Wine Shortage Predicted In Coming Years, Prices Expected To Skyrocket

A wine shortage is on the horizon, and experts say wine drinkers should stock up now if they want to avoid paying exorbitant prices for their favorite bottles.

The shortage was predicted in a new report from Morgan Stanley that shows the global supply of wine barely meeting demand. As long as people keep drinking wine at the current pace, the world is headed for a shortage in the very near future, experts predict.

The main culprit of the wine shortage appears to be a drop in production from Europe. CNN Money reported that about 1.4 billion of the world’s 2.8 billion cases of wine made each year originate out of some part of Europe.

So while wine consumption rose 1 percent last year, production actually dropped 5 percent. Experts said some of that was situational, with poor weather in some of the key centers of wind production dropping off, but trends out of Europe are disturbing to wine experts. The report found that production in Europe was down 10 percent in the last year, and worldwide has been on the decline for close to a decade.

“The data suggests there may be insufficient supply to meet demand in coming years, as current vintages are released,” the report concludes.

That would also mean price increases, experts note.

There have been other dire predictions of food and drink shortages in recent years that have failed to come to fruition, however. Last year the National Pig Association of the United Kingdom announced that the world would be seeing a bacon shortage in the coming year, but experts debunked that as something between a hoax and a bit of marketing for the pork industry.

It’s unclear how much truth there is to reports of the wine shortage, or how easily conditions could shift to account for a higher demand. But Morgan Stanley predicts that if conditions continue, the wine shortage would soon reach 300 million cases a year.