You might, of course, be tempted to lock yourself in the cellar with that case of 1982 Mouton that you bought back in the days when you had money, pull a giant Maga hat over your head and ask friends and family to wake you up when it’s all over – assuming the planet hasn’t been reduced to a smouldering husk. Though even then the Italians would probably still find a way of producing suspiciously large amounts of Prosecco.
If you can’t face reality, but are also concerned that a 12-month hibernation might make you a bit, well, out of the loop, then Decanter has the answer. Chris Losh has picked through the entrails of one of the six remaining Bengal tigers* to see what wine lovers can expect from 2025.
*no tigers were harmed in the creation of these predictions. Only poorly-chosen metaphors.
January
Elon Musk uses his one-time social media platform, Ex, to launch a blistering attack on Europe’s governing wine bodies.
In a series of furious posts, the Tesla boss says that growers should be ‘free to plant what they want where they want’, get rid of the ‘tyrants who rule with an iron jackboot’ and ‘liberate themselves from the woke wine virus’ before asking growers to join him on his new vineyards in Greenland.
French growers, however, remain largely unmoved by his rhetoric.
‘I’ve never heard of Élan Musk,’ says one. ‘I don’t wear aftershave…’
February
Disruptive Californian wine brand Jump The Bandwagon sets a record for a new launch by selling one million bottles of its new weight-loss wine, Ozem Peak in less than 24 hours.
Described as a ‘white Zin but with less sugar and some other stuff thrown in’, its creator is adamant that the science is solid.
‘Just like weight-loss injections, it’s all about removing the desire for consumption,’ says winemaker Wyatt Zin. ‘And believe me, once you’ve had a couple of glasses of this stuff, you’re not going to go back to drinking wine in a hurry.’
March
The UK government announces plans to kick-start the country’s economy with an ambitious construction programme of 250 ‘rehoming hostels’ for English wine.
‘Every year, millions of bottles of English wine appear in our country with nowhere to go,’ says Minister for Wine Homelessness Noah Market. ‘If people aren’t going to drink them then we’d rather they were safely tucked up in a warehouse than sitting unwanted in chilly cellars.’
Leader of the opposition Comic Badenough says the hostels scheme is ‘harder to swallow than English red wine’ and that the bottles should be ‘shipped off to Rwanda’.
April
Bordeaux’s chateaux are accused of ‘cynicism’, ‘wilful semantics’ and ‘deliberately omitting the definite article’ when they attempt to whip up excitement for the en primeur campaign by describing 2024 as ‘a vintage of the century’.
May
Early feedback is mixed as Google unveils its new ChatAOP tool, which uses Artificial Indifference to provide customers with a ‘digital sommelier’.
‘It took me 15 minutes to log in, ignored my preferences, tried to upsell me to a bottle of £80 Armenian red because it was “naturally fermented in a tree stump”, and refused to accept that it was faulty even though it smelled of wet cardboard,’ said the app’s first customer.
‘So it’s pretty much spot on. The only problem is it can’t make a decent espresso.’
June
German winemaker Dawn Felder hits the headlines when, having trained her dog Axel to sniff out wine faults, she says she’d like him to be the canine world’s first Mastiff of Wine.
‘He’d struggle with the written paper,’ she concedes, ‘but whenever he smells something he doesn’t like he runs round yapping noisily until you pat him and tell him he’s a clever boy. So in most respects he’s just like a real MW.’
July
Climate change scientists say that global warming has reached ‘disturbing new levels of disruption’ when 20% of Bordeaux’s production is wiped out by a…
Source : https://www.decanter.com/wine-news/opinion/chris-losh-predictions-for-2025-548306/
