CORRECTION OF THE WEEK: THERE IS NO GLOBAL WINE SHORTAGE
by Hazed
A few months ago I told you that there was going to be a shortage of wine. Terrible news! I wrote: “Morgan Stanley Research has examined the wine industry and reports that demand is outstripping supply to the tune of about 300 million cases a year.”
Now I have to take it back. It turns out that the many news stories upon which I based my article were, to put it bluntly, bollocks.
A financial blogger dug into the story to sniff out the facts behind the shock horror warning, and discovered that all of the stories had been based on a single piece of research carried out by the Australian research division of Morgan Stanley. That company is an investment bank, and – probably not entirely coincidentally – they were promoting an Australian wine company as a top stock pick.
The truth is that the Morgan Stanley report was very selective about the facts it used to come up with its conclusions – it only used figures up to 2012, even though 2013’s data was available at the time. The missing year’s info showed that wine supplies were increasing again and that production was on track to be higher than consumption.
So much for the panic over a global wine shortage! You can read the analysis of what’s really happening at the source link below.
Now, I’m not a proper journalist. When I write the Fed2 Star I just grab any story I’ve seen in a newspaper that I think is interesting or amusing, and rewrite it for you to read. I have a fairly well-tuned bullshit detector but in this case it didn’t go off. So I’m grateful that somebody else did the digging to get the true story.
