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The world's experiencing a major wine shortage

Have we reached peak wine?
Written by Tyler Falk, Contributor

You might want to store those bottles of wine a little longer and savor those sips when you do pop the cork.

Simply put, wine production just isn't keeping up with demand according to a new report from Morgan Stanley Research. Last year, when accounting for non-wine uses (making vermouth, for example), there was an undersupply of 300 million cases. There hasn't been a wine deficit that big in about 50 years.

The problem is that wine consumption is on the rise around the world. China, for one, has doubled its consumption twice in the last five years. At the same time wine production is slowing and has been for quite some time. In the top three wine producing countries -- Spain, France, and Italy -- production has fallen significantly since 2001.

And even with a relatively good harvest year in 2013, it might not be enough as wine consumption continues to grow, Quartz reports:

Reversing the current trend will require more than a single, strong harvest. The US and China alone are projected to consume over 400 million cases of wine a piece by 2016. Who will supply them? They themselves are nowhere near that level of production. And Europe, which has easily been suffering the steepest decline in wine production (roughly 25% since 2004) will have to reverse its recent bout of poor harvests well into the century to continue supplying the world—Europe, after all, still makes roughly 60% of the world’s wine. Nowhere else is wine production growing fast enough to suffice.

Read more: Quartz

Photo: Flickr/balaji shankar venkatachari

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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