They are simply choosing watches, cars and other luxury goods over fine wine. Benjamin Jack argues the problem may have less to do with moderation or affordability than with an industry that has failed to communicate its greatest assets: genuine scarcity, extraordinary stories and the luxury of drinking something that can never be replaced.
Somewhere on a villa’s terrace in the Med this summer, a man of about thirty-two is not buying the wine he should be.
He can afford the wine. He can afford the yacht the wine will be served on, which he has chartered for the week at roughly the price of a small house, and he can afford the watch on his wrist, a Richard Mille, which costs more than the house and tells the time slightly less well than the phone in his hand. He made his money in something with an API.
He will order another round of Aperol Spritz, a jeroboam of industrial Provence rosé and probably the GDP of a small nation’s worth of Dom and Ace of Spades at La Guérite, because everyone does, while the magnum of very serious Bordeaux on the table quietly warms.
The trade has a tidy explanation for this man, and it runs like this: the younger generation aren’t drinking as much; wine is arcane and complicated by nature and a glass of claret or obscure Burgundy is just hard to understand in some circles; the kids killed it, along with marmalade, doorbells and the nine-to-five; it is nobody’s fault; it is simply the changing tide of consumption around luxury goods in the modern world.
It is a good story, and I understand the appeal, because it is the one version in which the trade did nothing wrong. It is also, mostly, cope.
Fine wine does not have a sobriety problem
Start with the sobriety argument. The share of legal-drinking-age Gen Zs who have had a drink in the past six months has climbed, not fallen, over the last two years. The notion that Gen Z is a fundamentally different cohort from the rest of us is not supported by the evidence. Where the young do drink less, the strongest reason turns out to be not virtue but rent.
And our man on the yacht does not have a rent problem. He has, by every available measure, won financially. He can afford whichever drug he desires. The pricing issue of wine isn’t the problem here.
So, he has the money, and he has not taken the vow of whatever the wellness-industrial complex insists is the righteous path. He simply looked at the finest liquid mankind has ever produced and bought a lump of carbon fibre instead.
Although a gross simplification of the matter, the real question was never why the young stopped drinking, but why the winning ones would rather wear their money than drink it.
And the answer is sitting on his wrist.
Why we should be thinking about wine differently
What a Richard Mille does better than Bordeaux
Consider what the Richard Mille does that the Bordeaux does not. It is omnipresent, riding on the wrist in every photograph, announcing itself to strangers, bouncers and ex-girlfriends alike. It is easily decipherable: a man across a room can see it is expensive without knowing much about it, which is the entire job of a status symbol. It is permanent and will outlive him. It is liquid, and he can sell it on his phone before pudding. And, above all, there is very little risk he will get it wrong.
The Bordeaux fails almost every one of these tests. It is almost invisible to the man across the room who doesn’t know anything about it, while we celebrate that impossibly old and rare bottle as the greatest flex in the wine world.
And while the Ferrari on your Instagram means wealth to the world, only a smattering will know what a bottle of Sine Qua Non on your feed signals, primarily because, to the uninitiated, a five-thousand-pound bottle and a fifty-pound bottle look identical, being both, in the end, a bottle.
It is impermanent: the highest expression of it is to make it disappear down your own throat, at which point your enormous flex is gone and you are left with a marginally better evening and a recycling problem. It becomes illiquid the instant it is opened.
And it carries, unavoidably, the threat of humiliation, because wine is the only luxury on earth that, more often than not, makes the person buying it feel ignorant, if not stupid. Nobody has ever been handed a Richard Mille, Patek or Rolex and asked, with a small, cruel smile, whether they detect the minerality.
That last one is the killer, and it is entirely self-inflicted. Our thirty-two-year-old has the money, but not the inherited software.
The cultural capital money cannot buy
The French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) distilled a very particular concept: taste that cannot be bought, or ‘goût de liberté’, the taste of freedom.
Bourdieu argued that innate aesthetic taste and preference are shaped by an individual’s distance from material and economic constraints over generations. In the modern era, where wealth and social ranking are less aligned than ever before, the outsider risks always remaining the outsider.
The cultural capital the individual has may never match their bank account because appropriating “old money trends” from TikTok is fallible and no match for naturally absorbing these aesthetic tastes through their ‘habitus’: the ingrained habits, ways of thinking, physical postures and social rituals inherited from an immersive upbringing, experienced environment and the learned ‘norms’ these instil over generations.
Our 32-year-old did not grow up with a father who kept the Latour. He taught himself everything else he knows to succeed from the internet in an afternoon, and he is not about to walk into a game whose rules are written in an arcane language, scored out of a hundred by strangers he’d never purposefully befriend and refereed by a sommelier who sighs.
The watch makes him feel like a winner. The niche, expensive wine makes him feel like he is back at school and has not done the reading.
Wine’s snobbery is part of the problem
Here is the part the trade may enjoy least. Shown this man, our instinct is to sneer at the watch. How could a lump of plastic or metal be culturally valued that much, we wonder, whereas our wine… Ah, our wine is civilisation in a glass.
And that sneer, that precise curl of the lip, is our undoing in miniature.
The man on the yacht is not a philistine. He made a perfectly rational choice between a thing that instantly broadcasts his success through his understanding of taste and prestige and a thing that requires him to sit an examination just to be at the same table.
And he chose correctly.
