Editorial: Confessions of a middle-aged gummy eater

My relationship with the commodities of sin is longstanding, though perhaps less lurid than the phrase suggests. As a Stellenbosch University student in the early 1990s, beer and wine featured prominently (brandy and Coke always a bridge too far) and while reading Nietzsche in my Honours year of philosophy, a joint or three offered respite more than anything else.

From academicia to advertising. My first job, mid-1990s, was as a junior copywriter at the gloriously overnamed Ogilvy & Mather Rightford Searle-Tripp & Makin (now merely Ogilvy South Africa). The agency had the Carling Black Label account, and the office bar was open Monday to Friday. Controlled substances weren’t that controlled, either…

Right now, step-up wines, beyond entry-level without perhaps being quite yet very fine, in South Africa exists in an awkward space: too expensive for everyday, too everyday to be fully exclusive. The tension for those of us who love the stuff, who consider it both a default wind-down and a daily pleasure, is that it’s increasingly out of reach. A cost-of-living crisis is no longer a headline idea; it is the background hum of how people shop, eat and, increasingly, drink. And wine – never the cheapest form of alcohol in any normal market context – must justify itself more aggressively than ever before.

There is a temptation in the industry to reach for familiar refrains: “trade up,” “drink less but better,” “value still exists if you know where to look.” All of that is partly true. But it assumes a level of discretionary spending many consumers simply don’t have right now. A bottle of wine is no longer just competing with other bottles of wine; it is competing with the rest of the week’s budget.

And yet, people still want – perhaps need – that small, reliable something to take the edge off the day. Not extravagance, not even indulgence, just something that takes the sting out of the ordinary. The problem is that wine, at its current price points, is in danger of drifting out of that everyday territory and into something more occasional, more considered, and therefore more easily, or unavoidably, forgone.

At the lower end of the market – let’s say sub R200 retail – things get particularly tricky. There is plenty of wine available, of course, but the experience of navigating it has become increasingly fraught. The shelves are full, but signal-to-noise is poor. Label design, imported bulk wines, shifting brands, supermarket exclusives, discounting cycles – it can feel less like curation and more like guesswork. For a consumer who just wants something decent to drink with dinner, the cognitive load is high. This is where wine risks losing people not through price alone, but through fatigue.

Ideally, the sub R200 category should be the entry point into wine culture: the place where curiosity is encouraged, where quality surprises are possible, where a consumer can begin to form preferences. Does it still exist? If so, it’s less coherent than it once was. Inflation, input costs, and a generally more export-oriented industry have squeezed the middle. Producers either push up in price if they can or lean into volume at the expense of identity.

The result is an inevitable bifurcation: excellent wines at higher price points, and an increasingly noisy lower tier that demands more effort from the consumer than it ought to. And, frankly, why should consumers at this level of the market be expected to commit that amount of energy?

The point is that wine is not only competing with other drink – it is competing with other forms of relaxation and escapism. It would be naïve not to acknowledge the rise in accessibility and social normalisation of cannabis. Whatever one’s personal stance, it is undeniably an alternative intoxicant that is often cheaper per session, more predictable in effect, and far simpler to access. A bottle of wine carries not just cost, but decision-making: what style, what producer, what occasion, what food pairing.

Go to a cannabis shop, if you haven’t recently, and staff are delighted to welcome you, keen to share their knowledge, don’t try to upsell you unnecessarily, and basically you end up being a very happy punter inclined to make a repeat purchase.

This is not an argument that wine should try to compete on those terms. It cannot and should not. But it does mean wine has to be clearer about what it offers in return.

The obvious answer is quality. But “quality” is not a self-evident thing to most consumers – it has to be experienced, not asserted. And that experience is increasingly front-loaded into higher price tiers, where winemaking tends to be more precise, vineyard selection tighter, and stylistic intent clearer.

Which brings us back to affordability. It is still possible to find good wine under R200, but it requires more knowledge than it should. You need to know which producers are consistently reliable at scale, which supermarket ranges are genuinely curated rather than opportunistic, and which imports are worth the gamble. Without that knowledge, the category becomes a lottery. And lotteries are not great for repeat behaviour.

Wine has become more intellectually interesting at the top end, and more commercially confusing at the bottom end. That is not a sustainable shape if the industry is concerned about long-term consumption.

There is also a generational element. Many younger drinkers, already under financial pressure, are less invested in the traditional narratives of wine – vintage, ageing potential, provenance as status. They are more interested in immediacy, drinkability, and context. That aligns, in some ways, with the rise of lighter, fresher styles across both red and white wine. But it does not automatically translate into willingness to pay more for those wines.

So the industry finds itself in a contradictory position: celebrating accessibility in style while struggling with accessibility in price.

There is no easy resolution to this. Margins are real. Farming costs are real. The rand is what it is. But it raises a broader question of positioning. If wine wants to remain part of everyday life, it cannot rely solely on aspiration. It needs clarity at entry level – wines that are not only affordable, but intelligible.

The risk, then, is not outright substitution but gradual drift. When wine becomes both effortful and uncertain – too expensive to default to, too confusing to navigate reliably – people begin reaching for alternatives that are simpler, more predictable and better aligned with constrained budgets. Not a dramatic switch, but an erosion of habit.

Wine has always survived cycles of change by offering something more complex than its competitors. But complexity only works if it still feels worth the effort.

And that is the real test of the current moment: not whether wine can maintain its prestige, but whether it can remain relatable in a world where both money and attention are under pressure.