Last week I posted on the central difficulty the wine industry faces—too many wineries with too few customers. The preferred solution is more customers but ideas about how to generate them at scale are few and far between. It saddens me to say that the result will likely be more wineries closing.
For wine lovers the question then becomes how can we help ensure that the best wines, the wines that make a difference and keep wine exciting, survive. We need to develop a “conservation of difference” ethic. The goal of the coming correction should not be maximum efficiency. It should be selective survival guided by the value of meaningful variation. What follows are a few ideas about what that looks like.
Here is how writers and critics can contribute:
1. Shift criticism away from scores and toward public memory.
In a market correction, the wines most likely to disappear will probably be the least visible. This is where criticism can make a difference.
Scores are too blunt for this task. They reward polish, intensity, typicity, and flawlessness. They do not reliably identify wines that matter because they are strange, fragile, site-specific, transitional, or aesthetically risky.
What wine needs is more criticism that functions as public memory. We need detailed accounts of what a producer is trying to do. How the wines change over vintages. What kind of beauty they pursue. What tensions they sustain. What they contribute to the region’s range of expression.
In addition to telling us what is good, criticism has to tell us what is worth preserving.
2. Curate, don’t merely sell
Consumers are overwhelmed. More than 11,000 wineries creates a tyranny of choice that is experienced as fog because there is too much to comprehend. In a crowded market, the curator becomes more important than the marketer.
Retailers, sommeliers, wine clubs, critics, and regional organizations need to become better curators of difference. Articles about “ten great Cabernets” are less interesting than some of the following::
- Six California reds that reject the plushness template
- Five wines that show why old vines matter
- Three versions of coastal acidity
- A tasting based on drought, heat, and adaptation
- A flight showing the difference between power, density, and depth
This is where aesthetic vocabulary has practical effects. Consumers need pathways into variation. They do not need another shelf talker promising blackberry, mocha, and a long finish.
3. Treat “quality” as expressive achievement beyond technical competence.
One danger in a market correction is that “quality” gets defined by safe metrics: clean winemaking, consistent style, recognizable varietal character, critical approval, luxury packaging, and smooth texture.
That favors efficient producers and wines with broad appeal. But broad appeal is often the enemy of differentiation.
So we need a richer account of quality. Quality should include factors such as: specificity whether that be of terroir or winemaking style, expressive tension, structural clarity, distinctive texture, vintage sensitivity, site interpretation, memorability, and capacity to reward attention.
This allows us to defend wines that are not merely “well-made” but aesthetically necessary.
I’m neither a winemaker nor someone responsible for developing business practices or policies that govern AVA’s. But some of the following strike me as potentially helpful and in some cases already being implemented at a small scale.
4. Build cooperative infrastructure for small, differentiated producers
The market correction will punish producers who cannot manage distribution, compliance, storage, fulfillment, tasting room staffing, and digital marketing. But we should not confuse administrative efficiency with wine quality.
One practical answer is shared infrastructure. Small producers can collaborate on:
- shared tasting rooms organized by style or region
- joint shipping and fulfillment
- regional wine clubs curated by independent panels
- shared export representation
- collective back-office services
- cooperative farming equipment
- joint events focused on difference rather than generic “premium wine”
This allows small producers to gain some efficiency without surrendering their identity to consolidation.
5. Encourage graceful exits that preserve vineyards and knowledge
Some wineries will fail. The question is what gets lost when they do.
If a brand disappears but the vineyard survives under better stewardship, that may not be a tragedy. If a mediocre tasting room closes but the fruit goes to a more talented producer, the region improves. But if old vines are ripped out, distinctive sites are absorbed into anonymous blends, or talented growers lose access to land, the culture shrinks. So the focus should shift from saving brands to saving assets that matter: old vines, distinctive vineyards, marginal regions, rare varieties, skilled growers, and archives of regional knowledge
One idea might be to create regional preservation funds or vineyard trusts to protect high-value vineyard land from being replanted, redeveloped, or folded into commodity production. If regions care about identity, they should care about the material conditions that make identity possible.
6. Make room for second labels, negociant models, and shared brands without the stigma that often attaches to these.
If every passionate wine person has to own a full winery, the industry will keep overbuilding capacity. There are other models.
Talented winemakers already make meaningful wines through custom-crush facilities, leased fruit, cooperative cellars, negociant projects, and shared labels. These models allow experimentation while reducing capital expenditures. The wine world sometimes treats these models as less authentic than estate ownership. That is a mistake. Authenticity should not be measured by the size of the mortgage.
7. Reward adaptive producers, not just traditional ones
Climate change complicates all of this. The future of wine depends on adaptation: new varieties, new farming methods, and new regional styles. The wineries worth preserving are not only the ones that best embody inherited typicity. They are also the ones interpreting changing conditions intelligently.
The industry has to stop pretending this is only a demand problem. Supply has gotten out of control. But the task is not to prevent contraction which seems inevitable. The task is to conserve difference.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 