Speaking of ‘influencer’ I just listened to a podcast about WB’s own C_Fu !
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Anecdotal evidence here, not statistics:
Craft spirits and cocktails are having a negative impact on wine consumption, but I think most of the dropoff has been the impact of craft beer. Much of this also ties in to the locavore trend. I would guess there are dozens if not hundreds of microbreweries in every state and people are going for their local stuff. Obviously young teetotalers are also a significant factor.
Offsetting this, there could be a trend back to wine from the younger beer and spirits consumers as they age. Spirits obviously do not enhance food in the same way as beer and wine. And I think as beer drinkers in their 20s and 30s move into 40+, they may start to find wine the best accompaniment at the table.
Dan Kravitz
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"Spirits obviously do not enhance food in the same way as beer and wine. "
Lol. Kind of a (subset of) European perspective. Large swathes of the world don’t agree.
While not directly relevant to this discussion, the increasing portion of younger generations in the US that come from diverse backgrounds can’t be discounted in the changes.
Wine is not welcoming. If you look at the people who post regularly on WB, very few are folks of color. I still get side-eye at wine shops and feel unwelcome in tasting groups. Hip-hop artists and or sports stars who get into wine are disparaged as dilettantes by the gatekeepers. There is still an attitude that only the worthy really belong. You just dont get that attitude in a beer hall or cocktail lounge. The impression is the best wine is reserved for upper class, middle aged, white men, and that’s how most want to keep it. This has been my experience. YMMV
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I think that’s changing, if slowly. A lot of it has been driven by the popularity of wine in the NBA.
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Liz, your post beautifully says what all these reports have largely failed to recognize beneath the aggregate trends.
My anecdotal observations line up perfectly with yours (and I’ve “just” entered my late 30s, and yes, that means I’m technically a “millennial.”). My peers and the younger folks I know well are generally saddled with student debt, they aren’t earning salaries that leave much in the way of disposable income, and the hospitality industry has decided that wine should generally be 2X the price of beer, even when serving plonk by the glass. Making that mistake once is a good way to turn people off to wine for…ever?
Now, as we all know here, there’s plenty of outstanding wine to be had at virtually every price point, and there is reason to be optimistic. Millennials are entering peak earning years, boomers are retiring, and disposable income will start to pick up (let’s hope, at least). Millennials and Gen Z actually gravitate to things that have greater authenticity (smaller, honest people behind the product, quality, etc.), and wine is naturally better positioned here than mass produced beer and spirits (craft beer is well positioned too). Millennials and GenZ also far outspend previous generations at their age on travel, and as they start to discover wine travel (the best kind of travel IMO) it’ll provide a great gateway for many new wine hobbyists.
Now, for these things to come to true, producers do need to focus on a few opportunities, or risk missing the boat:
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have a high quality intro wine within the portfolio (eg Rivers Marie’s Sonoma Coast Pinot or chard vs the more expensive SVDs). As the prices continue to rise, there’s risk of missing this generation and remaining stuck with an aging (but still highly wealthy) population who will start to thin out over the next three decades. The temptation to tap into that wealth shouldn’t stop you from missing the next gen.
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put some content out there on YouTube showing off what makes you genuinely authentic. It blows my mind how little video content exists for wine compared to just about every other hobby on the planet. For gods sake, there are hundred of thousands of videos getting watched on YouTube of chiropractic sessions, and pimple extraction by dermatologists! Winery content is sorely needed for people to learn, discover, and be entertained. WineKing grew to nearly a half million followers with a camcorder, tripod, a patio table and some passionate experts simply talking about their tasting notes. It‘s truly not that hard.
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invest in the hospitality arm of your operation. Great hosts are the ones who will define your brand for the public, and turn people into wine hobbyists. Remember, these younger generations will travel, and they love a drink when traveling, so be ready to welcome them in.
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No offense taken.I think you’re also spot on here. It’s never been a better time for people who love to research the hell out of their hobbies (speaking from experience). YouTube, communities like WB, books, and other (mostly digital) media offer a ton of depth that stimulates that need to keep learning/discovering something new about a hobby you love.
I have the bug you describe…. I have more than a couple HiFi setups, including some very high end speakers I built by hand last year. I have the full bag of top lenses and camera bodies from multiple generations of digital… wine, for me, took off with a combination of the pandemic and having kids. What kind of hobby offers an unusually deep trove of research potential and can be enjoyed from all the time you’ll be spending at home 
I know I’m not the only one out there!
I also like to think that the common thread running through these hobbies is not just the deep research/learning element (which is a hugely satisfying one for me), but also that these are all “sensory” hobbies that require you to train your brain to hear, see, and taste nuance and subtlety that the rest of the population simply can’t. It’s like learning a little superpower, and with that comes some deep personal satisfaction.
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Andrew,
Thanks for the wake-up call. I obviously missed quite a bit.
However AFAIK the only big country where spirits are a dinner mainstay is China (please correct me if I’m wrong). Yeah, that’s almost 20% of the world. I have no statistics, but I would guess that beer and associated brewed products are the runaway favorite alcoholic beverage with food, with wine (not only grape wine) a distant second and spirits a distant third, maybe something like 65 / 25 / 10?.
If anybody has any actual numbers, I’d be grateful if you would chime in.
