Global wine consumption fell to 208 million hectoliters in 2025, a 2.7 percent drop from the previous year and the fourth consecutive annual decline, bringing the total to its lowest level in several decades. Analysts point to inflation, public health campaigns and younger generations that simply drink less. Columnist Aníbal de Castro, writing in the Dominican Republic’s Diario Libre, argues those explanations are true but incomplete.
De Castro opens with the Latin phrase in vino veritas , in wine there is truth , and contends the real story hidden inside the statistics is cultural, not commercial. Wine, he writes, was never merely a product. It was a setting: a shared cup around which masks fell away and honest conversation became possible. Each bottle left unopened, he suggests, often represents a table that never gathered, or a friendship reduced to a text message.
The paradox of hypercommunication
De Castro identifies a central contradiction in contemporary life: the most communicative era in history may also be one of the least conversational. He notes that people exchange hundreds of messages daily, react with emojis and comment on posts they barely read, yet the long, unhurried conversations in which ideas genuinely change hands have become rare. The digital economy, he writes, discovered that the most valuable resource of this century is human attention, and every application competes to capture more of it. That model rewards isolated individuals in front of screens, not people gathered around a table. A family sharing two hours over a bottle of wine, he observes, generates no clicks and feeds no targeted advertising market.
The South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han has observed, de Castro notes, that contemporary societies are losing the rituals that once gave stability to time and meaning to daily repetition. Digital communication, by contrast, privileges permanent flow and instant consumption. Everything circulates, nothing endures; everything connects, but very little unites. When rituals disappear, he argues, individuals stop being a community and become mere users.
Rituals as a silent pedagogy
Wine belongs precisely to that ritual universe, de Castro writes. It obliges people to pause, invites them to serve the other person first, introduces silences and turns an ordinary gesture into a small celebration of presence. You can replace the drink, he says, but not the rite.
He draws on sociologist Robert D. Putnam’s classic work Bowling Alone, which described the weakening of social capital in the United States as people abandoned civic clubs and organizations. Putnam noted with irony that Americans kept bowling, but alone rather than in leagues , a portrait of a society whose collective bonds were quietly unraveling. De Castro argues that process has only accelerated since: single-person households multiply, marriages are delayed, remote work cuts daily contact and even entertainment has become an individual experience. Parents and children share a roof while consuming different content on different screens, sharing physical space but less and less of a common life.
The philosopher Roger Scruton held, de Castro recalls, that drinking wine is not about ingesting alcohol but about participating in a tradition that transforms a biological need into a cultural act. Eating nourishes; sharing a table humanizes. The great Mediterranean civilizations made wine a symbol of hospitality, he writes, because a shared cup brought strangers together more effectively than many speeches.
Liquid modernity and the impatient age
Younger generations do not consciously reject wine, de Castro argues. They grew up in an ecosystem designed from the outset to push them toward individualism as a way of life. Their sociability is fragmented across multiple platforms; they socialize differently, go out less, switch preferences quickly and distrust any habit that suggests excess. They are not worse, he writes , they are different. But the cultural shift systematically favors solitary consumption over shared experience and immediate gratification over the patience that every genuine ritual requires.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described liquid modernity as a time when durable commitments give way to fragile, provisional relationships: jobs, cities, friendships and even identities change rapidly. Wine, de Castro notes, belongs to the opposite universe. It invites people to stay, demands conversation and rewards patience , qualities poorly suited to an era that treats acceleration as its supreme value.
The paradox, he writes, is striking: wine quality has never been higher, vineyard technology never more advanced, and the range available at every price point never broader , yet less wine is being drunk. The explanation lies not in the bottles but in the people who should be gathered around them.
De Castro closes by confessing that the true problem, in his view, is not that the world drinks less wine, but that it is beginning to forget the truth the Romans sealed inside three words , not the truth alcohol reveals, but the one that only surfaces when human beings grant themselves the increasingly rare luxury of sitting together, looking at each other and discovering that no technology has yet managed to improve on the ancient miracle of a good conversation.
