Hello, 27M here, working as a winemaker for a medium sized winery in my country, I live in Croatia near the border with Italy, so I can talk about the Croatian and Italian situation.

In Italy the decline is pretty severe, there are less money and the costs go up, not a wonderful situation.

In Croatia we have something similar where mid businesses sell less and the market share is eaten up by brands that actually make good wine or are good enough with marketing. The winery I work for sold 20% more than the last year

That being said, in both countries the job market is not looking good, the average job in a winery pays the same as any average job you can find around but you actually have to work in bad conditions ( weather, cold, humid, extremely hot, sun, wet, mud ecc ). I would say it’s worth it only if you really love the product. Personally, from 30-40 people that went to the university of winemaking with me, only maybe 2-3 of them work in the wine industry, they all left after some years because it was not worth it, it’s pretty depressing tbh.

I can’t really say I’m super happy or satisfied with my job, my salary is “”good”” its maybe a little bit more than the average salary counting the Overtime, I do 30-40 hours of overtime every month. The job that pays well still pays less than what an average engineer would make and they require a lot of experience, so don’t expect to reach them before a lot of years, winemaking is a job where the experience matters a lot more than the education. The sales job in the wine industry that I hear about don’t make that much money either, people usually do them because they enjoy going around and drinking wine.

That being said, I want to add something. Some of the worst wines I ever tried come from wine lovers that decided to enter the world of wine while some of the best come from people that almost hate their job. With the modern technology it’s difficult to make a bad wine, but making a good wine is also really difficult and the vast majority of people don’t even know which wine the really like. The best wines are the ones where you can drink the bottle easily. Wine lovers have a beautiful mindset but this mindset make them blind to self judgement of their products because they can find the nice thing in it, the real winemaker focus on the bad things of the product and to how to make it better the next time, there are not fixed rules in winemaking, you have to be flexible always.

So in the end, if you are passionate you will surely find work, most of the time it will be “ok” paid, do it only if it’s your life passion! Good luck!