Dan Kravitz
Dan,
I am not sure on that. Sake? Sochu or Makgeoli ? Mekhong? To pick up three countries with different food + drink traditions. Pisco is consumed more in Chile than wine. Or in many parts of Africa, alcohol of any form is about drinking in itself versus food accompanying.* My point was less about numbers and more that wine isn’t an unalloyed good. And that more it isn’t “obvious” that spirits don’t enhance food and the place of wine is very much a Euro affectation.
More interesting though is that as the US becomes more compromised of people of backgrounds that aren’t from that tiny sliver of the world are likely to have different views on wine. Declining consumption can be part of a basic demographic change versus some failure of wine or lack of appreciation/education/whatever among “the kids.”
- Since I wrote the initial post, we were out with another couple in Cyprus. He is from Ecuador and she is Cypriote. Spontaneously it came out how at a family gathering in Cyprus, there is an insane excess of food and little alcohol while in Ecuador, there are insane quantities of alcohol and tiny amount of food. The relativism is of how there is no inherent link between the two and our expectations of a link being normal (or proper or good) is pure cultural bias - that was my exactly my point. That said, this discussion was over a bottle of Gimmonet and a bottle of Ponsot.
I dunno. We got shamed over and over again because our Starbucks habit was the reason we can’t afford to buy a house. Now they’re complaining that we’re cutting back on wine. Millennials can’t win 
In all seriousness, I’m in the wine industry and would rather spend $6 for a pint of beer than $12 for a small glass of wine when dining out. Beer on tap is an elevated experience versus at home (from a can/bottle) whereas wine btg is both more expensive than if I opened a bottle at home, likely of lesser quality than what I drink at home, and is equivalent in experience to at home (I own Grassl, so home stemware is usually better than in a restaurant, and I know how to open a bottle Somm Guild style). Plus I drink a lot of Champagne, which is not typically available btg or if it is, it’s in a 187ml, which are mostly mass produced swill.
Beer might be at a higher mark up percentage versus wine, but dollars-wise, it’s only a few bucks more than a can/bottle at home. Most places are likely to offer good local beer (who doesn’t like supporting local?), whereas in most parts of the country that doesn’t/can’t happen for wine.
Finally, I think for most folks the knowledge required for entry is too high. Most people know the basic flavor profile of an IPA. Fewer could browse a wine list and know what ANY of the terms mean beyond Cabernet, Chardonnay, and Pinot Grigio.
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I think this is a big part of it, unless you live in a wine region, you have to travel to taste on site, but breweries can pop up in any gentrifying neighborhood and get foot traffic+have easier access to sell to local bars/restaurants. Most people that go to the brewery nearby are not beer nerds, they just want a place to hang out with friends, whereas most wine marketing is not to capture the casual drinker.
Another thought (and take this with a grain of salt, this is just my understanding) is that wine wasn’t super popular in america until what, the 60s? 70s? and then robert parker blew open the market with bordeaux. He rode the wave of popular taste coming from drinking heavier bourbon and whiskey cocktails, to full bodied reds, but now there doesn’t seem to be the same market defining shift. Fine wine in the popular imagination is still bordeaux/napa, but thats a bigger jump to enjoyment if youre coming from drinking hard seltzer or light beer. IIRC big brands have started making more investments in mass-producing pet nat and orange wine (or whatever ‘funky’ natural wine), but we’re still a few years off from deeper market penetration and costs coming down for ‘entry level’ wine that seems more in line with the tastes of younger generations.
The craft beer takes are likely spot on.
Even before craft beer, though that’s certainly made a difference. One of the reasons I got so deeply into wine earlier than most is that I loathe all beer. Finding decent wine was harder and more expensive, but if I wanted to drink, it was necessary. So I learned to love the hunt and research.
Craft beer has taken a humongous beating compared to wine, so not sure we should hold that market up as a beacon of success we need to emulate.
Constellation bough Ballast Point for $1Billion and sold it 3 years ago for less than $200 Million, just as an example of the bloodbath. There are hundreds of similar stories.
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^this. It’s not 2014/2015 anymore and the Craft Beer explosion has receded a ton. It’s here to stay, but take a brewery like Lost Abbey who are actually scaling back just to stay afloat.
I’ve seen these “wine sales are dying” articles routinely for 15 years now. Needless to say, wine sales compared to 2007 and 2008 are just as strong or higher now than then. Staying focused and forward thinking is a good thing. The scare tactics are just noise or make my eyes roll these days.
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I don’t if interesting, or not.
Sierra Nevada’s number one sales item is now Hazy!
They will also be starting up a THC based drink (no alcohol, just the THC) and it will be interesting to see how that goes.
I have two boys, 22 and 25. The 25 year old is a wine guy, the 22 year old has no specific inebrient he favors.
Not sure there’s causation here, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there is:
- Ballast Point turned into “industrial craft” almost immediately upon selling out to Constellation. Beer geeks have a long track record of walking away from brands whose quality drops, as it did with BP.
- Lost Abbey brews unpopular styles (heavy Belgian styles, typically). I’d venture a guess that’s playing a large role in their need to scale-back.
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Lost Abbey also scaled up for wider distribution and did that for a while until recently. I mostly used them as a point because they scaled up and have had to scale back. I’m sure I could spend an hour or two of research and find loads of breweries that have gone pop that have scored well on Untappd or BA and focused on popular styles.
Basically, Craft Beer has seen its own drop-off/plateauing what have you and it was happening before Covid.
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Oh, wow! I had not realized Lost Abbey previously ramped-up production. Really interesting to hear of quality breweries brewing popular styles that didn’t make it — that runs counter to my non-educated sense of things.