The wine industry is asking the wrong question

We have all seen numerous reports recently, examining the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, and its effect on the wine industry. Many of the comments have been inspired by the recent report from Rob McMillan, of the Silicon Valley Bank (State of the Wine Industry Report 2022). It seems to me that many of the responses miss the point somewhat (Wine marketing strategies fail to attract millenials); and I thought that I might write about this here.

The SVB report is intended to be a bit more holistic than simply wine-focused, in that it tries to look at the big picture, of the industry as a whole (although restricted to the USA). One topic of focus is that the prime wine-drinking population of recent decades is the Baby Boomer generation, which is mostly now either in retirement or departed. The issue is that neither the following Generation X nor the subsequent Millennial generation have shown more than cursory interest in wine. If they consume alcohol, then it is likely to be mixed drinks (except maybe in Australia: Australian millennials drive wine consumption post-pandemic).

The response of the commentators has been to ask the question: how do we sell our wines to the Millennials? I contend that this is fundamentally the wrong question, asked from a wrong perspective.

• Young people are buying less wine, but the industry keeps marketing to aging Boomers
• The wine business sees a problem: Millennials aren’t drinking enough
• Has the wine industry blown it with Millennials?
• US wine market — time for a rethink

I will keep my commentary personal, but I contend that my perspective is a general one. I am a classic Baby Boomer, whose (Silent Generation) parents hardly drank wine (cheap semi-sweet sparkling stuff is all I can remember from my childhood). I started drinking wine at university, at least partly because a bottle shop (liquor store) down the road from my home started having free tastings on Thursday nights (see Some personal anecdotes). From there, I started visiting wineries whenever I was in the vicinity. I now have a small collection of wine maturing under the house, to be consumed by my wife and I.

So, my perspective is not that of an industry insider, but that of an interested consumer. I have read a lot of books, and I read the new web pages each week; and I do wonder about a lot of what I read. I cannot see much of it being of interest to Millennials. Let's take some of the points, one by one.

For example, there are endless articles about apparently esoteric topics that affect wine production: different soils and climates, different clonal selections, different cultivation and vinification. There is also, of course, The enduring mythos of wine, which reeks of snobbery and elitism (USA survey finds rules of wine are intimidating). Even worse are the articles about wine that we will never get to drink, either because we are in the wrong financial bracket or because the wine is no longer available.

Indeed, this latter point still annoys me, even after decades of drinking wine. I am happy to read an article directing my attention to some currently available good-value wines that I have not tried before. However, far too much wine writing is about wines I will never get near, for one reason or another. Why should I read such stuff? How do I identify it before I read it? We will never get people interested in wine if the entry bar is raised too high.

However, what seems worst to me is that most of the writing is nothing more than opinion; and people almost never seem to share the same opinions! Someone will write an introductory book on wine, and other people will denigrate it for over-simplifying what is obviously a deeply complex and fascinating topic. Someone will write a personal reflection, and other people will dismiss it as being out-of-date. Someone else will write a deep dive into a particular wine region, with all of the details, and other people will be totally disinterested. Is this any way to attract customers?

From here, we could consider the issue of variability in quality, which is real. Depending on how you choose your wine, it seems to be depressingly easy to end up with a bottle you are not prepared to drink, once opened. Just about everyone I know has poured a bottle of wine down the sink. However, none of them has ever poured a beer down the sink, nor a mixed drink. If you happen to be a not-yet-very wealthy Millennial, which of the three drinks are you going to prefer? They are making their own conclusion rather obvious (Four reasons why Millennials don’t have any money).

Then there is the matter of storing the stuff. The purchaser does not need somewhere to store much in the way of beer or mixed drinks, because they can be drunk immediately after purchase, with perfect satisfaction. For wine, however, even cheap wine can taste a whole lot better if we wait a while (Does bottle price have anything to do with cellaring desirability?); and many wines positively demand storage, if we are to get any sensory value for our money. This alone raises the bar for entry into the world of wine as something more than a thirst quencher.

