Equal Parts Story and Substance

BY BRENNA RITCHEY | SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

I read an article the other day that told me, in no uncertain terms, I was doing wine wrong.

It claimed that young people—especially millennials, who, if you have not heard, are single-handedly destroying Each and Every Industry—care less for wine than they do the narrative of it. They overvalue the story and undervalue the product. They believe what is in the glass is “good” only insofar as they know how it got there. And (these sweet, misguided souls!) they don’t know the difference between being captivated by wine, and wine that is genuinely captivating.

As a millennial (and a young one, at that—newly-legal, baby-faced, in the early stages of planning my disruption of the high-end wine industry), I think a lot about this supposed generational gap between older wine-drinkers and young people like myself. Millennials may be excited—in a wide-eyed, inexperienced kind of way, according to many—about the world of wine. But we’re also on track to become the largest fine wine consuming generation by 2026.* And young millennials—that is, the 21-to 26-year-old crowd to which I belong—well, 28 percent of us are drinking wine on a daily basis. And it’s not the syrupy White Zin our predecessors imaginatively bagged up, boxed, and stamped “delicious.”

I think there is something big—something almost subversive—about this new generation of wine drinkers and enthusiasts. We’re calling into question the ways in which the wine-drinking public has frequently used tradition, age, and “Old-Worldism” as tools of exclusion, of elitism. In response, we’re disrupting the industry, but doing so in ways that are actually rewriting the rules of the game, dismantling the very structures that have schooled us in how to drink and appreciate wine, and rebuilding them from the vineyard up. Ever-rebellious, we’ll put wine in cans. Or maybe kegs. And then growlers. We’ll embrace the screw-cap, and the belief that wine can (and perhaps should) be just as compelling as its vibrant, eye-catching label. We’ll trust our pallets over profligate price tags or 94-point ratings—even if our palates are defiantly whispering, rosé all day.

Because wine is not, and has never been, reducible to what’s in the glass. And so, most importantly, we’ll trust the story.