Loving wine, generationally

Long ago, when Baby Boomers were young, we thought wine was stuffy, snobbish, and expensive. But then we took another look, and everything changed!

Now history seems to be repeating itself … or the first half of the story, anyway.

“The wine industry is getting pressed as young people drink less,” the U.S. edition of the news magazine The Week reported last spring. “The once-dominating drink is not aging well.”

Boomer, Gen X, Millennial, Gen Y:
Do you think your age group influences your approach to wine?

Writer Anya Jaremko-Greenwold ticked off a variety of possible reasons for this changing attitude: Worries about potential adverse health effects from alcohol, and, conversely, the lure of a growing universe of alternatives including craft beers, creative cocktails, and even a growing range of hard seltzers and canned drinks.

“If you haven’t been reading about the dire forecasts for the future of the wine industry, or listening to podcasts about it, then you must currently be living under a rock. The sales data do not currently look good, and there seems to be no immediate reason why they should improve, in either the short term or the long term.”
–David Morrison’s The Wine Gourd

“Although wine is the overwhelming choice among those 65 and older.” New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov wrote in a 2022 report, “it is not the choice of younger people.

Asimov cited a troubling report on generational buying shifts in Silicon Valley Bank’s annual State of the U.S. Wine Industry report, which concluded, “falling interest in wine among younger consumers, coupled with the encroaching retirement and decreasing wine consumption of baby boomers, poses a primary threat to the business. That issue has yet to be addressed or solved, and the negative consequences are increasingly evident.”

In a Harris poll on beverage preferences, Asimov reported, “Wine was the overwhelming choice among those 65 and older. The top choice was roughly split between wine and beer for those 35 to 64, with the other options trailing in the distance. But people ages 21 to 34 were almost evenly split among five options, with cider trailing. … Wine simply is not preferred by younger people.”

“One unsurprising reason younger people are avoiding wine is the cost,” said The Week. “Good wine is generally more expensive than beer or spirits, and millennials notably have less disposable income, less job security, and more student loan debt than their parents did.”

Have we been here before? When Boomers were in their 20s, we thought of wine — if we did at all — as high-octane swill hidden in brown-paper bags, or stuff wealthy wine snobs sniffed: fancy Bordeaux or Burgundy we couldn’t afford and wouldn’t want anyway.

But then the foodie revolution happened: Julia Child’s The French Chef got us interested in serious cooking. James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey, Marcella Hazan changed our understanding. And we learned to enjoy wine with meals: Lambrusco and Chianti with pizza came first. Then we found Bordeaux and Burgundies that werens that weren’t so expensive, and we realized California wine wasn’t all cheap or boring. Robert Parker and publications like Wine Spectator came along to serve this new market, and soon quite a few of us were loving wine.

Will younger generations eventually follow a similar path? I suspect they will, but it may be a rough road for the wine industry until that evolution happens. Meanwhile I’ll continue my road of seeking good-quality wines that don’t command a price that’s unrealistic for me, and I hope you’ll come along regardless of the year of your birth.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, whether you’re a geezer or a whippersnapper or somewhere in-between. Please reply to this post or join us in Substack Chat: Do you think your age group influences your approach to wine?

Today’s featured wine, Château Saint André Corbin 2022 St-Georges-St-Emilion, offers a case in point. At a retail price in the upper $20s, it’s not a cheap quaffer. But it takes us back to Bordeaux at a price that’s reasonable for an occasion as casual as a weekend dinner, at a price well short of the trophy range.

Since I buy all the wines I review at retail and do not accept wine samples or other gratuities from the industry, I count on the support of paid subscribers to help cover the cost of the wines I review, so I have to reserve wines over about $20 behind the subscription paywall. If you haven’t become a full subscriber yet, I’d love to have your support. Click here for information on our paid-tier edition. Our free-to-all edition featuring a quality wine for $20 or less will return in its biweekly cycle next week.

Support The 30 Second Wine Advisor with your paid-tier subscription. For $5 per month or $50 for a year (a 17% saving), you’ll receive additional wine notes funded by your subscriptions, gain quick direct access through Substack for wine-related questions, and gain my real appreciation for your support.