The wine industry is waiting. For better times, falling stock levels, the next generation of enthusiastic consumers. For this Generation Z, whom we portray in the media as lazy and incapable, but who are supposed to earn enough one day to discover Bordeaux, Barolo and Burgundy. For those well-stocked private cellars that, after twenty years of a wine boom, must finally empty. Above all, it is waiting for everything to become as it once was. That is precisely its greatest mistake. For the current slump is not a normal sales crisis. Red wine is losing ground, in some cases dramatically, with retailers reporting declines of up to 40 per cent in individual segments. And that follows an already poor previous year. Nevertheless, the persistent notion remains that the market merely has to pass through this valley. Yet much suggests that we are not currently walking through the valley at all, but failing to recognise a new landscape even as it spreads out before us. But new, different, young people live in this landscape.
The great wine boom between 1990 and 2010 was driven by an astonishingly homogeneous group: well-paid men, now mostly over fifty, often well over fifty. They bought cases of twelve, built cellars, read Parker, discussed vintages and scores, and were willing to pay ever higher prices for top wines – in some cases absurdly high prices. Wine became a hobby, status symbol, collector’s item and intellectual pursuit. These men, of course, still exist. They are simply getting older. Many of their cellars are full, some are drinking less, while others are already beginning to sell. And above all, they have clearly failed to pass on their enthusiasm on a comparable scale. Neither to their children nor to women. The hope that a new generation will one day automatically do the same as their fathers, simply because they will earn more one day (which they will not), is therefore astonishingly bold. Why should they? Generations inherit property and money. They do not necessarily inherit taste.
It can be put uncomfortably briefly: wine is out. Not everywhere, and not for everyone – but certainly as a cultural promise. The industry itself helped bring this about. During the boom years, a wonderfully simple drink was turned into a science for the initiated. Scores, vineyard hierarchies, glasses, vintage charts, terroir debates, natural wine versus conventional, screwcap versus cork, Parker versus everyone, orange versus classical: the very drink whose greatest talent lies in bringing people to a table was turned into an instrument of exclusion. Those who knew little could quickly feel stupid. Those who knew a lot occasionally made sure others felt it. We made wine complicated and wonder why young people would rather order a cocktail whose history they do not need to know. This is also where the revenge against all the fuss about wine becomes apparent.
Yet wine possesses almost everything that a contemporary lifestyle culture ought to be looking for: provenance, craftsmanship, landscape, agriculture, individuality, biodiversity, history, vintage variation, small producers, family businesses, local identity, enjoyment and the possibility of not having to reproduce a product in completely identical industrial form. Wine was regional before regionality became a marketing term. Wine can be produced in an extraordinarily sustainable way, connect people with landscapes and tell stories that were not invented by an advertising agency. Even its lower alcohol content compared with spirits could be an advantage in an age of more mindful drinking. Hardly any other indulgence has such rich cultural capital. The industry is simply astonishingly bad at translating this capital into a language that anyone outside its own bubble would still want to hear.
This becomes particularly absurd with alcohol-free wines. Instead of viewing them as a possible gateway to a new clientele, part of the wine world wages ideological wars over them. Yet these drinks are not being produced at all for the 58-year-old Barolo collector. They are aimed at people who like lifestyle, food, design and going out socially, but want to reduce their alcohol intake or abstain from it temporarily – including enough consumers with considerable spending power. In other words, precisely those people whom traditional wine producers have been desperately trying to reach for years. Whether alcohol-free wine tastes good to you personally is completely beside the point. You do not have to like a Negroni to understand why bars are full of young people.
Because where wine still genuinely lives today, you can have observed the solution for a long time. In the country inn, at least here in Italy, several generations astonishingly drink wine alongside one another because no one turns it into a matter for debate. And in urban fashionable restaurants, people order natural wine, Champagne and light red wine (if it is available) because there wine is part of an evening, not its entrance examination. This very restaurant sector is itself suffering economically, but it remains the most important gateway for a new generation – one that, unfortunately, has been going out less often since Covid. People need to experience wine again before you explain to them what they ought to know about it.
And one more uncomfortable prediction comes with this: many of the prices being asked today, not only for top red wines, will hardly be sustainable in the 2030s if their most important consumer group shrinks and nothing equally large follows it. Scarcity alone does not create a price. You need someone who desperately wants to drink the product. Ownership alone belongs to the past of the Wall Street and China boom years.
So wine does not have a quality problem. It has a cultural communication problem. And that is where the solution lies. Not in the pointless wait for better times. Wine needs more pop culture. And no more dramatic, by now often embarrassing, fuss.