End of an Era?

When I began blogging about wine and food back in 2011, Jeff Seigel (aka The Wine Curmudgeon) was a daily must-read. His posts about affordable wine were clear and insightful with just enough snark to keep the reader entertained.

Last month, Jeff announced that come January he would no longer be writing about wine on Substack, to which he had migrated his blog in 2021. He recently did a farewell interview with Tom Wark and his reasons for hanging it up were thought provoking:

Years ago, Mike Veseth wrote a piece that said wine, if it continued on its current path, could become something like opera — a niche product appreciated by a few but seen by the rest of us as something snotty and outdated. And I remember reading that and laughing. How could wine ever end up like that?.

Well, I was wrong. Wine is becoming like that. This is not to say that wine is going to disappear. It will still exist. But not the way we know it today, It will be smaller and less interesting and less fun, and lots of people are going to lose jobs and money and all the rest because of this short-sighted and avaricious approach.

The facts are clear. Wine is expensive and appeals mostly to older folks who are aging out of the market. Younger people are simply not drinking enough wine to make up for the losses. And Jeff aims his fire squarely at the wine industry for this state of affairs:

So what does wine do to combat this problem? It makes itself more expensive, more snotty, and less likely to appeal to someone who isn’t a member of its limited — and aging –demographic. A friend of mine, who is one of the best wine numbers people in the country, used to make jokes about selling wine to the Baby Boomers until the last one was dead. Now, he seems to think wine is sort of serious about it. And why not? Those of us who think wine needs to expand its market past its base are mostly seen as troublemakers who don’t understand the way wine works.

Wine should be fun, he argues, and he’s been reviewing cheap wines long enough to know that good, interesting wine can be made at price points well below what premium wine is selling for these days.

Tom Wark helpfully summarizes Jeff’s critique:

If I understand your critique correctly, the industry hasn’t spent enough time and money giving consumers a wider array of wine choices at a lower price point that, instead of relying on the more complex and nuanced aspects of wine and its history (terroir, varietal, laying wine down, etc.) and instead of relying on aspirational messages built around images of rich, well off men or white table cloth restaurant wine service), these wines took themselves less seriously by meeting customers where they were and how they lived, spoke to how wine fit into the average person’s life, wasn’t so serious but all the while explored different flavors.

No doubt Jeff is right that the wine industry has quite deliberately pursued a strategy of “premiumization” which is essentially the idea that people want better wine and will be willing to pay more for it. The premise is likely false at least for younger people who are not already dedicated wine consumers.

But I think the problem runs deeper than this.

The emergence of wine as a popular, “aspirational” beverage in which quality increasingly mattered cannot be disentangled from the food revolution in the U.S. and elsewhere. Both were brought about by soldiers returning from WWII, the availability of safe, efficient, affordable flights to Europe, European market integration, and the resulting emergence of Europe as the prime vacation destination for well-heeled American tourists. The French/Italian/Spanish love for food and wine deeply influenced the boomer generation as a key component in our ideal of a good life. Widespread reporting of the French Paradox which seemed to show wine was part of a healthy lifestyle certainly helped cement wine as the beverage of choice.

This situation no longer exists for younger generations. Immigration patterns to the U.S. bring to our shores many people from cultures that lack a deep connection to wine. Vacation travel destinations are now global. Most importantly, our eating and dining habits have changed. We eat food from around the globe and some of it doesn’t pair especially well with wine. Even into the early 2000’s any discussion of fine cuisine began (and often ended) with French cooking. This is no longer the case. Most cuisines now aspire to the kind of refinement on which the French had a monopoly for centuries.

In short, the global focus has shifted away from Europe and its wine culture. (Even French young people are no longer drinking much wine).

This is the larger challenge that wine faces and it will take a lot more creativity from the wine industry than it has shown thus far if it is to meet that challenge.

As for encouraging wine to be more fun, well of course wine can be fun. But so can beer, spirits, and cocktails and it isn’t obvious that wine has greater capacity for fun than its competitors.

What wine does have, its comparative advantage, is nuance, variation, a strong connection to place, aging potential, and the ephemeral mysteries of wine’s mutations. Younger generations seem less interested in these because that supportive cultural capital that I mentioned above has been spent.

I think it is indeed the end of an era.