Will AI Generate the Rebirth of Wine Traditions?

In her article “Why Doesn’t Anyone Want to Make French Wine Anymore,” Josephine de La Bruyère chronicles the plight of French winemakers, many of whom hail from families with centuries-old ties to the land. Half of them will retire in the next 10 years and their children are not keen on continuing the family tradition.

The reasons  are obvious and some are not specific to France. Winemaking is hard work and with demand slumping, especially for the rustic styles of affordable Bordeaux, it will be increasingly hard to make a decent living making wine, especially when you factor in drought, hail, and wildfires that have threatened the region recently, not to mention the U.S. tariffs that will further reduce demand. As she writes:

…its human cost is radical disruption to a region’s way of life. Winemakers are staring down the end of their centuries-old tradition….Winemakers mutter darkly about French youths’ growing affinity for tapas and happy hours and finger food—all international imports, elders say, that splinter the tradition of family around the dinner table, pairing cheese, meat, and red wine.

But what struck me was the ferocity of those who are choosing to continue the winemaking tradition. The article focuses on Armelle Cruse Falcy, the fourth-generation owner of Château du Taillan and daughter Tatiana who has decided to buck the trend and continue the family tradition of making wine:

The worse it goes for us, for wine, for Bordeaux, the more I want to work for this cause,” she said. “Here we have something more than marketing: ancestral savoir faire, tradition, prehistory. And I don’t think tradition should be thrown in the trash.”

Her two sisters and 10 cousins are part owners but want no part of running the operation. They work in the city of Bordeaux,  London, and Paris “in finance, fashion, and hospitality.”

Le Grix de la Salle, who runs Château Le Grand Verdu’s vineyard is equally trenchant:

Is succeeding in life having 10 apartments and four beautiful cars and eating in five-star hotels? I don’t know. My model is humility, simplicity, passion, heritage, and knowing how to be happy with that, being happy just to pass down what we’ve received. What did I do in my life? I received and I handed down the family property. That has inestimable value.

One might think this rousing, compelling defense of ties to the land and the artisanal craft of winemaking is unrealistic and nostalgic in its reverence for a world rapidly disappearing. But there is wisdom in their quixotic courage.

If the predictions of even the least prone-to-hype prognosticators are true, generative AI is about to replace many of those jobs in fields such as “finance, fashion, and hospitality”—especially jobs that rely on routine communication, pattern recognition,  data analysis, and coding. The kind of work that once signaled upward mobility, cosmopolitan sophistication, and “future-proof” careers now stands on shaky ground.

But here’s the paradox: in a world increasingly automated, the very things that resist automation begin to glow with new significance. Artisan and craft work—now treated as anachronism or a passion project—may come to represent something vital: a form of labor in which the human is not a flaw in the system but the whole point.

In such work, efficiency is not particularly relevant. A handmade object, a carefully tended vineyard, a loaf of bread shaped by hand—these are not optimized outputs. They are repositories of time, care, and embedded knowledge. They bear the trace of the maker’s gesture, the decisions made under changing skies, the material constraints negotiated with skill and intuition. They are, in a word, irreplaceable by a machine. Even if a machine could do the work, what would be the point?

So perhaps we are not seeing the end of wine traditions, but their transfiguration. As more of life migrates into the algorithmic ether, the crafts that anchor us to place, to rhythm, to the sensorium of the real may become not only meaningful but necessary. Not just for the economy, but for the soul.

And if that sounds romantic—good. We will need a bit of romance to resist the seductions of the machine.