What London Wine Fair 2026 Revealed About Wine’s Identity Crisis

The wine industry is good at building mechanisms and slow at building meaning. London Wine Fair 2026 made that obvious across four separate conversations: the labour standards debate, the future of English wine, the way producers tell their stories, and what’s happening within the no-and-low movement. Each of them is a version of the same problem. The trade keeps building frameworks, certifications, categories and new SKUs as if the mechanism were the point, when the mechanism is only the cost of entry. The harder piece of work, the one most of the industry is still avoiding, is the emotional architecture that would make any of it matter to a drinker.

The key takeaways were clear.

The labour standards conversation is being told in the wrong language.

One of the most critical discussions of the week was the session on raising labour standards, with Dom de Ville (The Wine Society), Allan Sichel (CIVB), Anne Jones (Limestone & Jones), and Murray Barlow (Rustenberg), and with input from the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation and WineGB. The panel was honest about the problem in highlighting that the producers are slow to adopt frameworks and standards, and  the language used to persuade them is mechanical: compliance, audit, framework. In short, none of it gives a producer a commercial reason to move.

The reflex argument is that consumers will reward producers who do the right thing. Yet, 20 years of research across multiple categories, wine included, says otherwise. There is a persistent gap between what consumers tell researchers they value ethically and what they actually put in a basket. Ethics in the abstract does not reliably move a hand to a shelf. The gap has widened over time because consumers have learned to read most ethical claims as greenwashing until proven otherwise.

For any of this to translate into commercial behaviour, the consumer needs a self-interested reason to choose the bottle. The good news is that one exists, and it’s stronger than the ethical case. The logic is simple: wineries that pay their people properly and treat their staff well tend to retain skilled workers, particularly at harvest and in the cellar. Continuity of skilled labour produces better wine. Picking decisions, sorting and cellar work all reward experienced hands, and high-turnover operations using poorly-treated seasonal labour make more mistakes. This is well understood inside the trade and almost never communicated to consumers. The labour standards story, told as a quality story rather than an ethics story, gives the consumer something they actually want: a better wine, made by people who stayed long enough to make it well, with a story worth telling over dinner.

That is where the commercial chain can finally close. The trade gets a credible reason to list and recommend that isn’t “buy this because it’s ethical” but “buy this because the people who made it stayed long enough to make it well.” Distributors and retailers can add value, justify better prices, and give the consumer a story they will believe rather than discount. Producers then embrace better labour practices not because they have been persuaded by ethics but because the market is rewarding the ones who already have. The mechanism is fine, but it has been written in the wrong language.

English wine has built a category. It hasn’t built a brand. And the naming debate is a symptom, not the disease.

Giving GB producers their own section at LWF was the right decision, and walking it was encouraging. The diversity on display bears no resemblance to how the mainstream press still frames the sector, which remains stuck on “nascent English wine”, with a predominant lean to sparkling wine. That framing is years out of date, and is actively holding the category back.

The trade cannot just blame the press. A lot of the producers on those stands are still telling product stories about terroir, technique and awards, when they should be telling brand stories. The category has the raw material for something culturally distinctive, but no one has yet defined what that distinctive thing should be. As one producer put it to me on the floor, English wineries don’t carry the historic and cultural baggage of France or Italy, so they can do things their own way, rather than play the same game by the same rules. That is the position the category should be building from.

The trouble is, the industry is trying to build that position by naming it. Take the example of English sparkling. The long-running debate about what to call sparkling wine made on these shores assumes the problem is linguistic, that “English Sparkling Wine” is a mouthful, that the sector needs single-word shorthand in the way of say Champagne, Cava or Prosecco. Merret has been proposed and is used by a handful of producers; Britagne surfaced briefly. Neither has broken through, and there is a useful reason why.

A proprietary name does not create a category position. It labels one that already exists. Natural wine has no proper noun and has built one of the most culturally influential wine movements of the last twenty years. Craft beer is a descriptor. What those categories have that English wine doesn’t is a cultural position underneath the words: a sensibility, a worldview, a reason for existing beyond the place of production. “Natural wine” tells you something about philosophy and about the kind of room you’re likely to be drinking it in. It conjures up an image that is young, experimental, often urban. “English Sparkling Wine” tells you only where it was made. Looking for a noun is a displacement activity – it treats a positioning problem as a naming problem because naming feels more tractable. Build the position first, and the language will follow.

Most producers are sequencing the story backwards.

Producers do not need help telling their stories; they need to make them earlier. Most treat story as something added after the wine is made: packaging, copy, a press release, a tasting note. For any brand that actually works, the story has to sit upstream of the product: it shapes what gets made, for whom, and why anyone should care.

The producers doing this well are not better writers. They have made a strategic decision about what their brand is for before they have made a stylistic decision about how to describe it. Gut Oggau in Burgenland names and illustrates every wine in its range as a member of a family, with its own portrait and biography. That decision shaped what they make, how they make it and what the bottles look like, before any of it reached a shelf. Whispering Angel made the upstream decision that rosé could be aspirational, year-round and premium rather than seasonal and cheap, and then built every part of the operation around that one choice. Two very different brands, two very different markets, yet the same underlying move. The clarity arrived at the point the business was being shaped, not bolted on once the wine was in bottle.

No-and-low is crowded with the wrong kind of proposition.

The no-and-low alcohol sector continues to expand, and the shelves now tell the story. It is an exceptionally crowded space. The more interesting observation is what the crowd is made of. Most propositions in the category are functional. Lower ABV, fewer calories, cleaner ingredients, a workaround for the morning after. There are exceptions, but they are outnumbered. 

The category is being built on what these drinks remove rather than what they offer, which is the trap full-strength wine has spent twenty years trying to climb out of. French Bloom is the clearest example of a wine brand that has gone the other way, built as a luxury proposition from the start, sold into Michelin lists, and leading with occasion and pleasure rather than abstinence. The brands that will own this space in five years will not be the ones with the best dealcoholisation tech or the best alternative: they will be the ones that have built a reason to drink, not just a permission to.

The products are getting better and some are outstanding, but pricing is becoming a real problem. The maths is now public knowledge: a 13.5 percent ABV still wine carries roughly £3.10 of UK duty per bottle under the post-2023 system; a wine under 1.2 percent ABV carries none. Producers will reasonably point out that dealcoholisation is itself a costly process, so the cost structure is different rather than simply lower, but that is an internal argument that does not reach the shelf. What reaches the shelf is a price the consumer is being asked to pay and a structural cost they can see has been removed. 

Premium positioning can close that gap, but only when it has been earned. French Bloom can charge what it charges because it built a luxury proposition before it built a price tag. Most of the category has not, and is asking for premium money on a functional proposition. People are starting to feel cheated. This isn’t contrarian consumer behaviour – it is a reasonable response to a pricing strategy that doesn’t add up. Left unaddressed, it stops being a brand-level issue and becomes a category-level trust issue.

The thread

The same problem runs through all four observations. The wine and drinks industry is good at building mechanisms and slow at building the emotional architecture that turns them into meaning. Labour standards told as compliance rather than as a quality story the trade can sell and the consumer wants to drink. A category arguing over its name when it hasn’t settled on its position. Stories bolted on after the wine is in bottle. A growth segment that has removed a cost the consumer can see and kept the price the consumer can see too. The good news, each of these is solvable. 

London Wine Fair took place at Olympia London from 18 to 20 May 2026.

Leigh Banks is partner and branding director at the London consultancy Spinach Branding