add some Bourbon to make some music ![[wink.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/04707e6a7bbb03e0153e349d8a9270d30e1e9525.gif "wink"){kind=small}
Hell yes it does!
It’s hard to figure out where to start, and when you get in to it, can you find someone reliable to sell you wine?
Like Jason, I first when to price problem. But that was only given your example. Leaving the example out of it, I’d say probably. I’d also add that it will be difficult to solve. Think of how much more complex overall wine is from beer or spirits. Vintages, varieties, varietals, regions, etc. Even so, wine consumption continues to increase in the United States, your sample size not withstanding.
From my perspective and experiences up here in TO and as part of the iYellow Wine Club, wine as a whole has no marketing problem towards younger millennials. The issue occurs when you get into specific types of wine.
Both CLASSIC and HIGH-END wine (ex: Port, Madeira, Burgundy, Bordeaux, Sherry, Sauternes, icewine, etc.) have a serious problem. Decades of being marketed to the stodgy old white man with money combined with little care for the next generation of wine drinkers has resulted in a wide open free-for-all for craft beer makers and ironically crappy commercial mass wine producers.
Beer has been forever associated with sports, machismo, partying, and sex in its marketing. What has wine ever been associated with? Seriously. Quick, right off the top of your head, what has it ever been associated with? The only thing I can think of is fine food and snobbery. Nowhere near as sexy as what beer is associated with.
Good news: this is changing now. Bad news: it’s being changed by mass market wines who are filling the void like Barefoot, Cupcake, etc. You reap what you sow. In many respects, I’m surprised often that wine is as successful as it is sometimes.
It’s an interesting question Berry. I think a lot of the posters make valid points. Somehow it’s easier to move from mass-market beer to some craft beer than it is to get into wine from beer. In the supermarkets, wine is mostly put out by huge distributors, kind of like Budweiser. You have Gallo, Constellation, and a few other players and they have wines in every segment. Top shelf, second shelf, third shelf, and fourth shelf. They may have different labels on each shelf but the only way they’re going to appear in a supermarket is if they have the production to fill the orders in the same way Green Giant can produce peas.
And wine can only be “local” in a few places, whereas any place with running water can produce beer. So you can have many more local craft beer producers than you can have “craft” wine producers. Craft beer is about the producer, not about location. Gallo makes wine like that, but that kind of thinking is rejected by the wine community. The only way you can get a consistent brand with wine is to eliminate vintage and terroir character; things that don’t really matter so much with beer. So the metrics are different and wine ends up being more complicated.
I agree…So many good craft beers out there, you’re drinking very well for a fraction of the cost of what you might spend on a comparable level of wine. I actually feel like they’ve gotten cheaper too because of the increased competition and the number of places carrying it.
Berry’s impressions are more similar to my own. I think Sonoma County may be the exception that proves the rule. Wine is more appealing when you’re drinking it near the source. You can see the process, walk through beautiful vineyards, visit cool tasting rooms, and meet the passionate people making the wine. It’s just not the same scene in the rest of the country.
I think that Burgundy in the US has a marketeering problem.
My thoughts exactly - normal progression. I was all about beer in my 20’s, started slowly into wine in my 30’s, then fell hard for wine in my 40’s. Now that I am firmly entrenched in my 50’s I find myself going back to craft beers, enjoying my stash of aged wines and really love my scotch/bourbon as well.
My kids are in their early 30’s and I can see the shift coming for them although they can’t keep up with Mom & Dad! They are still a bit in the binge phase instead of the daily moderation phase.
Of course all corporate entities like to keep growing but in my opinion nothing needs to change in the marketing of wine or booze in general.
My recent blog post
Absolutely wine has a marketing problem. But I’m not sure that problem is solvable. “Learning” about wine is time consuming, and more than that it’s expensive. So for most people, wine is intimidating; very few people are going to spend enough time learning about wine to really be able to navigate the grapes, regions, vintages, and producers to learn what they like, and even if they do that, it’s often hard to find what you like.
The solution, of course, is finding a great wine store, with a great staff, who are eager to work with customers at any price point. Unfortunately, in my experience great wine stores are hard to come by in most parts of the country. And in a lot of places (like Texas) you can’t even find most of the more interesting wines, even if you tried to look for them.
The upshot is that wine is not at all consumer friendly. It’s expensive, it’s complicated, it’s hard to find, and it’s very challenging to find good help. (Given this, I’m actually shocked that wine doesn’t have more of a marketing problem.) Of course, this is also why we love it – because the time and effort put into learning about wine can yield real pleasure and depth.
Ultimately, it’s hard to find the right balance between maintaining what we love about wine but also eliminating all the asinine snobbery and turns people off.
Finally, a quick comment on the craft beer/wine discussion above. It has long driven me crazy that high end food stores–especially Whole Foods–that carry fresh, artisan local food products, and excellent craft beer, often have generic overpriced wine selections. I’ve often lamented that Whole Foods, given its focus on the organic and natural, should also be trying to introduce customers to more interesting, artisan wines. But the problem is that those wines are generally small production and not widely distributed. So it seems like a hard problem to solve in practice. As others have noted, craft beers are much easier to carry, because there are often a lot of local craft brewery options.
The question seems to presuppose that, if beer drinkers only knew, they’re prefer wine. But many people simply prefer beer. Certainly in hot weather it has a lot to recommend it.
