What Happens If Wine Becomes Just Another Luxury?

The road to irrelevance

More than a decade ago, when the US wine boom was at its peak, economist Mike Veseth wondered if wine would become as esoteric as opera, relevant to only a handful of cognoscenti and mostly ignored by the rest of the world.

Wine, he wrote in his 2013 book, “Extreme Wine” was not only becoming more expensive to produce, but much more expensive to buy, both of which were reducing its potential market. This was what had happened to opera in the first half of the 20^th century, he said, when it changed from entertainment for the masses – it even had its own weekly national radio broadcast, listened to by millions in the US — into something appreciated mostly by wealthy, older people.

“It isn’t a surprise, therefore,” he wrote, “that opera evolved into an art for rich elites, and the opera houses became gilt palaces of conspicuous consumption.”

Two things happened at once. Costs rose, and prices followed. And as prices rose, opera became more expensive — and less relevant, as its audience narrowed to those who were able to pay.

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