If only wine were as simple as love.

How Can You Tell?

How can you tell if someone really loves you? The answer is simple, according to Betty Everett’s 1964 hit tune “The Shoop Shoop Song.”

Does he love me, I want to know
How can I tell if he loves me so
Is it in his eyes, oh no you’ll be deceived
Is it in his eyes, oh no you’ll make believe
If you want to know, if he loves you so
It’s in his kiss
That’s where it is, oh yeah

The truth about love is not reliably revealed by objective observable indicators such as hugs, smiles, or longing looks. It is too easy to fool yourself into thinking these mean more than they do. No, it is the subjective emotional response that matters. I’s in his kiss.

The message must resonate with a lot of people because the song has been covered by many artists, including Cher, Aretha Franklin, and Linda Ronstadt and the Muppets.

Love and Wine: Both Mysterious

The Shoop Shoop Song comes to mind because a friend writes that he is trying to figure out how he will know when the U.S. wine market finally turns up. Turning points, where momentum shifts decisively from one direction to another, are devilishly difficult to call in the economy in general and financial markets in particular. Making even a single correct turning point call can be enough to make a fortune or a career.

Everyone is hoping for a turning point in the wine business. Bad news has dominated the industry landscape for the last several years to such an extent that we’ve had to invent a few creative new categories of “good news” to justify hope. For a while the good news was that wine sales weren’t falling in all categories (hey, Sauvignon Blanc is still selling OK). But now even Sauvignon Blanc is struggling a bit, so that kind of good news is harder to swallow.

This is Good News?

Last year at this time the good news was that the bad news was getting worse at a slower rate. (You might want to read that again slowly.) Wine sales were falling but at just, say, five percent instead of seven percent. Slower decline isn’t the same as an increase, but maybe it’s a step in that direction. That was the hope.

Now the focus for many is on hitting the bottom in the hope that what follows will be a bounce (because markets often overshoot and then rebound when they change direction), a turning point. It will be difficult to know when that happens because of the complicated nature of the wine business.

The turning point, when it comes, is likely to be different for wines at different price points and from different countries. And it will be different depending upon where we take the market’s pulse: retail sales, wholesale inventories, producer shipments, bulk wine balance, winegrape demand and  prices, or international trade flows. All of these indicators might never show a green light all at once. How will we know? And how can we avoid fooling ourselves as the Shoop Shoop Song warns?

Another Missed Turn!

Chances are that most of us will  zoom right past the turning point without realizing what we’ve done. The only thing harder than spotting a turning point in real time is realizing when it has already happened. Here are a couple of charts from the OIV’s April 2025 global wine market report that show what I mean.

When did global wine consumption make the turn toward fewer bottles sold? Not many of us realized that’s what was happening during the global financial crisis, but here (above) are the OIV data. Since then we have had ups and downs (and regional variations, of course) that disguised a worldwide downward trend that only became obvious in the wake of the COVID pandemic. I didn’t call it at the time. Did you?

The global wine production graph above shows a situation that is even harder to forecast just because the dips are often followed by peaks, so it is always dangerous to forecast further decline. The current dip looks bigger than most of the others. Will the peak be bigger, too? If so, when will it show up?

That’s Where It Is!

Which brings us back to The Shoop Shoop Song because it applies a version of the Sherlock Holmes method to the question of love. Holmes advised to systematically eliminate all the logical possibilities and whatever is left, no matter how unlikely, must be the answer.  It must be his kiss, the song explains, because nothing else is a sure-fire answer.

When it comes to calling the wine industry’s eventual turn, data won’t necessarily be the best guide (although I will sure be watching it closely). It may be that subjective, emotional factors (it’s in his kiss) will be the best we can do.  Will we know when our feelings for wine are reciprocated? Fingers crossed we don’t have to wait too much longer to find out.