Every time we laugh at his Lego watch, we tell him precisely why we will never sell him a bottle of something spectacularly brilliant and expensive, and one of life’s great joys.
Fine wine tried to become an asset
Which brings us to the second unforced error, the one committed while trying to fix the first. If we cannot beat the watch on desire, we thought, let us beat it on money. Let’s make fine wine an asset.
And for a few decades we did, building indices and funds and an entire apparatus for treating certain ‘chosen’ wines as small, delicious hedge funds.
Then the same speculative money that inflated wine inflated watches too, and in 2022 the watch market fell by as much as sixty per cent, and wine, having bought a seat at the same roulette wheel, took its own beating.
Your remote cellar, it emerged, is not a safe haven. It is correlated with everything else like it, at exactly the moment you would prefer it were not, because it was never really that sort of asset in the first place. It was a drink that some clever people persuaded some other clever people to stop drinking.
And this is the point at which it becomes almost funny, if you work in the trade, in the way that watching a man hunt for the keys already in his hand is funny.
Because, frustratingly, wine has spent twenty years failing to become a watch, while owning outright the two things the watch and many other luxury products spend fortunes pretending to have.
Wine owns the purest form of scarcity
Take scarcity. The most admired scarcity in luxury belongs to Hermès, whose Birkin bag you cannot simply buy. You must be offered one, after years of relationship and spending, and the waiting list itself becomes the status symbol.
It is a masterpiece of illusion. When you look closely, it’s a bit of a con, because Hermès could make more Birkins tomorrow if it chose to. The bottleneck is an astute decision. The scarcity is brilliantly invented.
Domaine Leroy’s Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru vineyard is 0.27 hectares in size. Not just 0.27 hectares this year; 0.27 hectares forever. Also, a great vintage cannot be run again, and when a legendary winemaker dies, his or her final wine is the last there will ever be, in the entire history of the world. Amen.
Wine has the purest scarcity in all of luxury, a scarcity so honest it is alarming.
Unfortunately, we seem to communicate that scarcity far less successfully than a handbag company markets a queue. We can’t help treating our rarest creations as an administrative errand.
Hermès turned an invented queue into one of the most coveted things on the planet. Fine wine owns genuine scarcity, but we have failed to make this resonate with a younger generation of wealth.
Wine has better stories than luxury brands
The stories are the same tragedy in a different suit. The other luxury categories invent their romance. Watch houses stitch heritage onto companies that went bankrupt and were bought by strangers, then sell you a date on the dial as though it meant something more than just a mechanical piece of art.
Wine must invent nothing.
It owns the richest true stories in luxury: the specific soil, the impossible year, the life’s work of one particular obsessive on one particular hillside. Every word of it is real.
But we insist on telling these true stories in a private language, buried under classification law and tasting notes, so that they reach only the people who’ve already learnt how to speak our opaque language.
A man can repeat the story of a Richard Mille ten seconds after hearing it. He cannot repeat the story of a Burgundy at all, because we never told it to him in words he could carry out of the room.
Fine wine has a marketing problem
So, no, fine wine does not have a young people problem. It has a marketing problem wearing a wealthy demographic disguise, and a category that has spent decades apologising for the only two things that make it wine: that it is real, and that it is drunk.
The good news is that after the post-Covid alternative asset crash, the fake scarcity and illusions of many luxury products are wearing thin. The young and wealthy are growing suspicious. The honest thing quietly becomes the valuable thing.
Which is exactly the moment to stop trying to be a better watch.
You do not win back the luxury spend by out-watching the watch. You will lose that fight, because a bottle cannot be worn, cannot easily be photographed alluringly with you, unless you are an F1 podium holder or it’s a big bottle of Champagne on your head at a day club in the South of France, and must be drunk to be experienced.
You win it by reclaiming what the current winners are genuinely good at: the theatre of scarcity, the story a stranger can easily retell, the ritual that makes a newcomer feel chosen rather than examined and, above all, celebrating the experience.
Stop selling wine as a watch
And once we’ve won it back, perhaps we should also learn from the one thing the watchmakers got wrong: creating the speculation that just cost those with the money sixty per cent of their chosen alternative asset class.
Wine can be a store of value, and is undeniably an asset by that definition, but perhaps we need to ask ourselves if that is the best way to make it interesting.
In the trade, we know wine isn’t really that sort of liquid asset. It’s a drink that could peak at any time. By focusing instead on the rare, enveloping enjoyment of the drinking experience, we will imbue fine wine with far more value to those whose focus we have lost, and whose money and interest we need.
Fortunately, wine’s supposed weaknesses are its core advantages. It cannot be flexed online to the masses, which, in an age of relentless online flexing, makes it one of the last genuinely private luxuries left.
You need the knowledge of the brand, accessibly communicated, and you need the experience of drinking it. And, yes, it vanishes when you drink it, which is not a flaw. It is the whole point.
People are desperately trying to outdo each other. We live in an age where every expensive Eurotrip on Instagram starts looking like the next one. The real luxury is enjoying something lavish very few can actually experience.
Our man will get there in the end. Not because we shamed him about his watch, but because one evening, someone who is not sighing will pour him something extraordinary with genuine generosity of spirit.
They will tell him a true story he can hold, and let him feel that he belongs.
He will remember the smells and that taste, that magical evening, long after he has sold the Richard Mille.
