putting together information from several sources, one sees that a genuine crisis is emerging, with even well-know wine domaines being unable to sell all their wine. I know of especially young producers, as well as some more established ones, in Alsace, the Jura, Southern France, Bugey and elsewhere who are struggling because they can’t sell their wines for enough money to cover their costs and to make a living.

I’ve talked a lot about hail and frost in the past, an increasing hazard for many producers in Northern Europe. In Europe’s south it tends to be drought that is the problem. Reduced yields can be absorbed in many ways over the short term, but that becomes even harder to achieve when compounded by all the issues we are discussing here.

One of the stimuli for this piece was an article by one of the people behind Trink Magazine, Valerie Kathawala. Writing recently on the “Invisible Crisis in Germany’s Wine Industry”, she suggests that “two-thirds of independent German wine producers are in trouble”. This is a topic that has never been addressed in Germany, yet a crisis is unfolding. Again, it hits the young, newer, winemakers hardest. They are the most financially stretched with agricultural and equipment loans and they are perhaps under the greatest health stress as a result. They are the future and wine regions cannot afford to see innovative young winemakers going out of business.

A German producer may have some vines in a famous site or three. He or she may sell those wines easily, on allocation. However, for the vast majority, they have less elevated cuvées which they also have to sell. Of course, some producers are lucky, but a good number cannot sell these wines. It has nothing at all to do with quality, and everything to do with price. Perhaps fashion plays a part too, some may argue, yet it is clear many producers in the ever fashionable Jura are experiencing these problems. Selling at a price which doesn’t make them a loss, or, at least if individual wines have to be “discounted”, overall profitability has to be maintained. Without this there is no future, not for wine anywhere.

This all sounds like doom and gloom. In the case of most of us less financially resilient wine lovers we have to tighten our belts. My income hasn’t really increased over the past five or six years and artisan/natural wine prices have, by I’d estimate by between 25% to 40% (and sometimes more like 50%) for the wines I had been buying regularly.

No matter how much we love wine, it is still a discretionary spend. What can we do? My own approach has been on several levels. First, I’m trying not to drink wine on two days each week. In my case, that’s a saving of say four bottles per month, or in financial terms, perhaps £120/month. You can see I’m still far from struggling as much as many.

Then there’s the spend less option. There are some very good value wines, even natural wines, out there. Hot spots include much of Spain and Portugal, and Italy’s less-famous regions (especially in the south, if less so Sicily). I’m also buying, you might have noticed, quite a bit of Czech natural wine. Prices here are definitely rising, but what you can get for your money still makes these wines supremely good value.

Also, let’s not forget those lesser wines, so-called (I prefer entry level), from well-known producers. Take the Domaine L’Octavin negociant wine I drank last month, and featured in my last “Recent Wines” article. Alice Bouvot’s negoce cuvées are usually at least £15 cheaper than her domaine wines, but I know this producer well enough to know that I am still drinking Alice’s wine and the passion and soul that went into making it.

Where I draw the line when buying to drink at home is at the mundane. Even if I’m buying a cheap wine from one of the more interesting supermarket ranges, like the Australian Aranel varietal wine from Waitrose’s “Loved & Found” range (see Recent Wines January 2025 (Pt 1)), it needs to have a story to tell. I think most of us who have an interest in wine and see it as more than a mere beverage want that from any bottle we buy. You can find such wines at indie wine shops, usually by chatting with the staff to find out what’s really interesting or great value.

I don’t want to end just on doom and gloom. At the weekend my wife and I went to eat at a local, family-run, Italian bistro. It’s not somewhere to expect gastronomy, and I’m sorry to say that the wine list is rather mundane, but the friendly welcome is better than in any place I’ve been to since we moved to Scotland. Supermarket Chianti and lazy importer Barolo, however, top the list of the usual suspects at prices few of us would pay if we know the wines.

Nevertheless, they do simple house wines by the carafe or glass. The white is a Verdicchio, and I’m not sure about the Rosato, although it’s quite tasty, the tastiest of the three colours to my palate. On this occasion I had a large glass of red, a generic Italian Merlot. In context it was perfectly drinkable, made nicer by following the main course with the best home-made tiramisu I know, accompanied with a glass of Amaro. £6/250ml for the wine, just over £60 all in for a meal for two. The fifteen minute walk home along the beach, a cloudless sky filled with galaxies of stars and the waves quietly lapping against the shore made for an evening that a bottle of ArPePe, Tignanello or Mascarello would have enhanced, but not significantly more, in context, if I’m honest.

That such simple pleasures exist is perhaps reassuring for those of us seeing our cellars (or wine rooms) shrink as prices continue to climb, but this experience reminded me of two things. First, that immersing oneself in the pleasures of simple wine can, with ease, transport us to a place where we don’t need our unique unicorn bottles to create contentment. That is especially the case if you look at the mark-ups at some restaurants, where finding anything decent, at least for any wine obsessive, under £60 is pretty hard work.

It also reminded me that before my wine affliction, albeit a very long time ago, I had years enjoying very simple wines, whether with a steak-frites on the road in France, spaghetti in Italy, paella in Spain or a chicken kebab in Greece. A host of very specific memories remain from particular meals which cost little, and where the wine we drank was whatever they poured. I think that those experiences are now harder to find, but they are still out there, and the wine is likely to have improved in the interim.

You and I, we can’t help our passion for artisan wines, and I hope to continue to enjoy them for a long time to come, but they might not all be there forever. Carpe Vinum!