WILL WINE BE DUMPED LIKE AN OLD MAN INTO A TRASHCAN?
Apparently Wine is Not RTD
BY ALAN GOLDFARB
Sept. 20, 2024
The following thoughts are running though my brain as if in a pinball machine, whose theme is, Is It Really All Over Now, Baby Blue? That’s because I just finished reading my friend Tom Wark’s Fermentation discussion with the perceptive and studied journalist Erica Duecy, in which she pretty much sealed the deal on everything that we know about wine, is wrong. According to most of the trend-setting Gens of the last 20 years.
In summation, Duecy proclaims boldly and perhaps correctly, “Wine is in trouble, especially with younger audiences.” And wine is lacking sales points that Ready To Drink boast: “User-friendly formats, better price points, and a wider range of flavors.”
Therefore, I proclaim:
• Ninety-five percent of all wine produced is 95 percent RTD. No aging required (save perhaps by this alta drinker). Like the ones that come in cans or plastic (non-recyclable) bottles? Ms. Duecy, who I respect and even admire, also mentions pouches. Well, remember those bota bags like we used to drink wine out of? Like those were pouches.
• Of the aforementioned 95 percentile of wines, 95 percent have price points in the 6-to-15 dollar range. Like drinks that come in those aforementioned cans or not-good-for-the-earth bottles? Like.
• And wine comes in different flavors i.e. Cabernet, Pinot, Moscato or Muscat. Like, what’s that? You mean sweet, cloying fruit flavors like ick and eww? Like that?
(Incidentally, apparently not being the hip stirrer that I once was, I didn’t know what RTDs are. So, I looked it up. Ready To Drink or as in my case: Ready To Depart.)
As with the last point delineated above Erica posits, “Flavor is the No. 1 attribute younger audiences look for when deciding what to drink …” And adds that this younger demographic has concluded that wine is “too acidic, too sour, too bitter”. It’s kinda like many people’s notion of baseball. Those that don’t know much about it (always the tell) 95 percent of the time will declare: It’s too slow, too boring. Incidentally with football, which has far supplanted baseball, there are more actual stops to the action than in baseball. You can look that up.
Admittedly, these are just the meanderings, the grumblings and the judgy judgements of a guy who is so old, they’re yet to come up with a sobriquet such as: Gen SYBGBN or Shouldn’t You Be in the Grave By Now.
But what really got me right in the labonza is what Duecy said next: Wine “has lost much of its ‘coolness’ factor.”
Erica Duecy is most likely correct in everything she told Wark, but wine has lost its coolness?
Which is why I announce now: I think it’s all over for me now Baby Blue. Because the reason I switched from being a sportswriter all those years ago (being a dumb jock-adjacent chronicler was a thing back then) to wine writing (a thing 1981-2020), was precisely because I wanted to have my friends think I was cool. So, in the spirit of transparency: In all the years of being a wine journalist, I’ve never had a close friend who was into wine. That’s because all the friends I’ve held close, thought that wine was bougie. On a certain level, I’ve agreed with them.
But in the criterion of journalism, I’ve always known and reveled in the fact that wine is so much more than scores, astronomical prices and vanity. I’ve always approached it – as a journalist – as an agricultural story (grapes & soils), an historical story (various vintages tell a tale about from where we’ve come), a business story (wine business is a fraught, treacherous industry, like any other), and as a food story (how one enhances the other).
To cast wine aside as a feeble remnant of the past that may have outlived its usefulness, would be a damned shame. Wine doesn’t have to be expensive to be good; and is a nexus to a fuller, joyful life. Wine is a synapse to the fundamental tenants of human existence.
By eschewing its pleasures, its exigencies, its importance by subsequent generations younger than myself, is shoveling me and you toward irrelevancy. Like, I’m so disheartened by that. It makes me feel like an old man dumped in a trashcan. Like, kinda, sorta.