Spirits Just Overtook Wine for the First Time in 35 Years.
Global spirits volumes have surpassed wine for the first time since IWSR began tracking in 1990. But the collapse is happening at the bottom — and that creates an opening for the growers doing it right.
For the first time since anyone started keeping count, the world is drinking more spirits than wine. According to fresh data from IWSR, global spirits volumes surpassed wine in 2025 — the first time this has happened since their records began in 1990.
Both categories are shrinking. Wine volumes dropped 5% last year. Spirits fell too, but only by 3% — just enough to edge past an industry that has been bleeding volume for the better part of a decade. RTDs (ready-to-drink cocktails) are the only major category still growing, up roughly 1.3% globally, with spirits-based RTDs surging 20% in the US alone.
On the surface, this looks like another obituary for wine. But look closer, and the story is more interesting — and more hopeful for the kind of wine The Grape Reset cares about.
The Middle Is Dying
The real collapse is happening at the bottom. Commercial wine — the stuff under $10 a bottle — has been falling 4% per year for the past five years. It's a race to the bottom that no one is winning. Supermarket shelves are cluttered with anonymous brands, industrial farming, and wines so stripped of character they might as well be bottled water with ethanol.
Meanwhile, premium wine ($20–$29 and $100+) is overperforming. Consumers aren't drinking less because they've lost interest in wine. They're drinking less because most of what's available isn't worth their time, their money, or their health.
Why Spirits Won (For Now)
Several forces are converging. Gen Z is drinking differently — less frequently, but more experientially. They want a story, an occasion, a reason. Spirits and RTDs deliver that in a can or a cocktail glass. Wine, too often, delivers a dusty bottle and a lecture about terroir.
Health consciousness is also biting. A 2025 Surgeon General advisory linking alcohol to cancer pushed public awareness of that risk from 40% to 56% in a single month. Moderation has stopped being a January fad and become a structural shift. When people do drink, they want it to count.
And then there's the convenience factor. A canned espresso martini or a well-made RTD requires no corkscrew, no decanter, no pretence. Wine has made itself complicated. Spirits and RTDs have made themselves easy.
The Opportunity for Natural Wine
Here's the counterintuitive part: this moment is a massive opportunity for natural wine.
The industrial wine machine is choking on its own overproduction. Bordeaux bulk prices have collapsed to €700–800 per tonneau, with production costs at €1,400. Nearly 30,000 hectares have been ripped up in Gironde alone. The middle is hollowing out, and the bottom is falling away entirely.
But the growers doing it right — the ones farming without pesticides, harvesting by hand, fermenting with native yeast, and bottling with minimal sulphur — are not the ones suffering. Their wines were never competing in the $8 supermarket aisle. They were always selling to people who care about what they drink.
The data backs this up. "Selective premiumization" is the new rule. Consumers are trading down on mass-market wine and trading up on quality. They want authenticity, transparency, and a connection to the person who made what they're drinking. That's exactly what natural wine offers.
What Wine Needs to Learn
Wine doesn't have a volume problem. It has a relevance problem.
The industry has spent decades teaching consumers to buy on price and brand, not on farming and flavour. It taught them that wine is intimidating, that you need a sommelier to decode it, that terroir is a marketing buzzword rather than a lived reality. No wonder younger drinkers are reaching for a mezcal negroni or a canned spritz instead.
Natural wine has the answer, but it needs to get louder. The growers farming organically, biodynamically, and regeneratively are the future of this industry. The ones stripping vineyards of chemicals, rebuilding soil, and making wine that tastes like where it came from — they are the reason wine still matters.
Think Before You Buy
Spirits may have overtaken wine in volume, but volume was never the metric that mattered. What matters is whether the wine in your glass was farmed with respect for the land, made with intention, and sold with honesty.
The industrial wine complex is collapsing under its own weight. Good. Let it. The future belongs to the growers who never bought into that model in the first place.
