Honestly pretty crazy to me that 45% of legal Gen Z hasn’t had alcohol at all. That’s the craziest data in there for me if true. I guess covid really cut parties out for those prime peer pressure age groups. And it’s a cyclic effect as there’s less drinkers to peer pressure new drinkers.
I enjoy a drink(not wine) but the price and health are real kickers. I want a low abv good tasting beer and that’s hard to find as craft is still chasing the high abv super IPAs. I only have a drink with my weekly dnd and that’s kinda it anyway though.
I’m gen x and have never drank. In my 20’s people couldn’t believe this. But as I got older and hung out with people I relate to I found more and more that I wasn’t alone on this. From my personal experience and friend circles, most people go through their party phase and then alcohol loses it’s appeal.
I’ve said it in a comment before but I can smoke all day and be 100% fine the next day. I can’t drink more than a few drinks without nearly dying the next morning.
Makes more sense to do weed, not alcohol, just to be able to function later or the following day.
We’re midway through passing the blame torch. Soon they’ll drop the millennial part and it’ll just be “gen Z is killing an expensive or shitty industry how could they!”
Soon they’ll drop the millennial part and it’ll just be “gen Z is killing an expensive or shitty industry how could they!”
Well pretty soon the “they” will be millennials. Boomers are retiring or dying off, and there aren’t enough GenX to fill all the spots. Older millennials are in their early 40s now.
As an extremely avid wine drinker (and beer and cocktails), I’m good with this. That shit is too expensive. I just got back from tasting in Burgundy, and the range of prices is wild. One bottle from a specific vineyard costs literally $40,000, but a bottle from grapes 15 feet away costs $250. A bottle from a different producer from the exact same vineyard as the $250 bottle might charge $1000.
Can I tell the difference between a $50 bottle and a $250 bottle? Usually. But is it WORTH the difference? Usually not (but sometimes it is). There’s no chance I could tell enough of a difference between a $250 bottle and a $1000 bottle to make it worth it, regardless of me being unable to afford the more expensive one. I was actually afraid I was going to spoil myself from cheaper wine with this trip to Burgundy, but I ended up finding I’m happy with the wines I can afford and have easy access to.
Anyway, I’d be happy for the price of wine to come down.
It’s a 3 trick pony - red, white and rosé… sure you could probably differentiate $10 wine with $250 wine with the latter generally tasting better, but the baseline range of flavours is the same. Beer is great since you can drink a lot and get a milder buzz, whiskey and spirits get you drunk more instantly, where wine is an in-between that isn’t very appealing. Beer/Cider/Seltzer/Hard Soda types of drinks and Spirits have a great range of flavours in comparison to wine too.
If wineries and breweries want people drinking more, they have to invest in trains (lol), so that they can serve their product on them and we won’t have to worry about drunk drivers.
You are completely wrong about it being a 3 trick pony. There is tons of variety in wine beyond the color. But I’m not actually here to argue that because I completely agree with your last point. The thing that most often keeps me from drinking is the need to drive home at the end of the night. I don’t want to kill someone and I didn’t want to lose my job (I drive for work) because I went out to drink. So I drink at home which is not a healthy way to drink. So I don’t drink regularly.
If I didn’t have to drive to work I’d walk more which would put me on the ground, passing more bars and restaurants with the option to pop in for a pint and a bite to eat. Then hop on a tram or underground or light rail and head home full and happy. But we can’t have nice things like that in the US because oil rules or politics.
Yeah it’s not like I hate wine either, and characterizing as 3 types I agree is a massive oversimplification. It’s just it has fewer elements that interest me to go out of my way for it compared to craft beer and spirits.
Yes. Hell yeah. I hate how alcohol gets pushed as a “cool” thing to do when it’s so destructive. If anything, getting wasted should be looked down on, not celebrated.
It always has been, whenever marketing isn’t involved. Hell, for example: not only does the US have nearly every single major holiday now orbit drinking as a core element, but long-standing racist tropes do too. It’s a whole thing, this “bread & circuses” they’ve got us plebs distracted by…
I couldn’t care less what happens to the wine industry, but are people really using weed as an alternative? They’re completely different experiences. I enjoy drinking, but cannabis is in no way pleasurable to me at all.
