From the New York Times via NYT partner eKathimerini:
The American wine industry believes it has a problem: millennials.
More specifically, it’s the fact that aging baby boomers – currently the prime market for wine – are nearing retirement age, the time of life when consumerism typically declines.
Millennials, the generation that began to come of age after the turn of the century, have given no indication that they are poised to step in. They buy much less wine than boomers, and the wine industry has not done enough to entice them to become regular consumers.
In his annual State of the US Wine Industry report, presented last month, Rob McMillan, an executive vice president of Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, California, and a longtime analyst of the American wine market, issued a forceful warning that a day of reckoning was coming.
“In prior reports, we noted that the falling interest in wine among younger consumers, coupled with the encroaching retirement and decreasing wine consumption of baby boomers, poses a primary threat to the business,” McMillan said. “That issue has yet to be addressed or solved, and the negative consequences are increasingly evident.”
Sales of American wine could plummet by 20% in the next decade, he said. It’s not exactly clear what the industry can do to change this dynamic. As the father of two millennial sons, I am something of an expert on being unable to persuade millennials to do as I suggest. But McMillan, who has analyzed the wine industry for decades, has more than a few ideas for an effective strategy.
First, some background: In this discussion it may seem as if Generation X, the generation between the boomers and the millennials, has been overlooked.
This group is smaller than both the baby boomers, the huge population born roughly from 1946-1964, and the millennials, born from 1980-1995.
Because of the size difference, Generation X it has less buying power, although its wine-buying behavior does not seem that different from boomers’. Generation Z, born, approximately, after 1995, has too few years of legal drinking to really figure into the data....
....MUCH MORE
One of my favorite NYT booze headlines of late was October 22, 2020's:
How Income Inequality Has Erased Your Chance to Drink the Great Wines
Or, perhaps "Petrus for all".
Berry Bros. has an '82 available for £5,829.79 per, if you can choke down merlot rather than pinot noir.
But I digress.
