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| (homage to Gianni Di Venanzo) |
While Terry has been busy developing his taxonomy, I've been wondering about something else: what happens to the person who built an identity on that taxonomy, once the taxonomy stops organizing their days?
I spent a career in the wine trade. For most of that career, "wine person" wasn't a hobby or a preference, it was closer to an occupation of the self. You read the trade press, you tracked vintages, you had opinions about grower Champagne and Valtellina reds, years before either was a category anyone outside the business cared about. The wine wasn't just something you drank. It was something you were.
I've stepped back now. I still like wine — genuinely, not out of loyalty. But it isn't the driving force anymore, and I've noticed something about that shift that Terry's essay doesn't touch, because it isn't really his subject: the discomfort isn't in the wine getting worse or my palate going dull. It's in the quiet suspicion that I'm still describing myself with a label that used to be accurate and now is mostly habit. "Wine person" was true of me for thirty plus years. Is it true of me now, or am I hanging on to it the way you hang on to a job title after you've left the job?
I wrote something adjacent to this a while back, about what wine means to me of late — less reverential, more folded into an ordinary evening. That piece was about my relationship to wine itself. This one is about something upstream of that: my relationship to being a wine person, which turns out to be a different attachment entirely. You can keep loving a thing completely and still lose interest in being identified by it. Those aren't the same event, and I don't think I fully separated them until I read Terry's piece and noticed I was more interested in the gap in his question than the question itself.
I suspect Terry and I are not unusual in this. A fair number of people who spent decades inside the wine world — writing about it, selling it, evangelizing it — are now several years past the point where wine defined their calendar, their travel, their conversation. Some of us keep writing and talking about wine anyway, partly from genuine interest and partly, I'd guess, because the identity is comfortable and walking away from it feels like losing a leg. It's when that identity turns into a crutch that I see it as a liability rather than an asset. When “retired” wine writers advertise their Substack to build a readership, that's one way of saying: not yet, not ready for the next phase.
Which brings me to the same blind spot at a larger scale. Terry can spend all day asking what makes a wine fine. That's a different question than the one I'm asking here — whether I still have a place in (or out of) wine. I don't know if he's asked mine. I haven't spent much time on his. The trade press does something close to the same thing when it talks about declining consumption — clutching their pearls from inside the assumption that less wine can only mean crisis. The wine trade is in the middle of a real crisis of consumption — fewer Americans drinking wine at all, and the industry's explanation for it runs almost entirely toward economics and health: prices too high, Ozempic, younger generations sobering up. All of that is real. But I don't think it's the whole story, and it's not the story anyone in the trade has an incentive to tell.
Some portion of that decline, I'd bet, isn't defection. It's maturation. Folks who used to drink a bottle a night because that's what wine people did, and now drink two glasses on a Friday because that's what actually fits their life — they haven’t abandoned wine. They've stopped needing wine, or the identity of being someone who takes wine seriously, to be central. That's a different phenomenon than someone switching from Cabernet to seltzer because they can't afford either, and the trade press rarely bothers to distinguish between the two, because "the American drinker is growing up and drinking less as a result" doesn't sell a single bottle.
There's a precedent for this, and it's European. In postwar Italy and France, wine wasn't a lifestyle choice — it was hydration and calories. French schoolchildren were given wine rations into the 1950s, not out of indulgence but because it was safer than water in a country whose infrastructure hadn't been rebuilt yet. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine — that wasn't romance, it was sustenance. As nutrition and water infrastructure improved, wine's role receded. Nobody called that a crisis. It was just wine returning to proportion.
Back here in the USA, the maturation angle is harder to prove than to feel — that's the whole trouble with self-report. But I notice that Terry's essay, for all its rigor, argues from inside the identity it's defending. Mine, written from a few steps outside it, is watching the identity loosen without the interest disappearing — hopefully without wind, or dust. And clearly now, I see where I am headed.
