What happens when you aggrandize and enshrine something that for generations has served as daily ritual
This isn't just a story about wine industry economics. It's what happens when you try to scale something that was never meant to be optimized—when wine went from just what you did to something you now have to decide about.
Here's what's actually happening: the wine industry executed a textbook case of premiumization just as their target market could least afford it. It's like opening a Tiffany boutique in a town where everyone just lost their jobs. Perfect timing, if you're trying to fail.
Wine wasn't special in Italy. That was the point. It was ordinary enough to be everywhere, good enough to matter—the thing that turned Tuesday night into a moment worth showing up for.
In America, it was starting to work that way too. A bottle on the table most nights. Not because it was an event, because it wasn't one. You didn't plan for it. You didn't budget for it. You just did it. Then it stopped being something you just did.
Stroll around any Italian city around seven. The bars are full. Not wine bars—just bars. People having a glass, an Aperol, whatever. Then home for dinner, probably with wine. This isn't special occasion drinking. It's infrastructure. The ritual meets you where you are—no occasion required, no expertise needed, no guilt attached.
Here's what Italy exported to America originally: not Barolo and Brunello, but accessibility. Chianti. Soave. Wines you could drink every night without thinking twice. While France played the luxury card, Italy won by being democratic, and it worked beautifully for a while.
Then the strategy shifted. Italy looked at France's margins and wanted in. Classic aspirational pivot—abandon what's working to compete where the money looks better. Started chasing respectability, matching France score for score, price point for price point, proving Italian wine deserved the same reverence as Bordeaux.
And it worked, sort of. The prestige play succeeded. Barolo commands respect now. Brunello gets collected. Now, winegrowers and their children adorn themselves in Panerai and Prada and take a month off to play at Phuket Beach. Mission accomplished.
But here's the problem with prestige plays: they require a customer base that can afford prestige, and that cohort? It's fickle and mercurial.
That eight-dollar Chianti? Eighteen now. Soave got "elevated." The wines that worked because they were democratic got repositioned as aspirational. Italy abandoned the accessible tier that actually built market share.
Now those premium bottles sit in American and European warehouses alongside billions of dollars' worth of other premium alcoholic beverages, gathering dust. Billionaire's Row, they call it—a virtual graveyard for billionaire celebrity spirits and wine. The market they courted either doesn't exist or can't afford the cover charge.
Let's talk about what that looks like in real life. Not "economic precarity" or "purchasing power"—what people actually stop doing.
The weeknight dinner that used to include a bottle gets postponed to Friday, then to special occasions, then stops happening altogether. The grocery store moment of hesitation—standing there doing mental math, putting the bottle back, grabbing beer (or nothing) instead. The casual hang that quietly disappeared because nobody wants to suggest spending money when everyone's trying not to spend money.
Rituals don't die when people are poor. They die when people can't repeat them without guilt. You can't build ritual on luxury pricing. Ritual requires repetition, and repetition requires affordability.
Wine saw housing costs spike, student debt balloon, grocery bills double, and decided this was the moment to become a luxury category. The math doesn't work. Younger buyers—the ones who should be building lifetime habits—can't afford the entry price. Even if they could scrape together twenty-five dollars for a bottle, they're being told by every health headline that wine will kill them anyway.
And here's the thing: even affordable wine now feels like a moral choice. A health risk. A lifestyle signal. Something you must justify. I had a heated conversation with a gerontologist the other day who told me to stop drinking wine because it was killing my brain cells. As if all the other crap in this world isn't?
Rituals cannot survive justification or shaming.
Nobody explains bread. Nobody defends coffee. Wine used to live there too—ordinary enough to need no explanation, present enough to make meals feel complete. Italy perfected this pattern.
No cultural defense remains because wine stopped being cultural infrastructure and became a consumer choice to optimize or avoid.
So we're stuck with structural mismatch. Premium inventory. Customers without purchasing power. Social infrastructure nobody can afford to access regularly. It's Economics 101: when your product costs more than your target market can pay, you don't have a marketing problem—you have a business model problem.
The industry talks about educating consumers, building appreciation for quality. But appreciation doesn't pay rent. Quality at these price points doesn't build habits—it builds hesitation, sending people trading down to beer and spirits, which happen to be more accessible at the social moments that still exist.
The answer isn't better wine. It's affordable wine. Not garbage—plenty of good bottles under twenty dollars exist, red and white, that even a seasoned wine drinker would respect. But the industry has to abandon the premiumization thesis. That ship has sailed. There aren't enough people to support the premium segment at scale, and the people who could afford it are aging out or already have full wine closets.
People aren't looking for "aha!" moments. They're looking for warmth, for something that facilitates coming together without requiring event-level planning.
The corporate giants built massive capacity chasing growth in a shrinking segment. Classic late-stage capitalism move—optimize for quarterly growth for the shareholders, ignore demographic reality. Now they sit on inventory they can't move, wondering what happened.
What happened: they industrialized something that worked well culturally as ritual. They mistook the vehicle for the destination and made wine about the wine instead of what wine made possible.
Italy had it right the first time. The ordinary stuff. The daily wine. Bottles priced low enough you didn't think twice, good enough you paid attention anyway.
That's what built the market. That's what made Tuesday matter. That's what we lost—not because we stopped appreciating wine, but because the price forced us to think about it. And the moment wine required thought instead of permission, the ritual ended.
Those warehouses aren't full of unsold inventory. They're full of Tuesday nights that aren't happening anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment