The Wine Industry is Losing Valuable Talent. Time to Counter this Dangerous Trend
Almost wherever you look, high quality people are either being laid off or choosing to leave the industry. We need to do something about this.
Two LinkedIn posts caught my eye recently - from Sebastiano Alessandroni, a UK-based ‘Entrepreneur | Wine Lover | Tech Enthusiast’ and the advertising guru Sir John Hegarty. The former was describing a problem.
The wine industry. he suggested, is about to lose a lot of essential talent. As he says “Data from hospitality workforce studies shows that nearly 70% of professionals are considering leaving the sector within the next two years. Wine isn’t immune — it’s arguably more exposed, because progression paths are narrower and margins tighter.”
Smart, capable people, he continued “realise they can apply the same skills elsewhere — brand strategy, tech, luxury, startups — and earn significantly more with clearer progression.”
Read this in the context of the facts that Bibendum, one of Britain’s leading wine importers has just announced that it is looking for 100 of its employees to consider voluntary redundancy - a number many think is the tip of a looming iceberg for others working there - and that Southern Glazers and RNDC, the two largest distributors in the US have got rid of over 4,000 of their employees over the last 18 months.
Ageing workforce
Then factor in what is happening at the vinous coal-face: the vineyards where vines have to be tended and wine produced. In France, 56% of French winegrowers are over the age of 55, while only 12% are under 40. This ageing workforce is believed to have contributed to a 55% increase in winery insolvencies in 2024.
In Germany, 2023 research reported by Wein Plus found that only just over a quarter - 28% - of full-time winegrowers had a secure successor. Among the part-timers who mostly deliver their grapes to cooperatives or merchants, the figure dropped to 18%. Cooperatives, the engine room of the European wine industry, are losing members.
The situation in Italy is very similar to Germany. According to AUB Observatory research, in 2015, 26.6% of the family businesses that make up the majority of the country’s 160,000 wine companies, were run by people aged over 70. Fewer than one family business in three across all sectors in Italy reaches a third generation; the figure for the wine sector is almost certainly even smaller.
Thank you Mr President
And then there’s the US, where anti-migrant policies are taking their own toll. In Napa County, nearly three quarters (73%) of the total agricultural workforce is foreign-born, with about a third estimated to be undocumented. Many of these men and women are highly-experienced and valued by the wineries for their pruning, canopy management, and hand-harvesting skills, but these offer no guarantee against detention by ICE agents. Indeed, in Oregon, when a respected vineyard manager called Moises Sotelo suffered this fate last June, the knock-on effect among other workers was significant. Many workers are simply not showing up for work.
To return to Alessandroni’s point, the danger to the wine industry is that it faces labour shortages at every level - from the people who prune the vines to the sales teams and more senior executives.
Greener grass elsewhere
Wine may seem like attractive sector in which to work, culturally and socially, but there are more attractive options than working in vineyards in uncomfortably cold or hot temperatures, and bigger pay packets on offer and higher profits to be made from spirits and other sectors. Even without the threat of imminent redundancy, and the growing chance that younger employees may not be drinking much wine themselves, the industry is losing some of its appeal.
All of which brings me to Sir John Hegarty’s post in which he describes how, when Charles Saatchi’s advertising agency wasn’t flying as high as it should have been, Saatchi decided to focus on the value of his creative team. He announced that he’d insured them for £1m - a far huger sum at the time than it is today - and that a rival agency who wanted to poach any of them would, like a football team, have to pay a sizeable transfer fee.
This, coupled with a black and white photograph modeled on the football team shots that were popular at the time, got his agency into the business pages and the heads of prospective clients.
Hegarty’s reason for posting the story is to illustrate the value of telling a story - and/or giving media the raw materials to do so themselves.
But, I took away something else from it. In a world and at a time when we are all increasingly likely to lose high quality staff, we need to do all we can to keep them - apart from paying them as much as we might like to, but can’t afford.
I remember watching the Champenois learn this lesson 30 years ago. Having traditionally done everything possible to keep their winemakers in the shadows and to pretend that Monsieur Krug or Roederer or whatever was the genius behind the wine, they began to acknowledge the efforts of the men and women who actually did most of the work. Today, these winemakers are recognised as the stars they always have been.
Best vigneron
At around the same time, the Beaujolais negociant, Georges Duboeuf, used to run an annual competition. Outside experts were invited to blind taste samples of the latest vintage from each of the key growers from whom he had bought wine. The names of the producers of the most highly-rated wines were announced at a grand dinner at the nearby, Michelin-starred, Paul Bocuse restaurant. I have never forgotten the look of pride on the faces of the winners.
A shrinking workforce is part and parcel of a business sector with poor profitability and declining sales. But human talent and relationships built over time are not commodities that can be easily replaced. So, if you’re an employer, now more than ever, is the time to treasure as many as possible of the people who bring real value to your business. I’m not necessarily suggesting that you should insure their palates (something a UK supermarket once did for Angela Mount, its senior wine buyer) or their pruning skills but it’s an idea - as is finding space for them on the website.
Which is why I’m currently working on a new sections in the K’AVSHIRI site to profile more of the people who have contributed so much to that project.
It’s a small step, I know. But while looking for others, I’ll certainly go on reading what Sir John Hegarty has to say.
WHO KILLED THE WINE BUSINESS? The dunce cap goes to the distributors. Once upon a time, there was a proven supply chain of new customers. It started at the little bottle shop that SOLD wine by educating the customer and telling the story of each wine. Then the snake showed up in the Garden of Eden. It was the supermarket or grocery chain.
What are their skills? Stacking shelves, and placing orders in time to see that the shelves can stay full. It's a very simple business. Did anyone notice that they don't have a sales department, nor any sales people?
What do they stack on shelves? Products like Coke, Pepsi, Tide, Mars candies, etc. Items that spend Billions each year, creating demand that allows shelf-stackers to know nothing about how it was made, what's in the container, nor who or where it was made.
Obviously, wine does not have those characteristics and never will. So the partnership was doomed from the start. That would have been ok, except that volume discounts drove the bottle shop out of business, and killed the supply of new drinkers.
And that, my little darlings, is how the wine business committed suicide.