Spending Tuesday at Russian Retail Week. Wine already has its own traditional program here, and it's generally useful to come and listen to smart people.

In the photo - a slide from a presentation by one retail chain.
There was a lot of interesting analytics overall, but this slide is the most interesting and striking.

I'll try to briefly explain:
Within the alcohol category, there are customer flows; some switch from beer to wine, some from wine to whiskey, etc. This is normal; customer preferences depend on the season, current income, health, friends, age, etc.

Categories within alcohol used to complement and replace each other; there was never one clear donor.

But now, it seems a victim has been found, and it's still wine.
87.1% of all flow within the entire alcohol category went to still wine, meaning that out of 1,000 people who changed their preferred alcoholic beverage, 871 switched from still wine to something else.
All other categories combined account for only 129 people.
Little consolation that the flow partly went from still wine to sparkling, but there's no particular reason to rejoice.

Why is this happening?
After changes in duties and excise taxes on imported wine, an imbalance occurred: the price segment up to 700-800 rubles was practically cleared of imports and was supposed to be filled with domestic wine, but things didn't go quite as planned; Russian producers also readily raised prices, and consumers didn't appreciate the quality and variety of wines that filled the import niche.
Plus, we still have a supply deficit in this segment.

Some customers accepted the new rules: some stayed in the old price segment and switched to Russian wine, some continued to buy more expensive but familiar imported wines, and some switched to beer, etc. But the main thing is that wine as a category stopped attracting new customers; the entry threshold rose to an unacceptable level for many, plus the complexity and snobbish image of the product play a role.
Beer is simpler, or you can choose a decent domestic gin in cocktails.

In the end, everyone loses; consumers are not engaged in the category at all, which means Russian producers also suffer. How to break this cycle is not very clear, but at least this year people have started talking about the problem; in previous years, they preferred to only whisper about it.
And of course, no one predicted the 87.1% figure, even in the worst forecasts, although sensible people from the industry quite logically warned about it.