redoing a 2025 blog post over a 2016 set of guesses about Italian wine in America
Ten years ago this past January I sat down and made a list of guesses about where Italian wine in America was going. I hedged at the top, the way one might:
Looking back is so much easier than this. But the past is dust. So where are we going? All I have are some educated guesses. Maybe not predictions, but inklings from the tea leaves.
The past is indeed dust and the tea leaves have all dried out. Here is the scorecard.
What I got right
Private label. Here I was right and, if anything, conservative:
There will be more of this, already is. Big huge wave of wine. Like I said, from national chains to one man pizzerias.
The sourcing desks inside the big houses only got bigger, and the wineries in Italy who do nothing else are still spending August on the beach.
Barolo. The Burgundization call was the easiest one on the list and it still came in higher than I imagined:
So kiss affordable Barolo (and Barbaresco goodbye). In the meantime, look for the wines from the Alta Langa, from Carema, Boca, Ghemme, Gattinara, Sizzano and from the Valtellina.
A hectare of Barolo DOCG now runs up to two million euros, the most expensive vineyard land in Italy, with Brunello and Bolgheri around one million. And that consolation list is no longer a consolation. It is where the sommeliers who cannot afford Barolo actually shop.
The sommeliers. I handed them a chore:
So when you are finished with your “high-fiving” and posting all your incredible pictures of 1965 Cappellano Barolo to your Instagram account, let’s try and figure out how to get normal people to drink something Italian beyond the Big Four (Chianti, Pinot Grigio, Prosecco and Moscato).
The chore is still there. Prosecco is now the best-selling Italian wine in America, close to 40 percent of everything we sell here, and the Prosecco denominations together account for 31 percent of the value of all Italian wine consumed in the United States. The young lions are still tilting at windmills. The Big Four still carry the freight.
Wine blogging. I gave it a metaphor I now find a bit disconcerting:
But like a chicken running around after its head is cut off, it ain’t over until the poor thing stops moving.
Then, almost as an afterthought, I put it another way and got closer than I knew:
It’s like we’re driving around in a Model T, waiting for the next model.
The next model was Substack, and it took most of the decade to show up. The chicken kept twitching the whole time. HoseMaster of Wine™ up and quit in June of 2019, seven years before any of it resolved. And what it resolved into was the same people doing the same thing behind a paywall.
Half right
Delectable. I hedged this one — morph or die — and got a third thing:
In order to provide some return (for the investors, as well as the users) Delectable will morph (or die) into an online selling tool, which is the direction it has been heading.
Antonio Galloni’s Vinous bought Delectable and its sister app Banquet in December 2016, eleven months after the post, reportedly at a fire-sale price. Banquet was the online selling tool, and Banquet is the part that actually failed — it never produced the revenue to keep the company independent, and after layoffs it went looking for a buyer. Delectable itself is still running. It went pay-to-play under Vinous, the database stopped keeping pace, and it is no longer what anyone means when they say wine app. Vivino won on sheer scale. So the app did not morph and it did not die. It got absorbed, which was not on my list of outcomes.
SevenFifty. I was right about the tool and wrong about its independence. I wrote that I was putting my money on it as a bridge between the three-tier system and the newer ways of communication. Provi acquired SevenFifty in January 2022. SevenFifty Daily is now a Provi publication, and it absorbed Beverage Media and Beverage Journal after their New York, New Jersey and Florida print editions folded in December 2025. The platform that was going to bridge the tiers got bought by the bigger platform. That is the whole decade in one sentence.
Dalla Terra. The model still works. Almost nobody copied it. I wrote that I did not know why more importers had not adapted it, and ten years later I still do not.
Wrong
Etna. This is the one I would most like back:
Good lord, we’re going to beat this one with a stick. But we won’t kill it. Namely, because the region is so hard to get to … the trend followers will gravitate to other places, leaving these wines to the Sicilians the Italians, and to those of us who love the stuff, long before fashion dictated that we should.
Dead wrong. A hectare on Etna runs 150,000 to 250,000 euros against 20,000 to 25,000 elsewhere in Sicily, ten times more, and nearly every serious Sicilian and mainland producer has bought a piece of the volcano. Difficulty of access turned out to be a feature. The fetish became infrastructure.
The mid-size distributor. Right about consolidation, wrong about the direction it came from:
There just isn’t enough money to sustain distribution at small or medium scales.
It was not the middle that broke. RNDC, the second-largest wine and spirits distributor in the country, began unraveling in 2025 after Tito’s left for Reyes and a supplier exodus followed. It exited California, then sold markets off to Reyes, Martignetti and Columbia. The regionals I had written off ate the giant.
Franciacorta. I said it was time. It was not. And for the record:
If you see a Franciacorta at Trader Joe’s for $12.99, you might as well head for your back-country compound. Armageddon will be near.
Armageddon arrived on schedule anyway, from a different direction entirely.
What I did not see at all
Everything that mattered most. No tariffs, no pandemic, no GLP-1, no generational retreat from drinking. Italian wine exports fell 3.6 percent in value in 2025, with shipments to the United States down 12 percent, and in the first two months of 2026 that decline widened to 34 percent. A flat 15 percent duty on European wine is now fixed through the end of 2029, and producers cut their price lists by roughly nine percent so the American shopper never watched the number move.
I missed the media too, which is less forgivable, since media was the subject. TikTok did not exist in January 2016. It launched outside China the following year and only went worldwide in August 2018, after the Musical.ly merger. Instagram Reels was four and a half years off. Those I will take a pass on. Reddit I will not — it had been running since 2005 and I never thought to mention it. And I will not take a pass on this, where I looked straight at the answer and set it aside:
It isn’t Instagram (that’s a whole ‘nother medium).
It was a whole ‘nother medium. That was the entire point. I was hunting for the next model of the thing I already did, and the thing that replaced it was not going to be writing at all.
Retirement stopped meaning what it meant, too. People leave the trade now and announce a newsletter the same week. Nobody takes the cruise. I did not see that coming either. I took one cruise, got Covid and called it quits. I’m still driving around in my Model T.
Then there is AI, which nobody saw coming in January 2016 and which now sits underneath all of it. Miquel Hudin keeps a running count of the wine newsletters now charging for themselves, screening for AI. Substack had to build tools to detect it. He dropped one publication from his list. It was not dropped for being bad. It was dropped for not having been written by a person. Ten years ago the question was whether wine writing could find a business model. Now the question is whether the reader can tell there was a writer.
Which is the real lesson of the exercise. The calls I got right were about behavior, about how people buy and sell and chase and abandon. The ones I missed came from outside the trade entirely. Tariff schedules, a virus, a diabetes drug, a data center. Nobody in any of those places was thinking about wine. And why would they? Most predictions are bullshit. It has never stopped anybody from making them. It did not stop me.
I ended that post this way:
Me? I’m just trying to make sure the squirrels don’t eat all my eggplants and keep my vigil for the success of Italian wine in America.
The squirrels finally got the eggplants. So, I moved on to Basil and Hoja Santa, Oregano and Rosemary. Yep, I’ve gone herbal.
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