As Wine Industry Plummets and The World's Heaviest-Drinking Countries Cut Back, Bordeaux First Growths May Have Found a Bottom.
For 70 years, wine consumption has been declining in the old world, while "newer" markets have failed to compensate. This matches a broader decline in alcohol consumption worldwide, but the very top of the wine market may have found a bottom, supporting the K-shaped economy narrative and Burry's thesis that fine wine moves against the dollar.
Do the French still eat like the French?
French adults spend 133 minutes a day eating and drinking, about twice the 65 Americans spend. (France was last measured in 2009–10, the US in 2024.)
What’s changed is their drinking.
Measured as pure alcohol, the average French adult drank 20.56 litres of it as wine in 1961, and 5.66 in 2022.
Frequent drinking is an older habit. French drinkers aged 65 to 75 drink on 124 days a year; drinkers aged 18 to 24 on 64. The young drink more when they do, 3.2 glasses a day to 1.6, but far less often.
What happens to the wine nobody drinks?
France still makes it. In 2025 the country produced 36.1 million hectolitres, drank 22.0 million and sold 12.5 million abroad.
A country can sell what it doesn’t drink. The world as a whole can’t, and it has been making more wine than it drinks for most of the past six decades.
What can’t be drunk or sold has to go somewhere. In 2023 the French state and the EU set aside up to €200 million to distill surplus wine into alcohol for industry and fuel. Growers offered 4.4 million hectolitres; by the time the scheme ended in 2024, 2.7 million had been distilled. Then France paid growers to pull out their vines for good: €120 million in 2024–25.
Is it just France?
No. The World Health Organization calls its European Region, 53 countries across Europe and Central Asia, the heaviest-drinking in the world. Across Europe and Central Asia, adults have cut back, from 11.1 litres of pure alcohol per adult in 2000 to 9.2 in 2019. Worldwide, in 2022, the latest year with a count, the average adult drank less alcohol than in any year since 1961.
And the decline has reached the drinkers who pay the most. In the 12 months to June 2026, US spirits sales at Diageo, the maker of Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff and Don Julio, fell 11.5%. Pernod Ricard, which makes Absolut, Jameson and Martell, lost 14% in the US and 19% in China. In all its other markets combined, its sales rose 0.5%.
The forecasts point the same way. IWSR, which tracks drinks sales in 160 markets, expects worldwide wine consumption to fall another 14% by 2035. Across all alcoholic drinks, not just wine, it expects 19% fewer servings in China and 18% fewer in the United States.
And at the very top?
At the top of the market, wine is also an asset, traded by collectors. It fell too: the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100, which tracks 100 of the most sought-after fine wines, lost 14.1% in 2023, 9.1% in 2024 and 2.5% in 2025.
Then it turned. The index bottomed at 309.27 in August 2025 and stood at 326.31 in September 2026. Bordeaux’s five first growths, the top of the top, were up 2.3% over the past 12 months.
That is Michael Burry’s bet. The investor made famous by The Big Short wrote last month that he had “heard that wine is in a bit of a depression.” His post is titled “Shorting the Dollar by Drinking Free First Growth Bordeaux For Life.” Over the long run, top Bordeaux has returned 4.1% a year after inflation and storage, from 1900 to 2012, more than bonds, art or stamps.
Two wine markets, then: one so oversupplied that France pays to distill it, the other collected, and rising again.
In 2025, by industry estimates, the French drank more beer than wine for the first time: 22.1 million hectolitres to 22.0.
Correction, 9 October 2026: An earlier version said more than 4 million hectolitres of wine were distilled in 2023; growers offered 4.4 million and about 2.7 million were distilled by 2024. It described IWSR’s China and US forecasts as wine; they cover all alcoholic drinks. It called Europe and Central Asia the heaviest drinkers in the world; that is the World Health Organization’s description of its European Region. We also clarified that the age figures describe drinkers, and corrected the description of the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100.