Why Gen Z Hasn’t Given Up on Wine, It’s Rewriting Who It’s For

It’s a summer’s night in Austria. Some 550 people are packed into Katharina Gessl’s winery for a techno party. There is good wine and good food, a DJ, a dialect-titled event called Disco Schabernack, and an Instagram account doing most of the promotion. What’s missing are official tasting notes and tutored flights. And this is the point. Like some other winemakers, Gessl has worked out what the more traditional trade seems to keep overlooking: that the young drinker will come to wine, and gladly, provided nobody makes them sit an exam at the door. Wine, like so much else in their lives, is there to be discovered, to be studied, yes, but in an exciting way. Above all, it needs to be experienced, and joyous.

Much of the industry is not seeing beyond the bold, brash headlines; they are not reading the full article. The headline will likely say that the younger generations have turned their back on wine, they are not drinking the way their parents did. There is, of course, truth in it, but the truth is subtler, and ultimately far more interesting to unravel.

This is a generation that drinks less but drinks better, reaching past the anonymous supermarket bottle for a wine with a maker, a place and a point of view. They are choosing their bottles, and where they enjoy them, with care and curiosity. For them, so much of it is about the story: the company, its beliefs and ethos, its provenance and the codes it keeps. They want to know who made this wine, where the grapes grew, who picked them and on what terms, and whether the values hold up to scrutiny. Sell them exclusivity and they will walk. Meet them with something real and they will stay. Which is where wine at this level, mistaken for a gated members’ club for far too long, has work to do. Open the gates, and there is an exciting crowd out there.

To understand this mindset best, see how these generations treat fashion. They approach a luxury house the way a sommelier approaches a label, looking for provenance, materials, who made the thing, where in the world and under what conditions. They move fluently between a vintage archive piece and something new, and they scrutinise the ethics behind both. The story has to hold up. Carried into wine, it is a mistake to see this as lazy or anti-intellectual. Gen Z and below demand authenticity, and they are suspicious of anything that smells of marketing.

Wine, of all things, should be winning here. Few products carry more of what this generation is looking for. That is a place, a maker, a story you can trace from the glass back to a single row of vines. Excitement in the knowledge.

Which is precisely where serious wine has made trouble for itself. For decades it wrapped itself in a private language of appellations, rules and codes. It became tiresome, and it shut out not just the young but anyone who never learned to speak it. For an industry built on the love of land and fruit, on the love of making and creating, that is a contradiction, and an expensive one. It has shrunk the audience, and the sales with it. What younger and more diverse consumers are really asking for is permission to make up their own minds. None of this is a retreat from knowledge. Quite the opposite. This is a curious, questioning generation. They value the truth. What they resist is being lectured, the pumped-up spin, not knowledge.

One category that seems to get this incredibly well is champagne. In researching our upcoming book, The Life Champagne, we have watched, with much awe and excitement, the most rarefied wine of all become a gateway for exactly this audience, and it happened without a single lesson. The grower movement, the récoltant-manipulant who farms and makes rather than sells fruit into a house blend, turned champagne inside out.

A generation of vignerons led by the likes of Anselme Selosse, Cédric Bouchard, Ulysse Collin, among many more, and now the younger waves, have made single-vineyard farming and transparency the entire point. Selosse went further still: he would lend younger growers his cellar to make their own wine, Jérôme Prévost among the first, and from that open door has come a whole new generation of avant-garde winemakers. In doing so they have opened the category right up, sending curious drinkers on to the grand houses, and their nuanced vintages. It’s an all-round winning scenario for all makers in Champagne. 

What might have felt like the most gated drink imaginable, and with so much historical weight, has become its opposite: personal, legible, a bottle with a face and a field behind it. Young drinkers are tasting all this in the bottle, and loving it.

Somewhere to explore

Beyond the bottle, you feel the shift in the rooms where wine is poured for younger generations. The natural wine bar, the small restaurant with a list that mixes high and low without apology, a grower’s first release beside a classic name that has poured for generations, and often by the glass. This is not the tired luxury spectacle of a formal room and its single generic flute. It’s somewhere to explore, to compare, to be caught off guard. With so many rules to follow already, a night out, say the young, need not be another gruelling lesson. It should be a pleasure, and a surprise.

The room itself, its physical and emotional architecture, changes how wine is talked about, in plain, curious language instead of the old codes. The design and label change with it, saying something true rather than borrowing a château’s gravitas. And so does the experience, the venue, the event, open to everyone.

Which brings us to the guides, the people who open the door and show newcomers in. What Selosse did with a cellar door, others now do deliberately, and at scale, whole organisations built to guide new drinkers in. Some of it is the old-school apprenticeship, served in-house at producers, restaurants, bars and bottle shops, the route most winemakers and sommeliers still take. Some of it is more targeted, reaching the people the trade often talks past: women among them, drinkers from the communities wine has rarely spoken to, and, of course, the young.

In the UK, Queena Wong’s Curious Vines has built a community for women across the industry; in California, Stevie Stacionis and Sarah Bray run Bâtonnage, a forum for women in the trade; and The Roots Fund puts Black and brown students through wine education and into work.

Some large producers are turning their resources the same way, Gallo’s Offscript among them, an incubator handing a new class of winemakers the freedom to make the bottles they want to drink. From Georgia’s Teliani Collection, which pools smaller growers who lack the reach to export, to the state-backed incubators of Walla Walla and the young-winemaker programmes surfacing across Europe, the same model is appearing at the artisanal edge and the industrial core at once.

The crowd is out there, curious and ready. Wine has only to go and meet it.