Tag Archives: Millennials and wine

Millennials and how they’re changing the wine business

Or, as my pal W.R. Tish phrased it in the headline for my story in Beverage Media magazine: ?Boom go the Millennials ?.

The wine business has mostly accepted that the Millennials, born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, are here to stay; I hardly hear any grumbling about parent ?s basements anymore. And, as John Gillespie, the president of the Wine Market Council has said many times, anyone who doesn ?t pay attention does so at their own peril.

The story is here. Some of the highlights after the jump:

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Millennials and the confidence of the palate

Wine Market Council 2012 report

Confidence is one thing, but that 71 percent number is something else entirely.

Dear Millennials:

Almost no one who writes about wine respects you as much as I do ? in fact, I ?m in the middle of a trade magazine story detailing the massive changes you ?ll bring to the wine business.

But even I had to giggle when the new Wine Market Council study reported that 7 out of 10 of you who drink wine at least once a week said you could ?correctly differentiate a glass of merlot from a glass of cabernet sauvignon. ?

That ?s saying a lot. For one thing, the two wines can taste quite similar, especially given that one goal of post-modern winemaking is to eliminate the qualities that make them different. For another, I often have trouble telling the difference between cabernet and merlot — and I ?ve been drinking wine for a long time.

In this, I ?d love to do a blind tasting ? for money, of course, because I have all these expenses ? to see if you can really do it. I ?d enjoy being proved wrong, though I doubt that would happen. It ?s one thing to wax poetic about wine at the dinner table with your friends, and something altogether different when a bunch of people are waiting for you to demonstrate the acuity of your palate.

Yet, having said all this, I ?m quite impressed that so many of you are so confident about wine. It ?s not something that we ?ve always seen in the past from younger wine drinkers, who are usually more worried about using a corkscrew than about what the wine tastes like. No doubt this is yet another way in which you ?ll change the wine business. I guess I need to figure out to work that into my story.

Winebits 189: Wine and bikes, millennials and wine, wine criticism

? Safe and secure: Because there is no way I can describe this in words:

? Wine with friends: Yes, millennials are unique because some of them like to drink wine with friends. This is the one of the findings in a study from California researchers looking at how millennial wine consumption is different from the rest of us. And, as the author, noted, it really isn’t (though she desperately tries to find some difference). The age group born after 1982 or so drinks the most wine at special occasions and eating at a formal restaurant. The study will no doubt make my pal Tom Johnson at Louisville Juice fire off yet another of his eye-rolling millennial missives. And I’d have to agree with him.

? What do critics want? To like the wine they drink, of course. This is quite well expressed by the Israeli writer Daniel Rogov, who is known as that country’s Wine Curmudgeon (something we have had a giggle about). “A great many may not realize it,” he writes, “but writing a negative review pains the critic. The simple truth is that that bad or mediocre wines have a deep emotional impact for the critic, who lives for the day when he can be entirely positive.” This, I think, is the difference between honest criticism and what passes for criticism these days, and especially on the Internet. The goal is to write truly (to paraphrase Hemingway). Too, many, though, prefer snarky, since they think it makes them look clever.