The ‘thought leaders’ are out and about, busying themselves with AI-assisted look-alike-posts on LinkedIn pointing out that the next generation who have reached drinking age – Generation Z – simply aren’t interested in wine, because they are all healthful and find that wine is snobbish and doesn’t meet their yearning for genuineness and connectivity.
Meanwhile, winegrowers are struggling with stagnant sales and are wondering whether wine as it is has a future. Can wine ever truly resonate with new generations in the way that it did, or is it going to fade away with old farts like me (I’m 1967, so I’m Gen X)?
These are all good questions. Here’s my take.
First of all, there is no such thing as ‘wine’ or the ‘wine industry’. We can’t begin to say anything interesting until we look under the bonnet and see that the engine is composed of many components that sort of work together, but are different. So we need to begin by segmenting the wine industry. The different bits all have different rules, and if we bundle them together we will get nowhere.
I’m also not a fan of segmenting by age group cohort. Some marketers, however, seem to believe that these age groups, devised as a sort of marketing shorthand to take a broad-brush look at smaller groups of the population, are actually a real thing. They aren’t. And the confounder here is stage of life. Young people were different to old people 50 years ago just as they are today. I behaved differently when I was young to how I behave today. I behaved differently when I was a young adult with no commitments to when I had a young family, and I behave differently now living in London with no kids on the books. There’s also the confounder of available income, but we’ll come to that later.
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