Finally, of course, if someone does manage to jump the bar, they need to rob a bank to afford the allegedly top-rank stuff (The outrageous prices of modern high-quality wines). Well, I have, on rare occasions, tried some of these wines, and I can tell you now that not one of them impressed me even slightly, even though I have been told that this is what I should aspire to. Now, maybe this makes me an inverse wine snob, rejecting the supposedly most snobbish stuff; and maybe it makes me a sensory philistine. Either way, I am better off saving my money for the stuff that I like, which almost never gets more than 95 points, and never ever costs me either an arm or a leg, let alone both (Tasting great wines?).

So, that leaves the bottom line, which is to ask what sort of industry are we trying to attract Millennials to? It can not be the one that attracted Baby Boomers. Baby Boomers were the first post-War generation — the ones looking for a bright future after the dark days experienced by their parents. Wine became a part of that, as a luxury good that people could aspire to, and work towards. It represented just how different this new world was going to be, as newly affluent people benefited from their affluence.

This, sadly, ignores the down-side of what happened during that time. The Environment had not yet become a concern, which means that the Baby Boomers did not care for it the way they should have.

The Baby Boomers have not left a legacy that inspires much emulation. The world is a far more serious place, now, as we  try to grapple with long-term problems, not short-term ones, like a war. I have pointed out before that wine-industry data clearly high-light global warming back in the 1970s (Grape harvest dates and the evidence for global warming); but no-one cared back then. The wine industry certainly has a role to play, now, by achieving carbon neutrality, and by caring about packaging (their own, and that of others: Wine brand removes 10 million plastic bottles from the oceans).

However, that will never be enough (Why have we left it so late to deal with climate change in the wine industry?). My background in biological science tells me that reversing global warming may be a pipe dream — the best we may ever be able to do is to stop making it worse. Natural ecosystems are very robust, and they tend to move from one stable state to another, in response to any given disturbance. The new state may not be desirable for human beings, as some species become extinct while others taker over dramatically. The weather may be completely different, and stay that way for hundreds of years — so, you may have to get used to the current droughts (West megadrought worsens to driest in at least 1,200 years), and the loss of cool nights during grape ripening (Winemakers are poised to lose another vital tool to climate change). This has an obvious affect on agricultural pursuits, with desirable geographical locations for each pursuit changing dramatically. This is all "perfectly natural" in the big scheme of things; but it may take a lot of getting used to by human industries, which are all small-scale by comparison.

On top of this is the matter of health. Living a healthy lifestyle is unquestioned by Millennials. This means that any question about wine and health is of paramount importance. There are actually two issues here. One is the increasing pressure being applied to the alcohol business, particularly by the World Health Organization and by the European Union. This does not refer just to whether wine containers should have a list of ingredients (A perfect storm: Nutri-Score, alcohol and health;  Two glasses of wine enough to hit daily sugar limit) but also the extent to which it should contain health warnings (European Union lurches towards Prohibition;  Amendments made to alcohol and health recommendations in Europe). The second issue is whether we ever could work out whether wine is good for us or not (Wine and health — why is there so much argument, pro and con?). The response of parts of the alcohol industry has not been good (How can we get sober from the influence of the alcohol industry?).

None of this is meant to be scare-mongering. The world will be what it will be, and at my age I will not still be here to see it. However, my daughter will be, and she is an archetypal Millennial. She has no interest whatsoever in wine, at least partly because her parents do have one (including her step-mother). She is part of the future, and we are not (for long, anyway). The Millennials are trying to make their own future, just as the Bay Boomers did, before them.

So, the ultimate question for the wine industry is: how do we make the wine industry part of that future? What we are doing at the moment is asking a very different question: how do we make the Millennials part of the wine industry? When you swap those two questions, it is easy to see why the wine industry is having a hard time. Someone has put the cart before the horse. We do not need to get the Millennials to join us; but instead we must join them!

This means that we should stop trying to sell preordained wine to the Millennials, and start making something that they would actually choose for themselves.

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There is an old saying: The customer is always right. This is not a definition of “right”, but instead it is a definition of “customer” — if you think that someone is wrong, then they can never be your customer.