When you put a moose on your wine label, whose eye are you trying to catch? Why does a wine brand sponsor an outdoor music concert with acts like Coldplay and Wilco? What’s a popular disc jockey doing at the Zinfandel Advocates and Producers tasting? A new generation has taken centerstage: the Millennials–so-called because they came of age after 2000–are the new target for wine marketing. And according to a recent study by the Wine Market Council, the Millennials are responding, taking to wine in greater numbers and earlier in life than did Generation X or the Baby Boomers.
The fact of the matter is that all three generations are drinking more and more wine, which recently surpassed beer in popularity among Americans. What’s got the wine industry excited is that the latest generation is starting to appreciate wine at a younger age than did their predecessors. Boomers and GenXers both turned to wine a little later in life, albeit for different reasons. For example, I fall in the middle of Generation X, and very typically embraced beer (I lived in Seattle at the height of the Pacific Northwest’s microbrew “revolution;” how could I not?) as my drink of choice. It was only as I turned thirty that wine became an important part of my drinking habits.
The Millennials are a big group–100 million, compared to 44 million GenXers–and have lots of buying power; the public relations agency Ketchum puts it at $172 billion and expects it to rise dramatically as they move up in the workplace. The wine industry never really courted my generation, preferring to keep their focus on the bigger wallets of the Boomers. According to the Associated Press, the latter continue to be “the bulk of serious wine drinkers in the United States,” but today’s college grads are a force the industry can’t ignore.
Marketing consultants are falling over themselves trying to explain why Millennials like wine so much, often contradicting themselves. Some say the Millennials like to drink wine at parties instead of at sit-down meals; contrariwise, others say that what they really appreciate is how well wine goes with food. One consultant says alternative, even gimmicky packaging is the key to opening the purse-strings of the twenty-somethings; another counsels avoiding “slick advertising” in favor of the “unvarnished truth, voiced by everyday people.”
If you’re in the business of selling wine, perhaps these arguments mean something to you, but I think marketers get closer to reality with some other, less speculative points. Before I continue, a caveat: if you’re reading this, you’re probably a pretty established wine lover; you may read the next couple of paragraphs and say, “Whatever; this is just about big companies selling entry-level plonk.” Stay with me; there’s more going on here.
As a recent study regarding the location of Iraq showed, the Millennials are geographically ignorant. That’s disturbing from an educational point of view, but if you’re selling wine, it means you’ve got no regional prejudices to overcome. Wine imports are at an all-time high, and one reason is that these new wine drinkers are giving price point and varietal priority over geographic origin.
The Australians have been quick off the mark to take advantage of this change (I’m talking about you, Yellowtail), but South Africa, Italy, California, Argentina and every wine-producing country has the possibility of grabbing a piece of the pie. Even France, after a fashion: Gallo sent their marketing savvy abroad, and it came back with “Red Bicyclette,” an entry-level French wine that the company intends to develop into the best-selling imported French wine in the U.S.
Strip away geographical preferences, and you also pull the rug out from under a lot of traditional wine advertising: twenty-somethings respond more to so-called “lifestyle advertising” than to “winespeak.” That explains the DJs, the parties, and the “critter labels.” It explains wine names like Fat Bastard, Smoking Loon, and Twin Fin. Poetic ramblings about terroir, barrels, stone cellars, and aging don’t move this crowd. Richard Branson’s new vinous venture Virgin Vines playfully mocks wine terminology on their website; “complex” doesn’t refer to a wine at all, but instead is “a non-desirable trait in a partner. Usually leads to lots of serious talks and heart-wrenching debates.” Buy their Chardonnay; it’s “rebellious.”
The Millenials are also willing to experiment and try new wines. Instead of latching onto a single brand as a “house wine,” Millennials often go for a mixed case; 85% of those surveyed by the Wine Market Council said they regularly purchase a wine they’ve never seen before.
So lots of young people are swilling whatever wine is at hand, attracted to catchy labels and advertising that’s only tangentially related to what’s in the bottle. Here it comes: the ultimate dumbing-down of wine. Actually, the Wine Market Council study suggests that Millennials aren’t stuck on the cheap stuff, are comfortable spending a good chunk of change for a bottle when the occasion demands, and, more significantly, are eager and interested to learn more about wine; they just don’t feel obligated to do so before they can enjoy it.
I want to suggest that what we have here is: the first modern American generation that isn’t intimidated by wine. They like it, they drink it, they don’t worry about it. They’re not concerned about picking the wrong wine or being judged on their wine choice. They don’t choose a wine as a status symbol.
Did we worry about wine before? “Hearty Burgundy” and Californian Chablis were simple table wines; why did they need to leverage the great names of France to reach consumers? Orson Welles intoned, “We will sell no wine before its time” to reassure us that we wouldn’t be making a faux pas if we opened a bottle of Ernst and Julio’s latest without cellaring it for several years.
While I certainly believe that it is natural to develop an interest in the technicalities of wine–different oaks, soils, maceration times–I also think that we (as marketers and as consumers) sometimes turned to technical mumbo-jumbo as a tool to promote or defend our wine choices, to ourselves and to others: “It was aged exclusively in new French oak,” so it must be good. “It’s a single vineyard wine,” so it must be good. “We follow strict Burgundian techniques,” so it must be good (“Hearty Burgundy” all over again). Finally in the 90s, producers discovered the ultimate reassurance: the big ticket wine. How could it cost so much and not be fantastic? Still not sure? Watch me send the first bottle back (even if it seems fine), just to show you how discriminating my tastes are.
What a relief: finally, we are getting past all that and just popping the cork (or screwcap, actually) and enjoying our wine. Have we reduced wine to just another commodity in the process? Some wine, sure, but so what? In much of Europe, wine, like bread, has always been a commodity to one degree or another. In Alsace, for example, the everyday restaurants may not even mention the producer of their house wines on the menu; it simply reads, “Muscat, Pinot Blanc, Gewurztraminer, Tokay Pinot Gris, Riesling.” But there’s still a place for the great estates of Trimbach, Weinbach, Zind-Humbrecht, and many others. Having a national wine culture doesn’t mean that every citizen must strive to drink only the best and most exclusive of wines, know all the vagaries of terroir and climate, and keep careful track of the evolution of the past fifteen vintages. It means instead that wine is simply an accepted part of daily life.
Put whatever spin you like on it, this seems to be where the Millennials are headed–and the rest of us with them. Will they stay stuck on one type of wine, the fruit-forward style of the moment? Some may, just as there are Baby Boomers who cling forever to their White Zinfandel or Merlot (Sideways be damned, they say). But when it comes to wine, they’re already showing themselves more eager to learn, experiment, and explore than the preceding two generations, and that bodes well for vintages to come.
Jim Clarke is a freelance writer based in New York City. He serves as the Wine and Spirits Editor for the online magazine StarChefs and has written for the New York Times, Imbibe, Time Out New York, and other publications.