In addition to price, I think the other factor is scale. Even most craft beers are relatively mass-produced and standardized. You can find even pretty good ones all over the place. But the list is shorter, so it’s easier for distributors and retailers. I don’t know the number of product codes for beers and wines, but I’d guess the figure for wines is an order of magnitude higher, so the product is much more challenging for purveyors and consumers.
I’m 28. I love wine. I also went from 400 bottles to 125 because I bought a house, had a daughter, have another on the way, and just bought a bigger, more expensive house. I wouldn’t change a thing about my life. I would change the price of wine. At my age, there are a lot of expensive “transitions” and cost becomes prohibitive.
*I, of course, don’t represent my generation and I’m just one person. I’m also probably unusual for my age given my hobbies. S. Reynolds and I are the two weirdos I’m aware of on this forum. At least, weirdos in this sense. 
I think a lot of it boils down to cost - cost for stores to stock (and the cost impact on sell through time) and the cost for consumers to buy…craft beer has wine beat by a long shot. Getting to know either wine or beer and one’s tastes for them takes experimenting and it is far, far cheaper to experiment with beer. It is also far, far cheaper to dabble in the “high end” of beer. Might seem crazy to most to buy a bottle of beer for $5 or $10 or $15 but you can buy at the top end whereas $15 for a bottle of wine doesn’t buy you all that far up the quality chain. I suspect that it seems more fun for the younger generation to experiment with high quality craft beers because for $20 you can have a couple great beers but how much fun is it to spend the same $20 on low end wine…much more fun for 20-30 somethings to be drinking and talking about “great stuff” in the beer world than so-so wine…
When we started drinking many years ago, taste wasn’t the main consideration! ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
Here’s #3. Most of my friends my age are more into beer than wine, although most do enjoy a bottle of wine from time to time. From what I’ve seen, they do much of their shopping at local stores that specializes in both beer and wine (not the supermarket though any Ohio wine store’s selections tend to be mediocre for the most part due to the distributors that have control over the system). They don’t hesitate to ask for suggestions there but tend to keep their bottle price in the same $10-15 range that they would pay for most high-end 750ml bottles of beer.
Interesting coincidence that this just landed in my inbox this morning
http://www.snooth.com/articles/are-you-part-of-the-problem
I’m 29 and also a wine drinker, but most of my friends are beer or cider drinkers. They like wine, they occasionally buy wine, but they don’t spend a ton of money on it, partly because the cost of wine is pretty high. Most of them would balk at spending even $25-30 on a bottle. Most stick to the $15 range when they buy wine.
I likely don’t have any other insights that others haven’t mentioned but I will chime in to agree with John Morris. There’s an underlying assumption that if only wine were cheaper, or easier to navigate, etc. that all of my beer drinking peers would switch to wine and I think that’s just not true. They’re not “settling” for beer - they’re choosing beer.
I also think that restaurants aren’t doing the wine world any favors either. The markups on wine are still higher than on beers, and, truth be told, beer is often as good or a better choice than wine. As more and more chefs in this country become influenced by food outside of France or Italy and are looking to North Africa, China, India, SE Asia, etc. you’ll see more and more food that’s more beer friendly than wine friendly. I started a thread about Indian food and wine in Epicurean Exploits, and while there were some good suggestions, so far none of them beat beer. I love Spatlese and Thai food, but I can buy 2-3 growlers of beer for the price of a great Spatlese.
And there’s a ton of great beer out there. The beer world is exploding (so is the cider world), so there’s always something new. And unlike wine, if a particular beer gets super popular, it doesn’t double or triple in price. I’ve yet to hear someone say “I used to love Boneyard RPM but I can’t afford it anymore.” But I’ve heard that with tons of wineries and regions.
Finally, when we think of wine drinking nations, like France, we have to remember that most of the wine they’re drinking daily isn’t stuff we’re that interested in on this board. We’re geeks and collectors here, so we’re seeing everything from a skewed perspective. If the US became a predominantly wine drinking country, the biggest boom will be in lower end, super market wines that most of us dismiss. That’s just the reality.
I agree with John on the importance of scale. Beer has a better / easier scaling built into it. A couple guys build a brewery in their garage. They can easily move into a new warehouse and order more grain if their beer is in high demand.
Availability plays a significant role in marketing. Scalability can improve that aspect for beer. Growing more 1er Cru / GC is not easy. Land is the controlling factor.
Remember, most brewers aren’t farmers. Most winemakers are farmers. This allows additional time / effort to be spent on marketing. And costs…
Cost of producing wine on a liter basis (must be?) is higher. High quality wine versus high quality beer. I am happy to accept that mass farmed wine is cheap. But it sucks too. Great wine costs more to produce than great beer.
A final note is on the purchasing dilemma. Do you enjoy drinking something you know is always going to taste the same or do you prefer to take a risk and drink something that, despite the fact you’ve had it before, might be completely different? I’m not taking a punch at beer drinkers and saying they have unexciting palates, but the advantage for brewers is that vintage of grain makes little to no difference. Grapes are much more sensitive to the annual growing season.
Beer pricing (and interest) follows a very normal risk curve. Beer is relatively low risk. Buy it and hate it, you’re out a few bucks. Buy it and love it, you’re able to find it pretty readily available. Wine isn’t the same. Buy it and hate it, you might have spent $100 bucks on that vapid Burg. Ouch. Buy it and love it, it probably isn’t there the next day when you go back.
Yes, this strikes me as correct. I see a beer geek friend from college about twice a year and he always brings his own beer so he doesn’t have to settle for one of the dozens of selections at the supermarket.