Our last piece (Part II) ended with a very telling question. It is based on different patterns of the populace and tries to predict the behavior of the generation that grew up with the internet, cell phones, more ‘less traditional’ households, and, now, the dawn of virtual reality and Wingstop. While we can only predict with limited accuracy (if we were really able to predict that stuff, people would pay us money), there are some reasonable basis for hypothesis.
One is that ‘entertainment’ happens more outside the home in casual restaurants, gastro pubs, pizza places, et al. Clubs, cocktails, and craft beers are much more ingrained in the culture. Entertainment options are at historic highs (since now you’ve added virtual reality to plain old reality), as are the dining choices. A generation of immigrants (we do not make presumptions about anyone’s status), mostly not from Europe, have brought their food traditions with them. There’s an amazing array of cuisines from South and Central America, Asia and the Pacific Rim. Mexican cuisine, longtime staples in California, has countless more regional examples.
In places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, there is a dizzying array of food choices. All kinds of folks are eating all kinds of different foods. The thing is, and we say this in the most objective way possible, the majority of this new, expanded ‘food scene’ are from places with no ingrained wine culture. We interpret that as a potential problem from the standpoint of the learning curve. Everybody who ultimately gets ‘serious’ about wine has an experience or two that tickle the imagination, that motivates them to follow the path.
The typically bustling, high-decibel eating environments of today don’t necessarily support the quiet contemplation of your beverage. Sometimes you can’t even hear the person across from you, let alone talk about the wine. The energy of such a room is part of the experience, but the odds of randomly discovering wine is reduced by the fact there us so much other stimulus. In most Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, or Indian eateries, if there is a wine ‘program’ at all, it’s usually a small list of ordinary, very commercial bottles selected by a distributor rep without necessarily any regard to the cuisine but rather what they are supposed to sell. Often times the restaurateurs themselves don’t care. Beer is easier (though less so today with the craft explosion).
A lot more people eat at these types of restaurants as a percentage than three decades ago. Heck the extent and diversity of cultural food options really didn’t exist back then, and the ones that did were an occasional novelty for the typical family. The key point is that the expansive landscape of more ethnic fare will provide fewer opportunities percentage-wise for people who have yet to have that ‘definitive’ wine experience.
One would think that there would be more avenues than ever where someone might stumble into wine. But that’s not necessarily the case in today’s world. We old-timers learned by tasting, reading, and finding a few folks to talk to in a wine store. Since all the prices were fixed back in the 70s, a standard wine venue could support itself by carrying ‘the hits’ and a lot more options that grocery stores did not. When price fixing went away, so did a lot of those types of venues because they couldn’t adjust to the new reality. Fast forward today and buying patterns have changed (at least in California) because of the market shifting to a different group of venues that provided convenience and price advantages.
People today are a lot more harried. They will shop ‘specialized’ for big purchases, but most would like to take care of the day-to-day stuff in as few stops as possible. So they are less likely to make the extra trip for wine when they can find something palatable in the now-somewhat-expanded grocery store selection or ‘big box’ set. Are they interested in trying something new? Maybe, but there is little information on the shelves in such places save for an occasional point score from some publication that they may or may not know. It’s not likely there is anyone that can answer even the simplest of questions, either.
Big box stores? There’s a modest selection of ‘the hits’ and no one that knows anything on the floor. So unless you know what you are looking for, you’re flying blind and likely to just buy the same old things. Is just buying the same old thing wrong? Not for a lot of people. But even if you have the desire and motivation to expand your horizons you might need a little help. In such venues, if there even is anyone ‘working the floor’ (which is rare), it’s usually some supplier rep with an agenda to sell their own stuff.
The wine store of old is generally gone, replaced by more hybridized versions that have passionate buyers and innovative selections. The problem is that most aren’t going to have many of those old familiar favorites for you to fall back on because ‘big brand’ giveaways by grocers and big box stores have made these brands untenable even to carry for convenience. So basically to make that extra trip, you have to have made the decision that you want to get out of the ‘rut’ and get into wine. That’s a big commitment for most people.
What about those alcoholic beverage chain stores that advertise they have ‘experts’ on the floor to help you? Good luck with that. The term ‘experts’ is tossed around rather loosely, and most of them are only trained to move you into that high margin ‘store brand’.
Restaurant-by-the-glass programs should offer the best opportunity to learn. But there are a host of problems. In a busy, noisy restaurant, the likelihood of being able to talk to someone who actually can spend the time to help you and knows the wine is small (though they are out there). Plus, as we have mentioned in other pieces, you don’t know if the wine you’re tasting is representative of the genre it represents if you don’t already know the genre. Moreover, given the generally marginal condition of most ‘back bar’ wines, where you have no idea how long that particular bottle has been open, you don’t really know if the juice in your glass is even representative of that wine. Given that, it is fairly remarkable how much energy wineries put into wine-by-the- glass offers since they have little idea what the customer is actually drinking. They could be turning off potential wine drinkers to their brand or wine in general with some half-dead white or decrepit red.
As for experimenting with wine list at restaurant, where you see them open the bottle, you can learn that way provided it’s an eatery with a more enlightened yet still consumer friendly list. It’s no easy task to find one of those, and the learning curve will be the most expensive of any. This of course also presumes the person running the wine program is actually concerned about the diners themselves and doesn’t have some sort of personal agenda.
There are suggestions of forming tasting groups where a bunch of people all learn together. They work, but they are at least step B or C. At that point you have already gone to the next level of interest and aren’t a novice any more. The same goes with wine education classes. The passionate will find a way. Our point is that the person who might potentially be interested in learning more will have a much harder time in today’s market stumbling onto that formative ‘aha’ moment that will give him/her the fire. More to the issue, those who might have it may never find out they do because, under a wide range of scenarios, the situation may never present itself.
The ‘next generation’ of wine drinkers, whoever they might be, will have the most to do with how the next couple of decades play out for the wine industry in general. They are likely to be more open to wine as a beverage choice than any generation to date, but less likely to go far beyond that (other than the occasional tech millionaire who wants to fill the wine cellar in the mansion he just bought). As the prices of better bottles get to be more expensive, and the range of beverage choices competing for the consumer dollar continues to expand, wine geekdom will likely be even more ‘the road less followed’.
Pricing, marketing, global warming, is it the ‘juice’ or the ‘show’? We’ll take a swing at that stuff in a couple of weeks…
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