Why don’t younger people drink wine? Because it’s not on the cooking shows they watch

The Baby Boomers had Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, but the You Tubers popular with Gen X and the Millennials don’t bother with wine

The Wine Curmudgeon has solved wine’s most vexing problem – why younger people don’t drink wine. The reason? Their cooking shows don’t feature it the way the Baby Boomer cooking shows did. Hence, the youngest generations have never learned that wine is just as much a part of dinner as plates and letting the pots soak.

Don’t look so surprised. Yes, there are other reasons – wine’s complexity, its cost, and the country’s emerging neo-Prohibitionism. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the peaks of the U.S. wine boom, first in the 1970s and early 1980s and then in the 1990s, happened at the same time as wine-savvy cooking shows became a fixture on PBS.

Julia Child served wine with her meals, even though in those long ago days it was called things like Mountain Red. So did Jacques Pepin. So did Lidia Bastianich. So did Justin Wilson. So did Ina Garten, even though she never seemed to much care about it. In fact, wine was such a part of these shows that Julia Child contemporary Graham Kerr used it as shtick.

But the people who cook for today’s generations – many quite talented – rarely have alcohol anywhere in the kitchen, even to cook with. Frankie Celenza? Nope. Molly Yeh? Nope. Alison Roman? Cider maybe, but nary a glass of wine.

In fact, I’ve pitched several of them about adding wine to their shows. What better for their straightforward, cost-conscious recipes than the Wine Curmudgeon’s straightforward, cost-conscious wine advice? Alison, pal, I know just the $10 wine for your Internet-famous chickpea stew.

Never heard back from anyone. Which, I suppose, is understandable. Once you’ve experienced Alvin Zhou’s 30-pound Oreo, what does wine matter?

Pepin has said wine was crucial to what he was trying to do, that it was important to introduce U.S. viewers to the joys of wine and food. He also thought it was important to point out that wine doesn’t have to be expensive: “I am not a snob about wine, you know. I usually buy a bottle under $10 or whatever, if you know what to buy.”

My guess is that this change started 20 years ago, more or less around the time America’s Test Kitchen became popular. Its format rarely includes wine, and former host Christopher Kimball told me wine was entirely too hard. Instead, it focused on more “practical” matters, where wine advice wasn’t seen as helpful to its audience as finding the best saute pan or the best supermarket chocolate chips.

Which, frankly, is the younger generations’ loss. Wine is a lot of fun; just strip away the snobbery and the cost. That’s what this $8 rose was invented for. Anyone who appreciates a 30-pound Oreo should appreciate that.