The Funeral That Was Not a Funeral

Wine is dying again.

The numbers, stated plainly. The world drank about 208 million hectolitres of wine in 2025, near or at its lowest point since 1961. The global vineyard has now shrunk for six consecutive years. In the United States, the share of adults who drink alcohol at all fell to 54 percent in 2025, the lowest Gallup has measured in roughly nine decades of asking, and for the first time a majority of Americans say even moderate drinking is bad for their health. In Bordeaux, the state pays growers to tear vines out of the ground. The trade press reaches for words like "bloodbath."

If you walked into the story today, you would assume you had arrived at its end. You have arrived, instead, at a funeral wine has attended many times before. The mourners change. The eulogy is always the same. And the casket, so far, has always turned out to be empty.

Two thousand years of premature obituaries

Wine has been declared finished by Roman emperors who could not control its price, by a louse that ate the roots of Europe, by the Constitution of the United States, and by a committee in Beijing. Each time, sensible people looked at the numbers of their own moment and concluded that the story was over. Each time they were wrong, but not because nothing happened. Something enormous happened every time. It just was not death.

This series is the economic history of those funerals: nine episodes, each one a boom, a bust, or a structural turning point, told with money as the main character.

The thesis: a renegotiation, not a funeral

Here is the claim the whole series is built to test. Wine endures. What does not endure is the answer to two questions: who owns the premium tier, and who pays for it. Every shock in this story ends with those two answers renegotiated.

Renegotiation is the precise word, and the precision matters, because the pattern is not one tidy mechanism. Sometimes prestige moves: from Roman estates to the monasteries that kept viticulture alive after the empire broke, or from old European money to new Chinese money in the 2000s. Sometimes it freezes: the 1855 Classification of Bordeaux, a ranking built from broker price ledgers, has changed twice in 170 years, prestige locked in place by a snapshot of the market. Sometimes it is destroyed and slowly rebuilt: Prohibition took America's fine-wine industry to near zero in 1920, and the rebuild took four decades. And sometimes it widens rather than moves: the Judgment of Paris in 1976 stripped France of nothing; it added California to the map. What survives every variant is the premium tier itself, and the contest over its ownership.

That is a falsifiable claim, and it should be treated like one. If wine's consumption and its prestige ever collapse together, permanently, with no offsetting rise anywhere, the thesis is wrong. The episodes ahead are the evidence; the reader is invited to keep score. One caution belongs up front, though: wine gets a history like this written about it because wine survived. The long record puts the burden of proof on the doom case, but the record belongs to a survivor, and that is a reason for humility about the present moment, not certainty.

The route: nine stops

The series walks forward in time, and the stops are quick to sketch.

In the ancient Mediterranean (Episode 1), wine is not yet a luxury so much as infrastructure: a graded, priced, state-inspected commodity, a single jar of which, the ancient sources report, could trade for a slave on the Gallic frontier. When Rome's currency broke, Diocletian tried to cap wine's price by decree in 301 AD, on pain of death, and failed.

When the empire breaks (Episode 2), monasteries become the custodians, and then merchants and crowns take over. The medieval claret trade peaks at 102,724 tuns through Bordeaux in 1308 to 1309; a generation later, when the Hundred Years War breaks out in 1337, shipments fall by nearly four fifths in a single year. Four centuries later, a British duty schedule, capped by the Methuen Treaty of 1703, prices French wine out of Britain and effectively invents Port. Tariffs, not taste, decide what a nation drinks.

The 1800s (Episode 3) build the modern machine. The 1855 Classification converts price history into permanent prestige. The Bordeaux merchant system turns wine into a financed, branded, traded asset, the root of en primeur, which is selling wine as a future before it is bottled. Continuous global data begins in 1860, which is why the charts in this series can start drawing real lines here.

Then the great busts. Phylloxera (Episode 4): a louse, first recorded in France in 1863, destroys about 40 percent of French vineyards by 1890, and French production collapses from about 86.5 million hectolitres in 1875 to about 24.1 million in 1889 before the New World rootstock rescue, grafting European vines onto resistant American roots, saves the Old World. Prohibition (Episode 5): America bans commercial wine from 1920 to 1933, accidentally enriches grape growers through a home-winemaking loophole, wipes them out in a glut, and leaves behind the three-tier distribution system that still governs how every bottle reaches an American table.

Then the modern reshuffle. In 1976 (Episode 6), nine French judges in a blind tasting score California wines above some of France's best, and the right to make prestige wine widens permanently. Between 2005 and a 2011 peak (Episode 7), Chinese demand turns First-Growth Bordeaux into gift currency and prices rise more than 340 percent by one widely cited index, before an austerity campaign out of Beijing closes the gift channel and the market gives most of it back by 2014. And in the present decade (Episode 8), the slow shock: volume falls while value concentrates upward, so the prestige tier is not dying, it is becoming the whole game.

Episode 9 is the finale, and it is deliberately held back. That is where the argument faces the strongest case against it, and where the predictions live, stated so they can be scored later.

What kind of evidence

One promise about method, made once. The modern chapters stand on unusually good open data: an academic compendium of global wine markets reaching back to 1860, a daily fine-wine price index, annual world statistics. The ancient and medieval chapters stand on archaeology, amphora stamps, and customs ledgers, and the series will say so rather than dress an anecdote as a dataset. The charts are original, drawn from that open data. One of them already reframes the whole story: the share of the world's wine that crosses a border held in a band of roughly 5 to 12 percent for a century, then climbed to about 44 percent by 2024. Wine only recently became a single global market. The present decline is that young market's first full renegotiation.

The question held for last

So the question of 2026 is not the one the funeral guests are asking. Not whether wine survives, but where the premium tier goes next: whether it stays anchored to the Old World names this story begins with, or whether climate, cost, and a generation that drinks less but better move it again. Hold that question. First, two thousand years to walk through. Begin where wine begins as money.