I have spent the last year between a variety of different wine events, the kind of event where everyone in the room has spent thirty years learning to taste wine and approximately no time learning how to talk to people who haven’t.
More than once in these settings, the prevailing conversation about Gen Z has reared its head. Often the consensus reached with the grave authority of people who have a lot of opinions and not quite enough data, was that younger wine drinkers had simply decided wine wasn’t for them. They’re sober-curious. They’re wellness-obsessed. They’re drinking seltzers and smoking cannabis and spending their disposable income on experiences rather than bottles. They are, depending on who you ask, either the industry’s greatest existential threat or simply a generation that hasn’t grown up yet.
I have been thinking about these conversations ever since. Not because they were wrong, exactly. But because it was asking entirely the wrong question. I’d like to suggest something more uncomfortable: the industry is using Gen Z as an excuse. The wine industry does not have a Gen Z problem. It has a courage problem. Gen Z is merely the mirror in which that problem is currently most clearly visible.
Wine is complicated. That has always been true. What is different now is that we live in an age where every other consumer category has responded to complexity by removing friction. Spotify didn’t make music simpler; it made finding music effortless. Monzo didn’t change banking; it changed how banking feels to use. The seltzer category didn’t invent a new drink, it gave people permission to choose without thinking.
Wine has not done this. Wine has, by and large, doubled down. Like your drunk uncle playing poker with you at Christmas time.
Walk into a wine shop or scan most supermarket shelves, and you are still confronted with the same hierarchy of knowledge that has defined the category for decades. Appellations. Vintages. Critics’ scores. Region-specific labelling laws that require a university module to decode. The implicit message to anyone who doesn’t already know what they’re doing is clear: “This space is not for you yet.”
I am, I should say, as guilty as anyone of finding wine’s opacity rather wonderful. I grew up around it. I have never once stood in front of a wine wall and felt anything other than delight at the proliferation of choices.
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