Last week on the eve of my 19 year-old daughter’s departure for university, the last of our three children to leave, we shared wine over Korean barbecue. To hear some industry commentary on wine’s future, you’d think that a young person drinking wine was the most memorable aspect of this milestone family dinner.
The wine world has been in a flap since the publication in January of Silicon Valley Bank’s annual State of the U.S. Wine Industry report for 2024. It showed that wine sales in the US fell three per cent last year, the third fall in a row. Worse, the report’s polling found that only 16 per cent of drinkers aged 21-34 said wine was the drink they were most likely to take to a party. In the latest of a steady stream of stories in this vein, last week the Guardian reported that only a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds own a corkscrew (fourth-fifths of over-65s do.)
Some commentators have blamed the focus of Generation Z (those born between 1996 and 2010) on wellness and healthy living. A 2023 Gallup poll found that in the UK, nearly a third of those aged 18-24 don’t drink alcohol at all, up from 18 per cent in 2011. The number of young teetotallers is growing in the US, France and Germany too.
And especially in the US, alcohol has serious competition from cannabis, now legal for recreational use in almost half of US states. Statistics suggest that over a quarter
