Whither wine, as the new era dawns? We probably shouldn't fret too much. The fruit of the vine has been cultivated, crushed and imbibed without a hiccup, so to speak, for almost six millennia. The earliest evidence of organised wine-making, I've just discovered, is a stain on a Persian amphora, recently subjected to chemical analysis and dated to somewhere around 3500 BC. This is good news for wine lovers. We're into a pursuit with impressive staying power.
The vine-planting habit has spread a fair bit since the first examples of vitis vinifera fruited around Transcaucasia.
Even so, in the past few decades alone, the pace of change in just about everything to do with wine has been giddy. How it's made, how it's sold, how it's drunk. Even dedicated non-drinkers in rural isolation would recognise that something pretty dramatic has happened to put wine bottles on the shelves of every Irish supermarket, every pub. That's the end result of a massive drive on the part of producer countries to make more drinkable wines at everyday prices - and flog them anywhere and everywhere. Rev up the twin engines of technology and marketing, those who have done it tell those who wish they could, then stand back and watch your sales take off.
This isn't undiluted good news for consumers. As supermarket chains coalesce internationally, the big brands will grow bigger to service their needs - and we know what that means. Wine factories churning out obscene quantities of characterless plonk. Wines chemically tweaked for consistency and mass appeal. Wines made on the cheap and sold on the cheap.
All of these trends, already evident, seem set to increase as bulk buying goes global. And the gulf between wine's two identities - one as a high-volume, technologically driven industry, the other as a simple, artisan product - will surely widen.
E-commerce is the other major force in tomorrow's marketplace. The Internet's largest wine provider, California-based Wine.com, is preparing to make a play for the European market, while France's ChateauOnline turns its attentions to the US - and competitors of both are springing up faster than you can say encryptic website. Some of those competitors are local.
Already it seems clear that wine merchants with online ordering facilities will lure business away from those without, as the whole process of buying wine becomes increasingly impersonal. A shame when you consider the pleasure of browsing through well-stocked shelves, and chatting to the well-informed chap behind the counter about the kind of bottle that would suit tonight's prawn stir-fry.
If these developments are disquieting, others are encouraging. Let's not forget that Ireland's new Wine Age is still unfolding - still a long way from maturity. Consumption may have more than doubled in the past decade, but at almost ten litres per head per annum, it's still well behind that of Britain, and only about a fifth of current consumption in downward-spiralling France.
In other words, there's plenty of room for further growth here. Knowing that, the wine-producing countries will be sending us more and more of their most tempting wares.
Here are a few other trends to enhance your drinking pleasure: