Editorial Article
Spirits Passes Wine in 2031
Wine’s lead is six years of runway, not a structural position
Wine is the largest alcoholic beverage category in the world, and it has been for as long as anyone has measured the category. In 2025 the world spent USD 528.4 billion on it at retail, and USD 493.7 billion on spirits. Wine led by USD 34.7 billion.
That lead is closing at 1.19 points of growth a year, because the two categories are not growing at the same rate. Wine’s own report publishes 3.81 per cent a year to 2033. Spirits’ own report publishes 5.0 per cent. Neither number is new, and neither is controversial on its own. Put them on the same axis and the crossover is arithmetic.
| Year | Wine, USD bn | Spirits, USD bn | Who is larger |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 528.4 | 493.7 | Wine, by 34.7 |
| 2030 | 637.0 | 630.1 | Wine, by 6.9 |
| 2031 | 661.3 | 661.6 | Spirits, by 0.3 |
| 2033 | 712.6 | 732.5 | Spirits, by 19.9 |
The 2030 and 2031 rows are computed from the 2025 base at each report’s published growth rate. The 2033 row is each report’s own published forecast. Both are forecast to 2033 from a 2025 base, which is the only reason the comparison can be made at all. Whether both are measured at retail is a separate question, and it decides whether the crossover is an event or an artefact — see the caveat below.
2030 belongs to wine. 2031 does not.
In 2030 wine is still the larger category: USD 637.0 billion against 630.1, a lead of 6.9. Twelve months later the order has changed. Spirits reach 661.6 and wine reaches 661.3 — a gap of USD 0.31 billion, three tenths of one per cent of either category and comfortably inside the error any forecast of this size carries.
So the honest statement is not that spirits overtakes wine in 2031. It is that spirits reaches parity in 2031, and the lead stops being a rounding error in 2032. The year in the headline is the year the difference becomes too small to argue about, not the year a crown changes hands. By 2033 the two published series are USD 19.9 billion apart in spirits’ favour — which means this crossover is not a projection I have invented. It is what is left when two lines that already exist are drawn on one axis.
That is worth saying plainly, because crossovers are usually the most speculative thing in a forecast and this one is the least. Nothing here turns on a new estimate. It turns entirely on two rates that are already published, and on those rates persisting for six years.
What the differential is made of
Wine’s 3.81 per cent is a price story wearing a volume headline. Its volume falls from 208.0 to 189.0 million hectolitres — 1.19 per cent a year — while revenue per hectolitre rises from USD 2,540 to 3,770, 5.06 per cent a year and 1.484 times over the eight years. Wine grows because the bottle gets dearer, not because there are more bottles. Every point of its 3.81 is bought at the shelf.
Spirits has no such decomposition anywhere on this site. Its report gives a value, a forecast and a rate, and names whiskey and vodka as its dominant product segment — but it carries no volume series. We therefore cannot say whether 5.0 per cent is two points of volume and three of price, or one and four. That is the largest hole in the comparison this article makes, and it is a gap in our own work rather than in the industry’s data.
There is a second, quieter problem. Vodka has its own report in this segment at USD 38.60 billion growing 4.5 per cent — slower than the category it sits inside. If one of the two named dominant product segments in spirits is growing more slowly than spirits, the 5.0 per cent aggregate is being carried by segments nobody here has sized: American whiskey, agave, and the flavoured and craft sub-segments the spirits report names but does not quantify.
What wine would have to do to hold the lead
Wine does not need much. It needs 4.17 per cent a year — 0.36 points more than it publishes — to finish 2033 level with spirits at USD 732.5 billion. That is the whole of the ask: a third of a point, held for eight years, is the difference between the largest category in alcohol and the second.
Set against the published series, though, it is not a small ask. Wine’s realisation already has to rise 5.06 per cent a year in order for 3.81 per cent of value growth to coexist with 1.19 per cent of volume decline. Finding another 0.36 points means shelf prices doing more than the report already assumes they will — in a category whose own volume line is falling and whose 2025 consumption drop the OIV attributes partly to pressure on purchasing power.
The one thing that decides whether any of this is real
Basis. The wine report states its basis at the front and tests it: USD 528.4 billion is consumer spending at retail, and world exports of EUR 33.8 billion are 6.40 per cent of it, because exports are ex-cellar and freight, duty, the importer, the distributor, the retailer and the glass all sit inside the retail number.
The spirits report states no basis. If its USD 493.7 billion is also retail, this article describes a dated event. If it is supplier-level revenue or trade value, the two numbers are measuring different points in the chain, and the crossover is an artefact of that difference — supplier revenue and retail spend differ by a factor of two or three in most alcohol categories, which is far larger than a USD 34.7 billion gap at this scale.
I cannot settle that from the pages we hold, so treat the crossover as a dated consequence of two rates rather than an observation about two markets. The test is a retail-level series covering both categories from a single provider — or an independent source such as IWSR — and we hold neither. Until that exists, the useful form of this finding is conditional: if both numbers are retail, wine has about six years.
Why the year matters more than the ranking
Category rankings look like structural facts and are usually just rate differences that have not finished working. Wine’s position was built when it was the only drink with a brand story attached to it; spirits’ rate is being set by premiumisation, by agave and by the cocktail occasion, all of which are cheaper to enter than a vineyard.
Two consequences follow that have nothing to do with which category is called first. A brand portfolio weighted to the larger category is weighted to the slower rate. And anyone benchmarking spirits against wine on growth has been comparing a 5.0 to a 3.8 for years without needing to know the totals — the totals only matter for the moment the lines cross.
The rest of this series takes the same arithmetic apart from other directions: the premium tier inside the wine market, the wine market’s own price dependency, and the ready-to-drink category growing twice as fast on a twelfth of the revenue.
More in this series: Fourteen per cent of the wine market is growing 1.4 times as fast · The wine market grows because the bottle got dearer · RTD grows twice as fast as wine on a twelfth of the revenue.