And no, I am not talking about fault lines in California, Mexico, Japan or even… of late, Chile. The ‘plates’ I am referring to have to do metaphorically with the dramatic shifting in the UK wine market and the fact that France no longer appears to be most anyone’s favorite when shopping these days. Not first, second, third, or now even fourth… are you amazed?

In restaurants, when I was first learning about wine in the late 1970s (yes, back in the proverbial day), it was all about French wine. Bordeaux and Burgundy were the pinnacles, and yes we tipped our berets to the Loire Valley, the Rhône, and a few bits and pieces of Provence and the Languedoc. We studied and consumed Italy at the peripheral level (Chianti and Barolo), enjoyed our token Germans, and locally were fiercely proud and supportive of an emerging local but, at the time, globally insignificant California wine industry. This was essentially echoed at retail with the obvious trickling down to less expensive selections of same in the categories vis-à-vis the more premium offering being sold in restaurant dining rooms.

Australia? That was just getting started with Rosemount and Lindemans. Chile and Argentina? Difficult to find and obtain, politically challenging, and generally MIA. New Zealand… too early. South Africa, well, illegal to us in an apartheid era. Now while I wasn’t visiting the UK much then, I would suspect that it was similar with a few exceptions. First, California wines weren’t nearly as precious to your average late 70’s British wine drinker as they were to us in California. Second, there was a lot of other European wine available to them that we rarely saw including more depth from Spain, Portugal, and yes, Bulgaria. And finally, South African wines had never been unavailable. This phenomenon has always assured the South African wines a place in the UK while it took years to establish anything in the USA. I guess I just wouldn’t have expected that 30 years later, they’d have achieved such traction.

A recent news brief published on Decanter.com entitled “South Africa overtakes France” gives one a moment of analytic pause. The author, Lucy Shaw, points out that sales of South African wine grew 20% by volume to 12.27m cases in the 12-month period ending 23 January this year and in doing so (when compared to a 12% decline in French wine sales to 12.26m cases in the same period) delineates that South Africa is now fourth in wine by volume sales in the UK, behind Australia, California and Italy. WOW.

These figures are telling, especially as they pertain to both the French whose apparent freefall from grace is sadly continuing and the Italians who can’t be happy being in 3^rd given their historic and geographic relationships with the English. The Californians have been creeping up for years but the South Africans in 4^th. My has the world changed since the 1970’s!?

Your thoughts?