Somewhere on a villa’s terrace in the Med this summer, a man of about thirty-two is not buying the wine he should be.
He can afford the wine. He can afford the yacht the wine will be served on, which he has chartered for the week at roughly the price of a small house, and he can afford the watch on his wrist, a Richard Mille, which costs more than the house and tells the time slightly less well than the phone in his hand. He made his money in something with an API.
He will order another round of Aperol Spritz, a jeroboam of industrial Provence rosé and probably the GDP of a small nation’s worth of Dom and Ace of Spades at La Guérite, because everyone does, while the magnum of very serious Bordeaux on the table quietly warms.
The trade has a tidy explanation for this man, and it runs like this: the younger generation aren’t drinking as much; wine is arcane and complicated by nature and a glass of claret or obscure Burgundy is just hard to understand in some circles; the kids killed it, along with marmalade, doorbells and the nine-to-five; it is nobody’s fault; it is simply the changing tide of consumption around luxury goods in the modern world.
It is a good story, and I understand the appeal, because it is the one version in which the trade did nothing wrong. It is also, mostly, cope.
Fine wine does not have a sobriety problem
Start with the sobriety argument. The share of legal-drinking-age Gen Zs who have had a drink in the past six months has climbed, not fallen, over the last two years. The notion that Gen Z is a fundamentally different cohort from the rest of us is not supported by the evidence. Where the young do drink less, the strongest reason turns out to be not virtue but rent.
And our man on the yacht does not have a rent problem. He has, by every available measure, won financially. He can afford whichever drug he desires. The pricing issue of wine isn’t the problem here.
So, he has the money, and he has not taken the vow of whatever the wellness-industrial complex insists is the righteous path. He simply looked at the finest liquid mankind has ever produced and bought a lump of carbon fibre instead.
Although a gross simplification of the matter, the real question was never why the young stopped drinking, but why the winning ones would rather wear their money than drink it.
And the answer is sitting on his wrist.
What a Richard Mille does better than Bordeaux
Consider what the Richard Mille does that the Bordeaux does not. It is omnipresent, riding on the wrist in every photograph, announcing itself to strangers, bouncers and ex-girlfriends alike. It is easily decipherable: a man across a room can see it is expensive without knowing much about it, which is the entire job of a status symbol. It is permanent and will outlive him. It is liquid, and he can sell it on his phone before pudding. And, above all, there is very little risk he will get it wrong.
The Bordeaux fails almost every one of these tests. It is almost invisible to the man across the room who doesn’t know anything about it, while we celebrate that impossibly old and rare bottle as the greatest flex in the wine world.
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