My takeaway from the article is that there is hope for the industry. Yes, it may not be great wine that’s being touted and consumed, but in my younger years I drank cheap stuff and thought Burgundy was synonymous with ‘heavy, thick reds’ (!). But that cheap stuff spurred me to seek out better wines once I started educating myself, and I’m confident Whiny Baby’s clients will do similarly.
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To use an old idiom, it’s the economy, stupid!
Millennials have more debt due to student loans and lower buying power. They are buying homes later (if at all), are keeping cars longer, and don’t start wine cellars.
your profile pic! “You’re supposed to spit it out…”
Looks like Gen Z spit it out and never picked the glass back up!
Alan, I agree with you. This is why I prefer wine over weed.
I know both my daughters (in their 20’s) enjoy, appreciate, and collect wine. I started having them taste everything I drank when they were teenagers. Then we discussed what they were drinking and what they were smelling and tasting. My youngest daughter (24) likes everything, but I think she is trending towards Chardonnay being her favorite. She loves Walter Scott and ZD. Every year on her birthday I open a birth year wine and share it with her.
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I am a boomer. When I was 37, I had one close friend who was really into wine, but nobody else I was friends with cared about wine at all. Over the next decade or so, I started to meet more people into wine (largely because of the Parker wine board) and developed a bunch of friends who were as geeky about wine as I am, if not more so.
I don’t think there ever was a time where most or even many people were into fine wines. I learned about wine the old fashioned way - from my father who owned a wine store.
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And, yet, the most popular wines at the time were Lambrusco and White Zinfandel, which actually was a step up in quality from when I was young and the big wines were Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and Andre Cold Duck (or, if you were really sophisticated Mateus and Lancers).
If and when wine becomes big again with a younger generation, the hot wine will look a lot more like a wine cooler than Ridge MB.
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None of us are typical now or then. Is it really that big a step from MD 20/20 to Pot?
I think this is last line, “If and when wine becomes big again with a younger generation, the hot wine will look a lot more like a wine cooler than Ridge MB.” is gold.
Thanks for sharing what the landscape was like back in your day. I have changed my opinion and think you’re right. I’m going to think about this comment for a while.
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Frankly, the biggest difference between when I first started buying wines and now are the prices for the wines we love. Prices are so much higher now. If young people are not buying them and boomers are cutting purchases because we are getting too old to buy wines to age, who are buying all these wines and causing prices to go up. My guess is that while overall wine sales are going down, there are more and more people buying top wine (and from more and more parts of the world).
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I got started on Lancers and Mateus (not counting Annie Greensprings, that was just to get drunk). Liebraumilch and Zeller Schwartz Katz were a step up. So who knows if, how, or when the next few generations will get into wine? Or what wine will even look like if/when they do.
To paraphrase Jurassic Park: Commerce finds a way!
I was at Vinitaly last week and was tasting with some Antinori folks when they poured me this: Fichimori - tormaresca
Tasty, light, chillable red. Unpretentious, “trendy” design, colorless bottle. I asked how much they make of this. About 8,000 cases. Now, that’s not a lot for Antinori, but it’s not nothing. Apparently it sells well at about 10 euro.
I tasted more wines last week than I really want to think about but this one stuck with me because it was different. I’ve been actively into wine since my teens and am now in my mid-30s. For my whole wine journey, before and since getting into the industry, when I talk to people my age and younger about wine they are turned off by the illusion of choice. This might not be the biggest reason young people aren’t drinking wine, but it is one that I don’t hear being talked about enough.
We know how to make wine in a lot of different ways to make very different styles of wine. But people are, for some reason, refusing to do this at scale (ok, I’m not so naive, I know that one reason is because takes a lot of either marketing dollars or time to convince people to buy 10,000 cases of something completely new). We end up with the illusion of variety despite celebrating it as one of the core appeals of wine. I don’t know how many of you are fed up of tasting Sonoma Coast Chardonnays that all taste pretty much the same and cost $70, but I sure am. It’s even worse in the grocery store, where the $15 Josh, $20 Daou, and $25 Justin Cabernet Sauvignons are all more or less indistinguishable - which isn’t even to say that they’re bad, only that people are turned off by having to make a choice that is both seemingly infinite and narrow. “Different” styles done well also aren’t only appealing to assorted Gen Z drinkers - they’re appealing to us beyond-the-pale fanatics, too. I think of some of the folks who get love on this board, like Hardy Wallace, Adam Sabelli-Frisch. And these wines often happen to be lower in alcohol, too, which helps to meet another priority of the younger generation.
I would love to see more large wineries producing wines like Fichimori for the US market. These wines have low costs of production and are released quickly so good for cash flow. Presumably the marketing gurus have scoped this out and decided it’s not worth it, but I genuinely don’t understand why.
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I can remember working at my father’s store and trying in vain to convince people to spend a dollar or two more and get 1971 Pradikat wines instead of Blue Nun. Dad did a much better job with this for his “wine customers” but for the average joe walking into the store, there was no chance.
I believe the key is inexpensive/free wine tastings at local stores where young people can try several wines and even a few expensive ones they may have open. I started in the 80’s and there were free tastings all over the place. Covid seemed to stop them but they need to come back (which I’m starting to see). Problem now is how to advertise to get the kids into the stores.
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The price of buying any wine isn’t higher, the price of buying the same wines you were used to buying for cheap is higher. I think there’s far more value available now than there was in the past from a wide variety of regions in the 10-20 range. Top wines though are much more expensive.
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And for younger generations, there will be different wines they love that will invariably go up in price.
I’ve certainly noticed that Chianti has a lot of appeal for people 45 and under. Who’s to say that Castell’in Villa doesn’t become a super hot wine for younger people? Who’s to say with all of the travel to Portugal that a producer like Wine&Soul doesn’t become super expensive in time?
There’s an ocean of wonderful, affordable wines that are more available now than they were when people over 60 were getting into wine. Add in travel to different countries and there will be different wines that generation loves
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Like I’ve said before, we tend to overthink this. It’s really simple:
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I suspect this is well over half the reason, but I’m still not giving anyone a pass for choosing hard seltzer over a proper drink.
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But look at the stock market!!! 
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I was thinking about this today Dave. Convenience trumps everything. We’re a lazy ass society. I’m too lazy to mix a proper drink. Let me just pop open this lame ass can because someone already made it for me and I’m too lazy to stir a couple of ingredients together for a far superior drink. I’ll eat whatever the F DoorDash will bring me because I’m too lazy to make something or go out and get proper. And I’m even willing to pay more for inferior food/drink.
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