Gen Z Photo 2

Connecting With a New Generation of Wine Consumers

Earlier this year, Areni Global ran a series of roundtables on how to attract a younger generation to wine. Top professionals came together to share their ideas about Gen Z and fine wine.

Here’s an unusual dilemma: there’s a cult winery that has a waiting list with thousands of names on it. People on the list must wait for between seven to ten years before they get their first allocation. 

That’s a position that most wineries would love to be in.

But the waiting list is full of Baby Boomers — the very same group that’s slowing down on wine buying. Maybe the people on the list won’t be interested in buying wine by the time they get their chance.

“Some of our long-time customers are saying, ‘Sorry, we’re not buying your wine any more,’” said the cult Californian producer. “We’re trying to understand our next move. How can you bring the new generation in and have them engage with your different brands?”

It’s a question that the entire industry is grappling with — and was the focus of two round tables conducted by Areni Global in mid-2024.

As always, the round tables were conducted under the Chatham House rule, so participants were only identified if they gave explicit permission.

The current situation

According to Liz Thach MW,  the President of the Wine Market Council in the US, Millennials make up 42% of those US consumers spending more than $20 on a bottle of wine.

“They are very interested in drinking higher quality wine and willing to spend more for it,” she said.  “Currently they are drinking slightly less wine than Boomers, but they are spending more and they’re highly engaged.“

[Millenials] are very interested in drinking higher quality wine and willing to spend more for it. Currently they are drinking slightly less wine than Boomers, but they are spending more and they’re highly engaged.

Liz Thach MW

The good news is that as consumers enter their 30s, they are “very engaged with wine.”

As for how this cohort should be understood, Thach MW said that seeing them as members of a particular generation is only one of many ways to understand them. It can also be useful to group consumers by their spending patterns instead, or by their psychographic profile. “There are pros and cons for all of [the methods],” she said, though she acknowledged that psychographics research — which seeks to understand consumers through characteristics like values, goals, interests and lifestyle choices — was expensive to undertake.

Another way the industry can understand its consumers is just to ask people, whether at retail or the cellar door, how they got into wine. “In our research, we ask people, ‘How did you get into this? Why did you decide to buy this kind of wine?’” she said.

The answer, very often, is that somebody introduced them to it. 

She suggests that the organisers of any programme or event should always encourage participants to bring a friend, or “Gen Z son, daughter, niece or nephew. Bring them and introduce them to wine. It goes a long way.”

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Maybe there are no cohorts

The allocation waiting list situation came up several times in the discussion. One well-known winemaker said that he also has a list, and regularly loses people because they have aged out of wine drinking — but it doesn’t matter because their places are taken very quickly by the next generation. Significantly, he said, the people coming in look exactly the same as the people who are leaving. 

“I’ve been working for 15 years and in my first seven years it was all Baby Boomers and GenXers. Now I have an equal distribution of Baby Boomers, GenXers and Millennials on my list — but the average age has only moved lower by two years,” he said. “They’re all the same person. They’re all a 45-year-old male or female.”

He added that his brand sold “the idea of Italy” which appeals to everybody from young backpackers to retirees. “I think we have to get past this idea that generations are going to be the doom and gloom of our business.”

Others on the call said they did, however, see differences in the way different age groups behave. One GenZ sommelier said a particular problem she saw with younger consumers was a loss of social skills. “It’s so hard to connect with us. We have no idea how to talk to each other and make friends — it’s so hard to get people to connect over wine.” She said that some of her peers confessed they were worried about speaking to sommeliers or other wine professionals.

This isn’t just her observation. According to numerous sources, the pandemic exacerbated an already existing trend towards social isolation among young people; getting them to connect over wine is going to be a challenge.

All is not lost. One of the educators on the call said, “I hear you loud and clear on attention spans.” But he said that what 20-somethings lack in conversational ease, they more than made up for in “exploratory drive”, and this is being reflected in the rise in wine education.

This is something being reported across the board, from record numbers of people graduating from the WSET, to the dramatic growth in wine courses from regional bodies and private companies like the Wine Scholar Guild. One American wine educator on the call said her own enrolments skewed younger, because “we promote a lot on social media. We have a mailing list of about 9,000 people — if I launch a class, I sell out immediately.”

This intense exploratory drive means younger people are also interested in wine beyond the classic regions. “Can we do something on natural wines?” the first educator went on. “Can we do something on really funky, off-the-path wines? That’s really important in our understanding of how to speak to younger folk.”

Make everybody feel welcome

Polly Hammond of digital marketing agency 5forests noted that American wineries often had a script that they launched into when visitors arrived. She suggested that such wineries might want to consider the European approach instead. “Build a relationship. Ask them who they are. Give them time to talk to you. We need to stop this kind of ‘whoosh’.”

Areni’s Pauline Vicard added that South Africa is a model of how to build relationships because wineries encourage families to bring their kids along to the winery. Some wineries even offer supervised play areas, so the parents can go off and enjoy lunch or a glass of wine, without worry.

“There’s a sense that if the whole family can’t go, then you fail as a tasting centre,” said one South African media figure. “The wine industry has realised that you can’t alienate any segment — those with expendable income are generally young professionals with young children.”

He also said that he’d witnessed that a great way to accommodate people who either don’t want to interact with staff or who struggle with social interactions, is to offer a gamified tasting experience via the smartphone. “You can add in those sorts of elements where people are then competing against each other, and that also really warms up a room.”

After a lively discussion lasting 90 minutes, the group agreed that while there are some apparent differences in the way different age groups behave — particularly when it comes to technology and the smart phone — there are also timeless truths: be hospitable, encourage people to bring their friends, listen to the customer, and make it as easy as possible to engage with wine, including thinking about the customer’s children.

So that waiting list may not be a problem after all. If the winery does everything right, it will have people queuing to join it for years to come.

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