Fine Wine doesn’t compete with beer, it competes with Taylor Swift

Opinion Piece

Market turmoil forces clarity. In every disrupted industry, the choices narrow: innovate, pivot, retreat or close. The wine industry is no exception.

I sat with a question for months that I didn't particularly enjoy sitting with: why would I continue making wine in a market that is contracting? I love what I do with a depth that is difficult to explain to anyone outside this world. But love is not a business model, and I am not interested in paying people to drink my wine.

The numbers tell a familiar story.  People are drinking less. Sober curiosity is real, moderation is real, and the cultural moment has shifted. But here is what the hand-wringing misses: when people are drinking, they are drinking better and more intentionally. The questions I hear most often are not about vintages or varietals. They are about what is actually in the bottle. Are there additives? How can I tell? Consumers are not abandoning wine. They are becoming more intentional about what they drink.  Young people do like wine, most can’t afford it.

I started thinking about live sports. You can watch the San Francisco 49ers in pristine high definition from your couch. The beer is cheaper. The bathroom lines are shorter.  Yet fans pay tens of thousands for season tickets. They sit in traffic and spend thirty dollars to park.

The same question applies to Taylor Swift. Her music is available everywhere, for almost nothing, anytime you want it. And yet her tours gross billions of dollars, with fans spending thousands for a single night. One of my friends traveled to three continents to see her perform.

Why?  Because presence is not the same as access. There is an energy and excitement about being there in person, being one of the few, the camaraderie, the memory.  I still remember Joe Montana under 2 minutes pass to victory, throwing the football with my brother before games at Candlestick park, and AC/DC at my first Day on the Green.  The experience creates the memories and that is point.

That is what a lifetime of experience had told me wine actually is at its best.

Not as a beverage. Not a consumer product moving through a three-tier distribution system. Wine at its finest is not a commodity. It is a live performance. It is the once in a life time in the moment kind of thing.  A great bottle opened with intention, often at real cost, for people who matter, creates the kind of memory that does not fade. The memory is more distinct the rarer the wine.  I know exactly where I was when someone opened a 1929 La Tache. The expense is part of it. Even the slight ache of opening something irreplaceable is part of it. These are the bottles people remember twenty years later. Not because the wine was technically perfect, but because it was opened and you were there.

I still remember a cold gray day at Château Haut-Brion. I was twenty years old, studying in Bordeaux by accident. I was supposed to go to Paris for my junior year abroad, but ended up in Bordeaux instead. A mistake that altered my life. The winemaker who guided me that day, the famous Mr. Delmas, seemed less than thrilled to host someone with no wine knowledge. But something about that tasting, that grey day, the cold room, the smell of the barrel room, that reluctant host, the gravity of the wine itself, changed the direction of my life. Not because I understood what I was drinking. I didn't. But because I felt something in that room that stayed with me.

I have loved wine since I was twenty years old, but the love has never been about pretentious tasting notes or trade journals. It has been about what happens when a bottle is opened at a table. What I have watched over forty years is wine's extraordinary power to create connection. Wine has taken me into rooms I never would have entered otherwise, from Broadway backstage to West Point on the twentieth anniversary of September 11. It has connected me to mentors, CEOs, executives, pro athletes and, more importantly, to families marking weddings, birthdays and memorials with wine I made. 

I now know that opening an exquisite bottle of wine is a great act of generosity. Once opened, that bottle is gone and likely cannot be replaced if rare and and old. That irreplaceability is core to making the moment matter.

Forty years and thousands of experience have shown me wine is a powerful way to bring people together.  The power of wine in building community goes back to antiquity, the Greeks believed wine increased financial well being and creativity.  We are suffering from a pandemic of loneliness, why can’t wine be part of the solution for bring people back together and building community?

If people are drinking less, which many are, then every occasion that calls for something special becomes more significant, not less. The opportunity is not to sell more bottles. The opportunity is to make each bottle matter more.

The wine industry has a demand problem. It also has an imagination problem. We have been selling wine as if it competes with other beverages, as if the question is whether someone chooses wine over beer or cocktails or over cannabis-infused beverages on a Tuesday night.   We are selling wines by points and focus on tannins and descriptors that most people can not relate to. One commoditizes wines and the other alienates people from buying it.  The industry of fine wines needs to redefine its competition.

Exquisite wines best competes with the 49ers games or with Taylor Swift concerts.  With the unrepeatable experiences people are willing to spend thousands of dollars and travel across continents to enjoy.  Moments in time that’s value are the memories.

The fine wine producers who survive what is coming will be the ones who understand that distinction. Not the ones with the highest scores or the widest distribution. The ones who create the conditions for memories that outlast the bottle.

I do not know whether this approach will succeed in saving my winery. But I am convinced the old model is broken. I would rather fail building something I believe in than succeed preserving something that no longer works.