One thing we all have to careful about, if we care about what’s true, is that we avoid endorsing a point of view only because it confirms our prior beliefs. Confirmation bias is an existential threat to clear thinking.
But while reading Jim Silver’s recent contribution on Substack, it was really hard to resist that tendency. I really want his thesis to be true partly because I’ve written extensively over the years about how what I call the “production paradigm” undermines good taste as well as the pursuit of a good life. But also because, if his thesis is true, there is a clear path to getting wine back on its feet again.
Silver’s thesis can be summarized this way: Wine was under pressure to compete in a business world thoroughly captured by the ideology of perpetual growth. The result is that wine became too standardized and de-humanized, what he calls a loss of texture, as platforms and metrics replace living, breathing, wine lovers as interlocutors. Stories became content, relationships became data, loyalty became behavior, and emotional response became “consumer sentiment.” As he writes:
When you manage wine primarily through what can be measured quickly, you tend to favor what behaves predictably. Styles narrow. Risks dispelled. Difference becomes something to manage and flatten, rather than explore. This is why people like me, and probably you, I’d imagine, find very little (wine) to buy at the grocery store. What’s often described as wine’s decline feels to me more like a loss of texture. Erosion of people’s outright interest in wine.
I certainly cannot disagree about the baleful effects of standardization and homogenization. It is, and has long been, the greatest threat to the wine industry. When wine becomes a commodity because it all tastes the same, and people stop believing the marketing “stories” that are supposed to differentiate brands, it’s just a race to the bottom.
But is homogenization and standardized ways of thinking and talking about wine really the cause of the current slump in sales?
At the supermarket during wines’ heyday in the 2000s, homogenization and standardization were every bit as problematic as they are today. But if you wanted good, distinctive wine it was easy to find outside the grocery store. And that remains true today. There is a lot of good wine around (although tariffs are an obstacle) and it’s easy to find. Retail sameness can be real while category diversity overall (import channels, DTC, small distributors, online shops) is simultaneously higher than ever.
Furthermore, we know that younger consumers are strained by the cost of living and are resisting the luxury pricing, called “ premiumization, “that was supposed to save the wine industry a few years back.
And we know that the abstinence curious and the “dry January” ecosystem following the renewed intensity of public-health warnings about alcohol are part of the environment wine is operating in, regardless of whether grocery shelves are filled with indistinguishable plonk.
I suspect also that the lifestyle markers that supported wine consumption in the past–European-style diets and a Eurocentric conception of the good lif–are under substantial change.
Silver’s preferred remedy—more human translation, more people “willing to stand next to it” and make wine meaningful again—has an obvious appeal. But the rebuttal is that those human intermediaries historically also created intimidation, insider codes, and snobbery (sometimes benevolent, often not). Replacing them with shelf tags and scores may flatten the experience, but it also lowered the entry barrier for millions of ordinary drinkers.
I don’t want to deny the “loss of texture” Silver discusses. But I doubt that the growth ideology alone explains the steady decline in wine sales since the pandemic—and I doubt whether the human-rich alternative can be rebuilt at scale without making wine even more expensive.
Look at what’s happened to the tasting-room experience: fees have risen sharply over the last decade, walk-in hospitality has declined, and wineries are squeezed into extracting more of your cash per visit. In that world, calling for a renaissance of patient, knowledgeable, non-salesy mediation sounds like calling for a return of the mid-20th century neighborhood butcher: ethically moving perhaps, but economically complicated.
So I want his thesis to be true; maybe it contributes at the margins; but there is more going on than the same old bugaboo of homogenization.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 