Wine has become one of the world’s most globalized consumer goods. The OIV estimates that 45% of all wine crosses at least one international border on its way from producer to consumer. And that’s just the finished product. If we examine the whole product chain, to include bottles, corks, and so forth, wine’s globalization index would be even higher.

So it is significant that wine today faces headwinds, obstacles, and distortions that make global wine a risky business. Taken together, these forces impact every part of the wine trade.

Headwinds

The covid pandemic has created new headwinds and magnified some existing ones that make global wine trade more difficult and uncertain. On-premise sales are critically important to some segments of the wine industry, for example, and the recovery from lockdowns  is slow, uneven, and uncertain. Bars and restaurants have struggled to refill to capacity in many cases, even where rules permit this, because of both uneven response by wary consumers and difficulty attracting and retaining service sector workers.

Many wineries invested time and effort into establishing alternative paths to market during the pandemic and now they must wonder whether direct-to-consumer and other strategies will continue to be as critical to success and what aspects of these efforts should be expanded in the future. There are a lot of puzzle pieces to put together as we move into the new normal and the picture that they create won’t be the same as it was pre-covid.

Obstacles

Wine globalization has been powered by favorable trade policies and efficient transportation logistics over the last 50 years, so it is significant that obstacles have appeared in both areas.  US tariffs, Chinese tariffs, Brexit uncertainty — the list of trade policy factors that create barriers to particular wine flows is much longer than in the past and some counties (Australia, I’m looking at you) have been hit particularly hard.

But an even bigger obstacle for wineries not directly affected by trade policy has been the breakdown of ocean shipping logistics, which moves bulk wine, packaged wine, and intermediate goods such as bottles and corks. A world-wide shortage of shipping containers is to blame and big increases in the costs of shipping a container is one result. Port congestion, which adds extra days or even weeks and much uncertainty to shipping schedules, is an unwelcome side effect.

Distortions

Finally, foreign exchange rates have introduced or magnified distortions in the relative prices of wine on international markets. The graph above shows how the US dollar (USD) has fallen relative to the Euro in the pandemic period.  The dollar has recovered a bit of its value recently, but it is hard to know if this rise can be sustained. In general, a falling currency encourages exports and discourages imports. The impact on US wine exports has been muted, however, by the several factors noted above including especially demand-squelching pandemic lockdowns in target markets.

The dollar’s fall came as a bit of a surprise, as I noted in a column about a year ago.  Now there is another surprise. The Economist newspaper reports that the dollar is still over-valued by over 10 percent against the Euro!

The Economist released its most recent Big Mac Index report last week, which uses international fast food  hamburger price differences to estimate the relative purchasing power of various currencies. This might sound like a foolish exercise, but the Big Mac Index has a pretty good track record as a general indicator of over- or under-valued currencies.

The June 2021 Big Mac Index finds only four currencies over-valued relative to the USD, so the currency distortion would favor US wine export sales. Significantly, Sweden (+9.6%) and Norway (+11.5%) are in this group and they are both importanr potential export markets for US wine.

The list of currencies that are under-valued compared to the USD is long and includes a number of significant wine producing countries that gain an advantage from the exchange rate mis-alignment.

• Euro area -11.1%
• Australia -15.2%
• New Zealand -15.7%
• Argentina -30.2%
• Chile -30.3%
• China -38.3%
• Moldova -48.8%
• Romania -55.5%
• South Africa -59.6%

Several of these countries are important wine exporters and so their under-valued currencies give them a cost advantage in competition for US sales. Global wine has always been a tough business. The current combination of these headwinds, obstacles, and distortions make the global wine trade particularly challenging as we head into the fall.