Editorial: Wine and young drinkers? They’ll be alright (probably)

There’s a persistent anxiety among wine commentators over 40: the fear that the under-40s simply aren’t interested in wine. Read a highbrow editorial or attend a tasting and you’ll hear it murmured, half in sorrow, half in irritation: “They just don’t get it.”

Sometimes this is voiced with genuine concern – what becomes of wine culture without fresh converts? More often, though, it slips into something less flattering: a faintly patronising disdain for those deemed insufficiently initiated into the finer points of terroir and typicity. It might reflect not so much care as a more private anxiety about losing cultural authority.

I’m not convinced wine and generational cohorts (Boomers vs Gen X vs Millennials vs Gen Z) are the issue they’re made out to be. Wine doesn’t care about birth certificates or supposed predetermined mindsets based on age. It responds to curiosity as much as anything. A 70-year-old with no interest in provenance will glance at a label and move on. A 25-year-old with an open mind might suddenly find that a Chenin Blanc or Shiraz speaks to them in ways Spotify, Netflix and TikTok never will. My pivotal moment was encountering Meerlust Red 1985 in my early 20s. If this was not quite grand enough for the Rubicon, then the property’s top label must be very fine indeed, I concluded. The fixation on age brackets as a predictor of tasting ability or willingness to engage with the subject is a category error – one that too many otherwise sensible wine people continue to make.

What I am prepared to concede is that in a world where anxiety levels have probably never been higher, drinkers may gravitate toward experiences that feel immediate, bright, and uncomplicated. Equally, the market has gone nuts with choice. Artisanal coffee, craft beer, and cocktails with playful names and emojis all compete for attention. Everyone, regardless of age, might reasonably want something a little more uplifting in the glass.

Wine, by contrast, can be messy. The drinking experience is shaped by ostensibly unfriendly things like acidity and tannin. Its beauty lies in imperfection: a dusty patch of vines, an awkward vintage, a bottle that smells slightly wrong before it comes right. That kind of unpredictability can feel alien – even faintly hostile – when the rest of life already feels chaotic enough.

However, I’m still not sure how this equates to a generational gap. Rather, it’s a cultural framing problem. What if nobody – least of all the young – is rejecting wine at all? What if they’re simply looking for experiences that feel alive and meaningful, rather than dutiful and instructional? When wine is at its best, it surprises, unsettles, seduces. It hints at a life less ordinary. Wine has always belonged to people who are open to being moved by flavour and story, to those willing to follow a thread of romance through a glass. Age is beside the point. What matters is temperament: a readiness for contradiction and a little glorious mess.

And yet the over-40 contingent too often interprets the absence of younger faces at traditional tastings and dinners as a crisis. “They’re not drinking, so the industry must be dying,” goes the refrain. This is concern cosplaying as stewardship. Obsessing over who is and isn’t showing up is really about our own unease with relevance and authority. Wine doesn’t need gatekeepers, and younger drinkers don’t need validation. They need room to explore, to be surprised, to form tastes without being told what counts as correct.

There is, I suppose, a lesson in this for producers and communicators, though it isn’t especially complicated. If you want to reach curious drinkers under 40, you need to meet them halfway: guide without lecturing, intrigue without pandering. Being told what to value rarely goes down well, and inherited ideas of prestige often sound more like habit than insight, especially when the big names are out of reach for all but the wealthiest. Wine isn’t just about where it comes from or who made it; it’s also about a willingness to try something unfamiliar. That impulse isn’t generational – check out any inner-city wine bar scene if you want evidence of this.

Yes, many might be gravitating toward things that are cleaner, sunnier, more immediately comprehensible. But that doesn’t make such consumers the problem. It simply challenges wine to show its best side: its capacity for pleasure, intrigue and enchantment. The people who will keep wine alive – whether they’re 25, 35 or 65 – are the ones who approach it with curiosity, who prefer diversity to uniformity, who are willing to entertain a little disorder in the glass. Wine rewards attentiveness, not conformity.

So let’s stop diagnosing generational divides and start talking about wonder. Wine belongs to anyone prepared to take a chance on it – on an unfamiliar grape, a slightly eccentric producer, a bottle that seems odd until it suddenly makes sense. Wine will do what it has always done: find its way to the openminded and free-spirited.

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