Blog / May 29, 2026
Relationships Won’t Save You. Getting Off the Price Grid Might.
Volume is falling and premiumization is stalling at once. The survivors won’t be the brands with the warmest customer relationships.
By Zillah Bahar, Founder, COLAClear · May 29, 2026
When the numbers turn down, the industry reaches for two comforts: that it’s just a cycle, and that even if people drink less, they’ll drink better. Both are failing at once.
Drinking is at a near-90-year low — 54 percent of adults, down from 62 percent in 2023 (Gallup) — and the pressure is structural, not seasonal: health warnings, the Surgeon General’s 2025 cancer advisory, GLP-1 drugs dulling the urge. Meanwhile the trade-up lifeline is fraying too. Super-premium spirits fell 15 percent in 2025 while value-and-below took 70 percent of the market (IWSR). People aren’t buying less but better. They’re just buying less.
So if neither volume nor premium price is safe ground, what’s left to stand on?
Here’s where I’ll part company with most of what you’ll read. The trade press wants to tell you the answer is relationships — build loyalty, cherish your customer, go direct. After twenty years on the distribution side, I can tell you that’s mostly a fiction we sell ourselves. In retail, two things move wine: a press score and beating the lowest price on Wine-Searcher. That’s it. My customers were relentlessly transactional. And I can’t blame them. They’re living in a chain store dominated retail environment, in which it was nearly impossible to get the best deal when the big guys could suck up huge volumes.
That’s the uncomfortable truth a shrinking market exposes. Price transparency was survivable when the tide was rising. It’s a guillotine when it isn’t. If your wine sits on Wine-Searcher beside forty other listings, the lowest price wins, and in a contracting market your margin bleeds out faster than you can refill it.
So what actually survives isn’t the most loved product. It’s the most un-substitutable one. There are only three real ways to get there: command a score high enough that demand stops caring about price; own a genuine cost advantage and win the race to the bottom on purpose; or — the only durable path for anyone small — get off the comparison grid entirely. Make something so specific, so limited, so allocated or sold direct that there is no “lowest price” to beat, because there is nothing to compare it to. The wines that come through this aren’t the ones with the best story. They’re the ones Wine-Searcher can’t commoditize.
That reframes loyalty itself. Buyers aren’t disloyal — loyalty was never owed to a product that only competes on price.
And here’s what I keep coming back to, the part that’s in no analyst deck: people drinking less is not a tragedy. It’s me, too. A more moderate relationship with alcohol is good for the people having it and the society around them. The industry’s job was never to reverse that. Its job is to be worth the smaller number of times someone chooses to pour a glass.
The survivors of this contraction won’t be the ones with the warmest customer relationships. They’ll be the ones who were never really competing on Wine-Searcher to begin with.
Zillah Bahar is the founder of COLAClear, a TTB label pre-screening platform for wine, spirits, and beer.
Sources: U.S. drinking rate and per-capita consumption — Gallup, 2025. Surgeon General’s advisory on alcohol and cancer risk — NPR, January 2025. GLP-1 drugs and reduced alcohol use — NIH. Premiumization stalling; super-premium −15%, value-and-below ~70% of spirits — The Spirits Business, IWSR.