It's Time To Ignore "The Wine Industry"

...and focus on the industries within.

It’s time to ignore calls for change in “the wine industry”.

Recently, I’ve been devoting myself to a good deal of reading around the state of the wine. It would be hard to count the number of times I’ve encountered “The wine industry is…”, “The wine industry should…”, “The wine industry must…”, and “The wine industry will…”

As I’ve read these various observations, I found I was far less interested in the is’, shoulds, musts, and wills, than I am in the “it”….The “it” being the “wine industry”.

I’ve read that the wine industry must reach younger drinkers. It should incorporate AI tools to better identify high-value buyers. It will fail to continue to attract loyal consumers if it doesn’t move away from traditional varietals. It is behind the linguistic and social times.

There is a lot of meaning being invested in and stuffed into” it”; into the idea of “the wine industry”. In truth, “the wine industry” can only be identified with any precision through numbers and statistics, and figures, and even then, only the broadest strokes can be drawn. The similarity between Gallo and Constellation on the one hand and Ridge Vineyards and Caldwell Vineyards on the other boils down to the fact that they all use grapes that eventually ferment. And that’s about it.

Explaining to a collection of a few wineries so large that they produce 80% of domestic wines, that they should move away from traditional varietals is a completely different task than a small winery attempting this. Asking a tiny winery in Anderson Valley that specializes in $75 Pinot Noir made in amounts of 3,000 cases a year that they should revamp how they discuss their winemaking project means something entirely different than asking a behemoth winery in the Central Valley with a centralized marketing department to do the same.

The “wine industry” is not one thing. It is a collection of many different things that all ferment grapes and this point seems lost on folks who generously make recommendations for how “the industry” must change.

The closest thing America has to a single wine industry can be found in its trade associations and even these are highly diversified. The Russian River Valley Wineries Association speaks for a set of wineries that have specific issues relative to their small region. State producer associations like the California Wine Institute or the Texas Wine and Grape Growers Association speak for a broader constituency that can’t always speak for smaller regional associations. Then you have Wine America, which seeks to speak for an even larger coalition of producers ranging from Pennsylvania to California that often have only a small number of issues that weigh on all of them.

What’s important to understand for reformers and those who would tell “the industry” what they must or should do is that policymakers generally pay attention only to these associations or their largest members. If a change of systemic proportion is sought, it will not result from a single winery asking for it. It will almost always come from a coalition of producers asking and lobbying for it.

Qualitative changes such as how wine is discussed or portrayed to the public or how wine is marketed, will only ever come about over a long period of time. Certain pioneers try to innovate or incorporate new technology, fail, are followed by more pioneers who succeed and who are observed by a keen-eyed few who will then copy them until, after years, the successful pioneers are written about in think pieces by those who have observed that “the industry” now commonly does this or that. Change is a slog in an industry with so many corners and niches.

It’s not only a matter of the great diversity that it rarely makes sense to talk about “the industry”. It’s that the central element of this thing we call “the industry” is unchanging in a fundamental way: wine is and always has been a matter of planting vines, harvesting a crop, and guiding the fermentation of the fruit. There has been no innovation in this process since man first produced wine for commercial reasons. Moreover, farmers tend to be conservative by nature. As a result, change and innovation are not nearly as central to the winemaking project as they are to other projects such as communications, transportation, packaging, or even food production.

For all these reasons, I find myself being very skeptical when I hear folks offer admonitions on what “the industry” must do, without at the same time offering qualifiers as to which part of the industry must make the change being called for.

I am sometimes guilty of this kind of broad generalization about “the industry”. I’ve been trying to rid myself of broad strokes and focus my ideas and thoughts on smaller, more rational targets. It’s not always easy, but it’s necessary if analysis is going to be practical and useful.