Gen Z to Wine: Please Stop Condescending to Us

A response to Wine Spectator's—and the industry's—hand-wringing over young people and their wine-drinking habits.

How the industry views Gen Z. (Photo: Stefano Guidi/Getty Images)

Today, we’re introducing Caroline Lamb as a new contributor to Everyday Drinking. Caroline is a wine professional based in Detroit, who works in distribution, contributes regularly to the Business of Drinks podcast, and writes about wine and culture at The Enjoyer.

---

At twenty years old, I bought a one way ticket to Madrid on a budget that had absolutely no business getting me to Europe in the first place. I slept in the most basic youth hostels, crossed international borders in strangers’ cars, and ate (mostly) whatever was local and cheap. Yet, somehow, I always found the money for wine. I took tours in Rioja with old British holiday goers, drank classified Bordeaux, and smuggled a bottle of birth year Tokaji home in my 40L sac. I was waiting tables at the time and had just fallen in love with wine. When reading about wine failed to satiate, I could not help myself from diving headfirst into wine as a cultural experience. I’m 29 now and those early days of discovery eventually led me to many more unlikely places, more obscure wines, and taught me more about history, geography, agriculture, and humanity than my formal education ever did.

I don’t tell this story because I think I’m special. I tell it because I know I’m not. And also because, last week, Wine Spectator published a piece suggesting that people my age are too intimidated by the big, scary world of wine, entitled “Are We Winning the Wine War (Gen) Z?” The piece, by senior editor Alison Napjus, argues that wine is too “elitist.” She writes:

Novice wine drinkers feel like wine is a club to which they’ll never know enough to gain entry. Rather than try, many younger consumers are bypassing the club altogether and moving on to other options. And these days, there are many alternatives: cocktails, beer, cannabis products and/or embracing the sober movement.

Napjus argues that the industry’s job is to lower the intimidation factor. This is not a new idea. The wine industry has been trying to demystify itself for years—stripping information off labels, swapping tasting notes for infographics, and the endless content teaching people how to order “confidently” or “correctly” pair their Trader Joe’s wine with their favorite snack food.

First of all, let’s note the rich irony of Wine Spectator complaining about wine’s “elitism,” considering its own role in whatever wine culture exists today. But more than that, I’d argue this idea that wine needs to be dumbed down is more condescending than any of the exclusivity it claims to be fighting. Embedded in the entire demystification agenda is an unspoken assumption: That young people need wine to be easier because they can’t handle complexity, aspiration, or even a simple conversation with a sommelier, that the only way to engage young people is to meet them at the bottom rather than invite them up.

When you search “Gen Z and wine” on Getty Images. (Photo: Max Cisotti/Dave Benett)

I have spent my entire adult life working in wine—in restaurants, at wineries, in distribution, in the media—and I do not recognize the young consumer Napjus is describing. Not in myself, not in the people I know, and not even in the data she buries in her own piece.

Let’s start there. Frankly, the elitism framing is just lazy—a tired recitation of wine culture’s snobby past. The real barrier is economic. Wine is expensive to experiment with on the average young person’s income in the age of inflation, tariffs, crushing housing costs, and student debt that undermines discretionary spending in ways previous generations simply didn’t face. That is a fundamentally different problem than intimidation, and conflating them leads the industry exactly where it keeps ending up: Apologizing for wine’s depth to people whose real problem isn’t that wine is too elitist—it’s that it’s too expensive to gamble on.

Napjus cites research showing that Gen Z spends the same percentage of their income on wine as previous generations. But she immediately pivots away from that fact, worrying more about volume than value and treating it as thin consolation rather than the remarkable finding it is. The young people who love wine are spending on wine at exactly the rate you’d hope. The data shows us just how much Gen Z is and will continue to engage with wine as their spending power grows. That is not a category in crisis, but a category with an attention problem the industry refuses to see clearly.

