Beer brewers and winemakers in the US are struggling with an existential crisis: A substantial decline in consumption. It hit beer first, because people switched to wines. And then it hit both after the pandemic, when alcohol consumption declined all around.
There are numerous stories about vineyards not being able to sell their grapes, and winemakers not being able to sell their wines, and a slew of them have gone out of business. I described the fate of Vintage Wine Estates, a publicly traded winemaker with 34 widely known brands which filed for bankruptcy in July 2024 and entered out pantheon of Imploded Stocks.
The decline in alcohol consumption isn’t because the tapped-out overindebted always-struggling or whatever American consumer can no longer afford to buy a beer or some wine.
But it’s because older people have become aware of the toxicity of alcohol and what it does to their bodies, and they have cut back, and by a lot, and younger people never really got started in the large numbers that the older generations did at that age. And for the industry, this has turned into a deadly mix.
https://wolfstreet.com/2026/03/26/us-winemakers-and-beer-brewers-face-an-existential-crisis-plunging-alcohol-consumption/