While we’ve been busily worrying about the impact of global warming on the wine industry, it turns out that it is currently the least of the industry’s problems.  Despite catastrophic fires in California, Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Greece, Spain, France, Portugal, Sicily, the list goes on and on… You would think that fires of such immense magnitude, taking their toll around the globe, would mean a shortage of wine or at least significantly higher prices. Shockingly, these worldwide infernos have not resulted in any significant wine shortages. Moreover, they have not led to a decrease in the quality of wines produced in affected countries. Quite the opposite. Despite the roller coaster ride that the planet has been on for the past several years, bringing unfathomable amounts of rain or drought that makes Death Valley look like the Amazon, the quality of wine today, right now, is beyond exceptional.  Itsa may just be that we’ve managed to dodge a barrage of bullets, but if you had to guess what the impact of climate change has been thus far, it’s safe to say that most guesses would be dead wrong.  But we'd like to say very clearly that the loss of property and life caused by these cataclysmic events is nearly impossible to fully comprehend, which makes the resilience of wine regions around the globe even more remarkable. In truth, the biggest story coming out of the wine world paints a catastrophic picture, but the big story is a wine glut that is so immense that massive tracts of land planted in wine grapes are being returned to their natural state or converted to crops more necessary to our survival. Vine removal on an almost incomprehensible scale is a very real possibility. But it gets worse. Many growers will be leaving fruit on the vines this harvest season because wine storage maxed out from prior years, and there is very little demand for the juice on hand; it’s just better to walk away than to pile more potential losses on what already exists. In Australia, they are using Olympic swimming pools as a unit of measure to describe the wine glut down under. Australia currently has the equivalent of 859 Olympic swimming pools worth of wine in storage. This excess wine amounts to about 2,000,000,000 liters or, if you prefer, 2.8 billion bottles.  Australia may well be the hardest-hit wine-producing country in the world, and much of this is due to the enormous amount of wine they were selling to the Chinese just a few years ago. The Chinese appetite for wine was almost surreal when it hit its peak in 2017, but what many expected to be the new reality in Chinese beverage preferences is now contracting as quickly as it mushroomed. In six years, wine consumption in China has decreased by 50%, and Australia finds itself holding the tab. So, there are lots of theories about who to blame for the wine glut and significantly decreasing demand around the world, and China’s role is certainly a significant factor where the Australians are concerned… And most certainly, European producers have also taken a big hit for the same reason. In America and many other countries, the cause of the glut may be one or more persons with your last name. Much to almost everyone’s surprise, the explosive growth in wine sales that was a direct result of young consumers bringing an insatiable appetite for wine to the marketplace has turned out to be one of the most disappointing non-events in many decades. Yes, your children are, in large part, to blame for lackluster wine sales. In fact, they headed for the exits almost as quickly as they jumped into one of those Olympic-sized swimming pools of wines that were being crafted to quench their thirst for fermented fruit!