The Future of Wine Depends on Keeping it Complex

Convincing 20somethings to turn to wine could be a fool's errend.

If I had a dime (well, maybe a dollar) for every time someone suggests that younger folks will drink more wine when they get older and have more disposable income, I could afford to drink a lot more Burgundy.

You don’t hear it said, “They’ll drink more beer when they get older". And you don’t hear them explain, “When they gather more disposable income they will drink more bourbon and tequila”.

For better or worse, wine has the popular image of being the expensive drink; the drink for richer people; the snooty person’s drink; and the drink of the educated. While this impression leads to some pretty disparaging portrayals of wine, this general impression is true.

If you look at any demographic profile of wine drinkers, you’ll find they tend to be older, better educated, and upper-middle class or above. It makes you wonder if all this talk about the industry working to attract younger people to wine is just a fool’s errand. These particular demographics were not any different during wine’s heyday in the ‘90s and ‘00s. Today, younger people are drinking less wine than their parents and grandparents did. But it’s because they have many more, less expensive options now. It’s not because wine has somehow all of a sudden become unattractive to younger adults.

One of the things that happened in the 80s, 90s, and 00s is the wine industry and wine drinkers embraced the complexity of wine. As wine became more popular and as more people were willing to pay more for it, the industry fed the growing interest with ever more exposure to the details of terroir, the drink’s history, the minutia of soil composition, the difference between American and French oak barrels, and the fine points of malolactic fermentation and carbonic maceration.

And guess what happened? Drinkers chugged it all down.

They bought books and more books, subscribed to magazine after magazine, and dove into journal after journal. They made “wine tourism” a thing, which in turn led to mailing lists and the rise of direct-to-consumer sales. The wine aisle at supermarkets became two-sided.

The industry wasn’t fooling around either. The embrace of complexity led to more and more MW’s, MS’s, and WSET’s. The diploma mill ground out folks who reveled in and knew the details of appellations, obscure varieties, pairing science, and aroma wheels.

None of this can be said of beer or spirits. Architecture, yes. Art, of course. But not beer, spirits, or cider. Just wine.

What I’ve heard since I first entered the world of wine marketing is that a product must distinguish itself from its competitors. It must locate the point of difference and make that difference a benefit to the consumer. This is as true today as it always has been.

And it is as true today as it has been for centuries that what distinguishes wine from other alcohols is that it is culturally, agriculturally, and creatively far more complex. There is a very good argument from a marketing standpoint to continue to lean into wine’s complexity

I’m very skeptical of the calls for wine marketers to work to make wine more “accessible” to younger drinkers. In the first place, this is a very expensive and risky proposition. To turn focus from complexity to a more simplistic pitch would mean abandoning a good deal of marketing that has worked. It would mean pitching the wine brand to a group of drinkers who have never been as inclined or financially able to adopt wine as the traditional older, better educated, and more well-off crew that has happily purchased the product for a very long time.

Moreover, what if it is still true, as it has been for decades, that as consumers hit their late 30s with a more stable and successful career, they will turn to wine? Doesn’t this mean that the real sweet spot for brands is to aim their pitch at those in their early 40s? Isn’t this the age when aspirations become vocations? And hasn’t wine always been an aspirational choice?

The effort and amount of serendipity it would take to successfully turn a drink as completely aspirational as wine into beer and bourbon so that younger folks can feel comfortable drinking it over the other choices would be immense. It would mean making pop culture into wine’s bitch. It would mean convincing younger people that wine is cool. It would mean turning Zendanya, Timothy Chalamet, Beyonce, Greta Thurnberg, Olivia Rodrigo, and then their progeny into enthusiastic wine drinkers. It would mean getting Taylor Swift to start a TikTok channel dedicated to wine.

I’ll get right on that.

More importantly, who is going to be the person to suggest that we ought to abandon the one distinguishing feature of wine that sets it apart from its competitors: its beautiful complexity?

For those who worry about “gatekeeping”, fear not. Trust that with age comes wisdom (and the ability to chase after adult things).