Social Media and Wine: A Destructive Relationship?

Exploring how Social Media may be impacting younger folks relationship with wine

I don’t think it’s controversial in the least to argue that the emergence of Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, TikToc) in the past decade is among the most important communication (social, even) developments since the printing press.

• Social Media has completely enveloped the Internet.

• Social Media is the primary means of news consumption for a large percentage of the population.

• Over 50% of Gen Z (Social Media natives) spend more than four hours a day on social media.

• Facebook alone possesses 2.98 Billion users, more than a 1/3 of the global population. Meanwhile, 4.2 billion people use one form or another of social media actively—over half the global population

• Half of all Americans in 2021 reported sometimes getting their news from Social Media (20% of them said they did “often”)

• With the advent of television, billions of people were able to look at the same thing at the same moment. However, not until the rise of Social media in the mid-2010s was everyone able to also gather in one place and “talk” to each other about what they saw. It is a development that could not have been conceived of at the turn of the millennium, just two decades ago.

So, with all the talk lately of how younger folks seem not to be taking to wine in the kind of numbers the industry thinks they ought to be, I’m wondering this: Could social media have anything to do with this turn of events?

I want to explore two possibilities that support this idea.