The engaged young wine consumer is not a myth the industry needs to manufacture. They already exist all around you. I think of my friend Kaira—a mid-twenties corporate attorney who runs a monthly wine club, organizes trips to wine regions with her friends, and writes about wine on Instagram and Substack just because she loves it. She has never worked in the industry and doesn’t plan to. She came to wine the way most passionate drinkers do: through someone who loved it first—in her case, her mother. According to NielsenIQ, 28 percent of Gen Z say they consider the opinions and suggestions of family and friends when making a beverage alcohol purchase, outweighing all other factors including social media influence. Kaira is that person for at least twenty of her peers. She is doing the industry’s most important work for free, and the industry completely ignores people like her. They’re too busy strategizing about people who never think about wine.

Napjus actually meets this consumer in her piece. Her own stepdaughter, she mentions, is pursuing a WSET Level 3 certification—a credential that takes real commitment and would impress most people who work in the trade. And yet she treats her as a footnote, a “thin straw,” before moving on to worry about the other young people in her family “none of whom regularly consume wine.”

But let’s do the math Napjus didn’t. Of the young people in her immediate family, one in four is not just drinking wine—she is pursuing a professional certificate. One in four. If 25 percent of a generation is genuinely obsessed with your product, you do not have a demand problem. The industry is so busy grieving the 75 percent that it cannot see the tens of millions of people already evangelizing for it for free. That’s why its answer, every single time, is to demystify wine and make it simpler. As if the path to winning the 75 percent who don’t care is to bore the 25 percent who do.

(Photo: Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images)

For those in my generation who naturally gravitate toward wine, depth is the draw, not the deterrent. In my work for Business of Drinks, I report on drinks brands that are resonating with younger consumers. That’s led me to follow the digital attention of my generation across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Discord.

Take Pilar Brito, for example. In my interview with her last year she shared that her audience exploded when she started making content targeted to young professionals who wanted to feel confident with a wine list at, say, a high-stakes business dinner. She framed wine as an expression of personal taste, as inseparable from your style in fashion or interior design. Her audience demographics tell us this approach draws the attention of Gen Z and Millennials: 42 percent of her audience is 25-34, 31 percent is 35-44, and perhaps most impressively 10 percent are 18-24. In a world where we can learn anything from YouTube or ChatGPT, giving young people a reason to care and a representation of how wine fits into a rich, expressive life is the path forward. Pilar proves the alternative: she challenged the demystification trend and attention followed.

I shared the Wine Spectator piece with my friend Seb, a 29-year-old non-industry wine enthusiast in England who I met in a fairly geeky wine discord channel. I wanted to see if any of it resonated from across the Atlantic. He said, “The same people who buy organic veg, rare cheeses, and heirloom tomatoes at farmers markets should be all over wine.” He’s right. Wine’s natural audience—curious, taste-driven, willing to spend real money on something of real quality—is already out there. The industry just keeps looking past them toward people who don’t care about wine, haven’t shown up, and likely never will.

Which brings me to the thing Napjus frames as a warning sign but to me looks like an opportunity for progress. She notes that her stepdaughter would rather share one $150 bottle of Barolo with friends than buy three cheaper bottles—and treats this as evidence of decline. Let’s be clear, this is only bad news if you are a mass producer of bulk wine. For quality-minded producers, a generation that buys less but buys better is not a crisis. It is only a threat to big brands that are propped up by pay-to-play schemes at the distributor tier that artificially inflate demand, all thanks to the system that lingers from the boomer gold rush of California wine in the 1990s. Gen Z is simply editing out exactly what the demystification crowd keeps trying to protect.

Napjus ends her piece by acknowledging that it’s hard to think outside the box from inside the wine industry. I’d suggest the box isn’t the problem—the assumption that the box needs to be dismantled is. The young wine drinker the industry keeps searching for is not waiting to be recruited by a friendlier label or a less intimidating tasting note. We’re already at the wine bar, two glasses into something we researched before we arrived, building a cellar on a non-existent budget, planning our next trip to a region we read about somewhere the industry isn’t looking.

In a world that has demanded constant optimization and digital connection for our entire lives, we are coming to wine for exactly what it uniquely offers: the chance for discovery, connection, and something tangible and deeply human that no algorithm can replicate. We do not need it stripped of everything that makes it so beautiful. We need the industry to stop condescending to us and start paying attention to what we’re already doing.