This is the final post in my series on Tight, Fat and Uncorked, the three trends I see shaping the wine industry. This week I want to think about how the future of wine might unfold depending upon which of these three forces is most powerful.

Wine markets are getting “tight” as demand for many grape and wine types outstrips supply, “fat” because of the growing demand for middle class, middle market, middlebrow wines and “uncorked” as more and more international wine trade shifts from bottle to bulk. Each of these forces is important, but it will untimately be the ways they interact that will determine the path of wine’s future development.

For your consideration, here are three possible histories of the future of wine. As always, I invite readers to share their own scenarios in the Comments section below.

Scenario 1: Wine as a Global Commodity

The first scenario sees the three forces fitting together neatly in a way that leads to the increasing commodification of wine.  Tight markets force wine producers to scour the world for juice to maintain their “fat” market wine brands. Bulk wine shipments help solve this problem in a cost-effective way but sacrifice regional identity and local “terroir” to a certain degree.

The second scenario looks more closely at the implications of tight markets. Grape and bulk wine prices are already rising (alarmingly so, in a few specific cases) and this trend is likely to persist for several years.

Many have observed that the demand for wine has become more “elastic” or price sensitive. The recession is one cause: consumers have learned to trade down. Many new “fat” wine buyers think of wine as just one of many possible beverage choices and are more willing to substitute beer, spirits, juice, soda,  and even water as relative prices change. Not all wine drinkers are equally sensitive to price, of course.

So what will happen as wine drinkers are faced with higher prices? One possibility is that the “fat” wine segment will be particularly affected as competition focuses on this price-sensitive market. It isn’t hard to imagine that margins could shrink or disappear as price-sensitive demand meets rising costs. Maybe today’s “fat” market will go on a diet, as grapes and wine are pushed upmarket in search of higher margins and consumers go down market in search of cheaper (or different) ways to fill their glass.

Scenario 3: The Center Shifts [on the margin]

The final scenario focuses on income and demand. The middle class, middle market, middle-brow “fat” wine demand is thought to have a high income elasticity — it is relatively sensitive to changing income. A 10% increase/decrease in income produces more than a 10% rise/fall in wine demand. This property is important as the wine market demand expands (the rising global middle class) in a multi-speed world.

If Europe’s recession continues and even deepens (as seems likely) and the U.S. recover slows or even stalls (as seems possible), then the center of gravity in the wine world will necessarily a bit shift towards those areas where middle class incomes are growing, including parts of Asia, South America and even Africa.

Is this a serious concern? Well, don’t forget that the United States is now the world’s largest wine market and this didn’t happen over night but it did occur because of just the sort of persistent marginal movements I’m talking about here. Certainly all eyes are on Brazil right now because it seems like a country where a substantial “fat” wine market might develop if solid economic growth can be sustained.

Not Nairobi [yet]

“Tighten Up” was a big hit for a Archie Bell and the Drells back in 1968. If you aren’t familiar with this R&B tune and its trademark dance you might want to take a moment to learn it because Tighten Up is where the U.S. wine market is headed.

[This is the second in a series of articles on Tight, Fat and Uncorked, the three trends I see shaping the wine industry in the near future.]

Up and Down Economics

There is nothing new about tight wine markets (where shortages pull prices higher) or slack markets either. Wine is an agricultural product subject to the sort of persistent cycles that economists have long studied. Today’s high price encourages farmers to plant more even as it discourages growth in demand. Result: future surplus and falling price when the new crops hit the market. Low prices discourage production but encourage consumption growth, resulting in shortages and future price hikes.

Up and down — that’s happens in wine markets. The Turrentine Brokerage’s “Wine Business Wheel of Fortune” illustrates the U.S. wine cycle — click here to view a detailed pdf version that will be helpful in understanding what follows.

This Time Really Is Different

If tight and slack wine markets are not uncommon, what’s the big deal? The answer is that we are coming off an unusually long period of low prices and most likely headed into a long period of tight supply. It is the length of the cycle, not the fact of it, that is striking and important.

The current Turrentine Wine Wheel shows the most recent cycles. The figure shows that prices started falling in 1982, for example, hitting bottom in 1986. By 1989 prices were at their peak again, setting up the next cycle, which ran from 1990 until 1999.  It took seven years for the first cycle to work itself out and nine years for the second cycle.

Now let’s look at the current wine cycle, which Turrentine says began in 2000 and that they project will last an incredible 18 years!  The slack side of the cycle was exceptionally long — 2000 to 2011 — because it combined several factors. First was the typical domestic surplus that results as vineyards planted at the previous cycle’s peak begin to bear fruit. The second factor was increased global wine production, which served to keep prices low even as some domestic producers cut back. This extended the period of falling price.

The Great Recession is the final factor, depressing prices and further extending the slack side of the cycle past 2010. As you can see from the figure, Turrentine originally expected the down side to last only through 2006, but a “perfect storm” kept prices low through 2010 as demand and supply slowly moved into balance.

Ebb Tide

Now we have finally entered the tight market phase where demand exceeds available supply at the current price  and this part of the cycle is likely to be extended as well.  Vineyard capacity did not expand sufficiently during the long down cycle and in fact it contracted dramatically in particular places. The EU wine market reforms removed some capacity in Europe and the collapse of part of the Australian industry has done the same there. In the U.S. some Central Valley producers, tired of low or negative margins, switched from wine grapes to more consistently profitable crops like tree nuts.

In theory it should take only a few years to rebuild vineyard capacity but in practice it will take longer for several reasons. First, the length and severity of the slack part of the cycle will naturally make some who have left the market in the U.S. and elsewhere hesitate to reenter it. The supply response in the U.S. will be delayed for this reason and also because of what I am told is a shortage of nursery stock needed to establish new vineyards and renew old ones.  It will take a few years to rebuild stocks needed to rebuild vineyard capacity.

Prices for grape contracts and bulk wine have already risen (dramatically in some specific cases) as they must do to eventually bring the market back into balance, but this will be a slow adjustment process. Domestic wines must compete with imports, which act to limit price increases in some segments of the market. And of course consumers have become accustomed to lower prices and are not generally expected to “trade up” (except in response to bargain pricing) as much as they may have previously traded down.

Hysteresis: Winding and Unwinding

Rising grape costs are good news for growers, who have borne the brunt of adjustment costs during the long slack cycle. Now the big squeeze will move up the supply chain in the form of tighter margins and the effects are expected to be substantial precisely because the length of the tight market cycle will be so long.

What will the wine industry look like when we get back to the top of the cycle? One thing we can be sure about is that it won’t look the same as it did back in 2000. Economic adjustments are not necessarily symmetrical — they don’t wind up the way they unwound. (Economists have a name for this property: hysteresis.) The history that unfolds in the intervening years matters a lot and there has been a lot of time for things to change since the last market cycle began.

In particular, the long slack tide brought new products, new consumers and new consumer behavior into the market. This doesn’t change everything, but it changes a lot — as I’ll explain in next week’s post.