As harvest 2023 draws to a close, many of us are gearing up for the 2024 edition of the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento on January 23-25, 2024. The Unified is sort of the Super Bowl of North American wine industry events, so I’ve decided to follow Super Bowl practice and call this Unified XXX.
A lot has changed in the economy and the wine business since the first Unified Symposium was convened. The 1990s were a very different time. This was the era of “The End of History” as the collapse of Communism was said to close the era of ideological conflict and open a world of rising liberal democracy.
Surfing the Global Wave
The economy was expanding and markets were becoming more open and more global. Although Ross Perot claimed to hear a “giant sucking sound” of jobs being pulled to Mexico by the new NAFTA agreement, economic growth was remarkably robust. I recall that interest in university economics studies declined because there didn’t seem to be any big economic problems to solve.
As the 1990s moved ahead, the budget deficit in the United States shrank and then eventually actually achieved a surplus! The budget deficit for the last fiscal year was more than $1.5 trillion. What a difference!
The wine world was changing very rapidly in the 1990s, too. Wine surfed the globalization wave much to
This Article was originally published on The Wine Economist
