The Transgressive Drink For a Generation of Digital Natives: Wine

To understand how and why wine will make not just a comeback will surge back to relevance, I needed to understand the role the drink played as Boomers adopted it into their lifestyle and lifted its sales and prominence.

It was the Boomers who brought wine to relevance in the United States as a symbol of affluence and worldly sophistication that accompanied the transformation of the culture from pre-war provincialism to post-WWII cosmopolitanism. It’s important to note that while the Greatest Generatiion encountered wine as it helped conquer the Nazis in Europe, wine remained associated with elitism, while brown spirits and suds welcomed back the conquoring heroes.

As the children of the heroes came of age in the 1970s and 1980s and took advantage of their growing affluence, Boomers needed to incorporate into their lives symbols of their rise and of their worldliness. The adoption of wine into their lifestyles and a rejection of its elitist pedigree was just one way this generation embraced their moment. It was a reaction to their cultural and economic circumstances. Wine gained acceptance as it joined travel, culinary exploration, countercultural embrace, and protest as primary examples of the Boomer zeitgeist.

Wine played a role for the Baby Boomers. An important symbolic role. Wine will have to play that role again for it to surge back to relevance.

Primarily due to the end of a bipolar world and the short-lived unipolar American moment after the end of the Cold War, the Boomer affluence faded as one economic emergency after another befell the Millennials. While this large generation saw their parents’ uptake of wine, having it in their lives did not play a similar role or the children of Boomers. It did not provide an outlet for affluence but rather a backdrop to disappointment and relative decline and agnst. While wine held a certain sophistication for Millennials, it also became only one of the selections of salves that just happened to harken to their parents’ better times.

Then, around 2005-2010, came the screens and algorithms and socials and interwebs. Within the space of two decades, as Gen Z began to come of age, a new balm to apply to the challenges of life entered the picture. As Dan Petroski recently put it in an interview with Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, “now we’re dealing with the generational shift of a group of young adults who have been self-medicating with professional prescriptions of different types of drugs, different types of therapy and social media.”

By the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, the digital and the algorithm have so thoroughly come to define the younger generations that they have become known as “digital natives”. Just as affluence and counterculture defined the Boomers, digital existence will define Gen Z.

When affluence is no longer the marker of a generation and when real disdain for the generation that embraced affluence is a part of a younger generation mindset and when the isolation that comes with being a digital native is taken together, the lure and impact of past symbols of life, like wine, no longer hold their allure. In fact, by many, they are set aside altogether.

This circumstance is part of the explanation for wine’s current decline: a lack of growth and affluence and a transition to a digital economy that is controlling and omnipresent; a videw of the future that is not defined by hope and optimism, but one that feels certan to b filled with dread, emergency, and uncertainty and where algorithms define daily life. In this milieu, wine does not represent progress or success or arrival, but rather something of the past.

So the question becomes, how does wine get its groove back and who will embrace it and why, when it has become a symbol of the decadence of the past, of a generation of squanderers, of a time that isn’t remembered, will it return to relevance? What must and what can wine be seen as to again represent something important and meaningful enough to cause an embrace of the bottle?

My answer to those questions is this: At some point, a sizeable plurality will conclude that some kind of retreat from digital social norms is necessary for their well-being. It will be a subversive turn bred by the need to undermine the oppressive impact of digitalness and lonlineness that will lead unintentionally to a class of trangressives who are seeking a connection to the analog world and a retreat from the algorithmic imposition of life under the sterile guidance of tech influencers and screens absent green.

I think the group that will lead the search for new meaning away from the screen will be the back end of Generation Alpha, those born between 2010 and 2024. I’m not suggesting this group will disdain online life. There will certainly be that fringe. Rather, it will be a sizable plurality of Gen Alpha that will seek out small antidotes to digital life. I am talking about small moves taken to deemphasize 1’s and 0’s; small steps to reincorporate something simpler and more analog into lives surrounded and controlled by the virtual.