Popping the Cork During the Coronavirus Pandemic?

Have the British turned to drink in the current crisis? When you’re stuck in front of an online merchant’s checkout page, waiting for an elusive and inevitably distant delivery slot, that feels like the logical conclusion.It’s backed up by sales figures. According to market research firm IWSR, sales of beer, wine and spirits in supermarkets and off-licences were up by a fifth in the first week of lockdown at the end of March, while online sales of alcohol for the same period jumped an unprecedented 50%.

That sounds suspiciously like a boom. The kind of boom that even alcohol sellers might want to be wary of celebrating too much, lest they’re accused of profiteering or having too good a crisis.

In reality, while some wine sellers – notably Majestic and the supermarkets, but a number of online-savvy independents, too – have struggled to keep up with the surge in demand, the wine business as a whole has been badly hit by the economic shutdown.

The same IWSR report estimates that the drinks trade lost 40% of its sales at a stroke when the government closed pubs, bars and restaurants. The spike in home drinking (which, anecdotally, seems to be slowing down anyway, as money and health worries mount) could never hope to make up that fall. Given that most UK wine importers will supply both the on- and off-trade – and many specialist independent wine merchants double up as restaurant suppliers or as wine bars – that’s a lot of lost sales in a very short time.The global lockdown has been a struggle for producers, too. The EU has seen the return of the wine lake, filled with unsold wine from producers whose sales to local restaurants and overseas have collapsed. In the southern hemisphere, Covid-19 struck in the middle of vintage – not the easiest work to carry out while practising social distancing. In South Africa, the government’s strict lockdown conditions initially prevented the Cape’s winegrowers from harvesting at all. They’ve since had a change of heart, but a potentially ruinous lockdown ban on exports remained in place for two weeks until the end of April.

The wine world has also been mourning the complete loss of its preferred method of promoting and selling its wares: the tasting. From the Napa Valley cellar door shop to the London fine wine importer’s new vintage launch and a vast Dusseldorf trade fair, in normal times there are, without exaggeration, thousands of wine tastings being hosted around the world every day.

Enterprising producers, aided by wine merchants and importers, have set up video-link alternatives, where participants receive a case of wine and taste in the company of a winemaker. If the speaker is one of those rare people who can do charisma on Zoom, these webinars can be a fun way to pass an evening: better, certainly, than trading wine stories on social media.

But even if the host avoids the occupational poor connection hazards, I find myself longing, as so often these days, for the real, messy, human thing – for tasting in a time when wine can be truly social again.