In case you haven’t heard the bad news, wine is in trouble. Not necessarily the weather-ravaged vineyards or the climate-anxious growers—though they have their problems—but the entire culture of wine appreciation. People are drinking less of it. Younger generations are turning to spirits, canned cocktails, hard seltzers, or skipping alcohol altogether. Wine, once the life of the aesthetic party, is in danger of becoming… just another beverage.
This cultural drift raises an urgent and surprisingly philosophical question: can wine be a form of art? Because if it can, that changes everything about how we should relate to it—and might offer a path forward for keeping wine relevant.
One of the most striking developments in the art world over the last 150 years is how wildly the boundaries of “art” have expanded. No longer confined to oil paintings and marble torsos, the art world has embraced everything from jazz to performance art, graffiti to video installations, found objects to entire environments. The Museum of Modern Art in New York once put a Jaguar XKE roadster on display—not just as industrial design, but as a work of art. (A decision that makes slightly more sense if you’ve ever seen one in motion, preferably while listening to Miles Davis.)
Art is no longer defined by a particular kind of object, but by the kind of experience it affords. It’s not what you’re looking at but how you’re engaging with it that matters. If art is about offering aesthetic experiences that move us, disturb us, delight us, or provoke reflection, then wine more than qualifies. Because let’s face it—no one is writing tasting notes about vodka.
Some will insist that wine’s primary function is intoxication. But if getting drunk were the goal, wine is hilariously inefficient. It’s expensive, slow, and often consumed in tiny pours. You want intoxication? There are faster, cheaper ways to get there that don’t involve arguing over terroir. The buzz from wine isn’t the point—it’s part of the ambience. Like candlelight, or a well-chosen playlist, it opens the door to perception rather than bulldozing it.
That slight Dionysian blur, historically speaking, has often been part of aesthetic appreciation. Art history is full of references to ecstasy, rapture, and altered states. If we’ve come to believe that art must be appreciated stone-cold sober, we’ve lost something essential—not just about art, but about the way it moves through life.
So what’s at stake in calling wine a form of art? Quite a bit. Art has a future because it constantly renews itself. It reinvents form, questions tradition, surprises its audience. We don’t expect painting or music to ever be “finished” as cultural forms. But can we say the same of wine? If wine is merely a commodity—if we reduce it to flavor profiles and price points—it risks stagnation. Like orange juice. Or shelf-stable guacamole.
But if wine is an art, then its future is wide open. New grapes, new places, new styles, new provocations—wine becomes a medium for expressive innovation. It invites curiosity, discernment, and imagination.
So no doubt, wine is an everyday object. But it’s also a vehicle for aesthetic experience. And like all great art, it rewards the attention you give it. If we want wine to thrive in the decades ahead, we have to stop treating it like a mere drink and start treating it like the beautifully unruly art form it already is.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 