Lorenzo Biscontin
The flea in my ear was put last November at the Wine Future Conference by Francisco Campo, Master of Wine and organizer of the conference, when he told me that his children drank little wine because they “didn’t like it.” And this despite having excellent quality wines available to them.
Then I saw a graph published by the American Association of Wine Economist that showed how the sharp drop in wine sales in French supermarkets (which are worth about 70% of the market) from 1994 to 2022 was entirely due to the reduction in sales of red wines.
A couple of months ago I saw how at a guided tasting of Jerez (or sherry if you prefer) many glasses remained half full, a sip to taste it and that’s it.
A month ago, I dealt with the “Stella Rosa” case, the brand of low-alcohol Italian wines developed by the American winery San Antonio Winery owned by the Riboli family (the Italian origin is clear) and which has become the most imported wine in the USA. In an interview, Steve Riboli, President and CEO of the winery, emphasized how the success of Stella Rosa was due more to the taste of the wines (generally sweet, semi-dry and even flavored) than to the low alcohol content.
I began to connect the dots and wonder if the decline in wine consumption that we are witnessing in all the main markets could be linked also to taste.
Last week I found the article “The Wine Crisis: Why Are Younger Generations Drinking Less Wine?” published by Warner Boin Dowlearn on hes website Confidence Uncorked and I had the (rather definitive) answer.
In the article, Warner reports the analysis of the over 34,000 responses to the video on her Tik Tok profile that asked Millennials and Gen Z the reason why they were not drinking wine.
- The responses attributable to aspects of taste of the wine and/or the preference for other products are the majority, with 31%. Craft and non-craft beers, cocktails, hard seltzers, cider and marijuana are people’s favorite alternatives to wine. In other (marketing) terms, the services (benefits) resulting from the use of craft and non-craft beers, cocktails, hard seltzers, cider and marijuana satisfy the desires of these people better than wine does.
- Another 30% say they do not consume wine for reasons related to headaches and hangover.
- 20% say they do not drink wine for various health reasons. Some consider wine “poison”, some notice feelings of sickness after drinking a couple of glasses, allergies to the components of wine, negative interactions with the intake of medicines (48.6% of Americans take prescription drugs on a monthly basis), fear of falling into alcoholism, misinformation regarding the components and nutritional values of wine.
- 11% link the lack of wine consumption to social concerns and to the generational changes in attitudes towards alcohol, so being teetotal is considered more normal than in the past.
- Finally, 8% of the answers refer to economic issues: reduced spending power and increased inflation (including wine).
So, the primary reasons for not consuming relate to the characteristics of the product: taste, alcohol content and additives.
In hindsight it was not difficult to imagine since in the end it is a food product (in the sense that we ingest it). At the same time, it was impossible for the industry to realize this, considering that those who work in wine are also, almost always, enthusiasts who like wine by definition.
Many years spent talking about storytelling, modernizing communication, making wine less snobbish and then in the end we find ourselves dealing with the taste of the product.
Not that the other problems are not real limits to the accessibility of wine, and in fact they are also found in the answers given to Warner, but they come after the taste.
It is true that wine is a learned taste, but there must be a way and a moment that pushes people to try to undertake the path. Which could stop at the beginning, and we will still have a wine consumer, or continue if new motivations are found to explore wine as a category. Warner herself writes in her article that it took her years before she appreciated red wines.
The problem is that today we are losing the “entry wines”. The increase in the complexity of communication has corresponded to an increase in the complexity of the wines, with a marginalization of “easy” wines from the point of view of taste, alcohol content and, often, price. Wines that performed the function of bringing people closer to the category.
The issue of the decline in wine consumption is now clearer.
The cultural somersault required for the solution is extremely difficult.
METHODOLOGICAL NOTE
Someone pointed out that the answers come from a self-selected sample, not random representative of the analyzed population. This is an incontrovertible truth, but to say that this makes findings unreliable means having an excessively scholastic vision of marketing research.
I would therefore like to do a more in-depth analysis to clarify any doubts about the solidity of the information collected by Warner.
From the analysis of the answers, we know that the subdivision by age group is: 57% Millennials, 24% Gen X and 17% Gen Z. Then the sample collects the age groups of interest with a number of answers that determine an extremely low statistical error.
Furthermore, the difference in percentages of the different answers collected is such as to avoid statistical overlaps even with much larger sampling errors, apart from the first two categories “taste/alternatives” and “headache/feeling of drunkenness”.
About the bias brought in by the profile and the attitude towards wine of those who responded, from the marketing research literature we know that in these cases of spontaneous responses is the most interested people who responds, those who care most about the topic of the question.
To state that Warner’s results are unreliable because the sample is not random implies that those who do not consume wine for reasons of taste, headaches, feelings of drunkenness are more interested in responding than those who do not drink it for health, social and economic reasons. And that this occurs to such an extent as to overturn differences of 10 percentage points.
Above all, today the most interesting target audience for the wine industry are consumers of other alcoholic beverages who are not wine consumers, or light wine consumers.
This is the “target population” and this is exactly the one represented in the top 31% + 30% of the answers.
