A Glass Against the Machine

There’s something tragicomic about the fact that wine consumption is declining just as we need it most. Here we are, deep in the decadent delirium of the 21st century, where a minor delay in food delivery constitutes a crisis, where even our pleasures are streamlined for maximum efficiency. And yet the drink that most resists such sterilized smoothness—the one that insists on patience, friction, variability—is slipping from view.

This is not just about wine. This is about what kind of life we’re living.

We’ve built a world where automation masquerades as freedom and frictionless convenience passes for luxury. But a life without resistance is not a human life. Humans are relational, situated, contingent creatures. Our dignity lies precisely in the unpredictability of our entanglements. Anyone who has tried to get a toddler dressed for school, or negotiate a dinner plan with their partner, knows this. Control is a fantasy. And wine does not play along.

Unlike so many domains of consumption, wine has stubbornly resisted tech’s overreach. The efforts to digitize, optimize, and commoditize wine—especially in Silicon Valley—have mostly fizzled. There’s just too much chaos built into it. Too many variables: vintage variation, vineyard microclimates, yeast behavior, barrel decisions, weather gods. No two years alike. No two bottles, really. It is maddening for systems engineers but comforting for humans.

Or at least those of us who remain human. Too many people think  that wine is just one item on the menu of inebriation. One night its MDMA, the next mezcal, some nights wine—it’s all the same. Just a buzz. This, to me, is like saying a Mozart quartet and a microwave jingle are both just audio experiences.

Wine means. It draws its meaning from soil and sun, from generational labor, from fermentation’s barely tamed wilderness. It is culture you can taste. A vineyard is not a factory. A bottle is not an algorithm. Even when industrialized, wine carries within it an echo of origin—those months the grapes spent slowly ripening, touched by breeze and frost, human hands and fungal spores.

Wine also fits. It fits the rhythms of a life lived with others. It’s a companion to food, and thus to conversation. It’s the punctuation mark to a day, the slow-down signal, the invitation to reflect. Spirits have their place, but most don’t even pretend to remember where they came from. Wine always does.

The vision of the good life that once lifted wine to its cultural pedestal—la dolce vita, the long lunch, the leisurely dinner, the table as theater of conviviality—has lost its grip on the contemporary imagination. Many young people today eat differently: alone, on the move, on screens. They have no ancestral connection to wine-soaked traditions, no inherited script for how to drink or why. And let’s face it; wine is complicated. It’s fussy, full of codes and shibboleths, haunted by the ghost of the sommelier who makes you feel like a fool. But even if the old rituals have unraveled, the underlying need hasn’t. We still crave a life with texture and connection, with pauses that mean something, with gestures that aren’t wholly instrumental. We still need to lead human lives. So the task now is to let wine speak not to nostalgia but to that aspiration—to reframe it not as a relic of another era’s elegance, but as a medium for reclaiming the embodied, relational, imperfect pleasures of being alive now.

What we need today is not another productivity hack or a dopamine drip of instant gratification. We need reminders of our mortality, our materiality, our mutuality. Wine—fickle, slow, place-bound—reminds us that good things take time, that enjoyment is not an optimization problem, that humanity is not reducible to code.

So here’s to the holdouts. To the vignerons, drinkers and late-night philosophers. May we drink more slowly, and remember more deeply, what it means to be human.