I say this as a millennial who drinks and actually did whisky tasting as my main hobby with reviews for 12 years; I get it. I worked with and in the alcohol industry. They have no clue. It’s all ego and razor thin margins and old ways of running a business. They are heavily resistant to change of any sort. They will not be able to handle this at all.
Add to that they are owned by rich people as vanity projects who want their ROI ASAP at levels that healthier margin/growth industries could barely achieve and we will start seeing them disappear. Which is too bad, because it’s centuries of tradition in some cases, and I find it tasty.
Add to that they are owned by rich people as vanity projects who want their ROI ASAP at levels that healthier margin/growth industries could barely achieve
They say it’s a vanity project and they just love wine…
But yeah, its just another investment.
We end up with bargin bin wine at 10x the price because a rich person who doesn’t know wine is running the business.
Europe has wineries that have existed for decades at least, ran by people who know how to make wine, and how to make a profit for it
For American “boutique wine” I really wouldn’t be surprised if packaging and marketing is a bigger expense than actually making the wine. As other mentioned, lots of Americans are priced out of it, the American economy focuses on selling to the wealthy because no one else has disposal income anymore.
And rich people always just assume that expensive equal better and a rich person knows how to do anything better than someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
Yep. The only way to taste wine is to do it blind so you don’t have preconceptions of quality based on the price. Doing this really exposes that there’s not a ton of rhyme or reason to wine pricing. There is a general trend that you get a better wine for more money, but there are so many outliers, especially expensive wines that just aren’t anything special.
Really the only trend, from my friends and coworkers who have done wine tasting, is that once you climb above the absolute bottom tier, the field is…kinda flat until you start paying hundreds per bottle. That $14 Yellow Tail white will, without a lot of outliers, taste just as good as a white that’s $150. The more expensive one might have a more depth or complexity, but they will be fairly easily comparable overall.
A huge problem with the wine industry in America is that they’ve always tried to position themselves as a premium product with respect to other forms of alcohol. With respect to the information available to the consumer, the pricing seems to be random. Products that are aged understandably are going to cost more, and huge brands should be cheaper than small brands. Other than that, prices just seem to be set to correspond to whatever market segment they are targeting. A $20 bottle of wine may taste way better than a $15 bottle, but it could also be worse. There’s no indication of what could make the $20 bottle better than the $15 bottle other than the fact that it’s more expensive. Some brands put a little bit more info in, like the percentage of grapes, and sometimes they tell you where the grapes came from, but most consumers are just going to grab the cheaper bottle.
Contrast this with beer, where you know higher abv=more ingredients=more expensive, aged beers are more expensive, and beers from smaller or foreign breweries are more expensive. Breweries often tell you the exact ingredients that went in, so you can get a decent idea of what a beer will taste like before ordering, and you can make an informed decision to buy slightly more expensive products.
Wine is a little more tricky because there are fewer ingredients, and less processing, but they could absolutely give way more info. The wines that are good just try to market it as the magic of terroir in a bottle, rather than actually pointing out how and why they are better or taste different.
The “problem” is that wine and other forms of booze generally don’t work as a “new” business. Because you generally can’t charge top dollar without it being aged but also need to make sure that you can guarantee you sell out all those aged bottles/barrels. Because even a few seasons in a glorified warehouse are a mess for bookkeeping and a large investment. It isn’t even that you can’t make five year old bourbon on demand. It is that you have to plan how much you need closer to six or seven years out.
Same with beer, just to a much lower timeline. The reason why EVERYONE has ninety IPAs is that you basically CAN brew that on demand. According to chatgpt, an IPA takes 3-4 weeks (and I have seen a lot shorter periods…) whereas a pislner is 6-8 and others go even farther. But that is still an extra 3-4 weeks of barrel and warehouse time.
So you really do need the mega-corporations to do anything at scale. Which means it is inherently “bad” because people want The Culture and to pretend they can tell the difference between two different vintages of the same wine rather than comparing general families or regions of wine. And corporations won’t have that magic special something.
They did mention that in the comment, they were talking about Wine creation requiring larger amounts of cash to invest in which generally requires corporations.
Yup. Startup cash to cover the potentially months without profit as well as operating cash to be able to plan out a year or two in advance (let alone a decade) and not be beggared if you have one bad season.
But hey, reading is hard when someone can instead key in on one phrase, isolate it, and feel like they have reading comprehension skills.
guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion
Newest