Dumbing down wine is not the way to sell more to millennial customers
Millennials are among the most maligned and marketed-to groups. Employers bemoan their sense of entitlement, laziness and constant demands for feedback while marketers wet themselves at the prospect of selling to them en masse. Having partied like it's 1999 in braces, spectacles and the company of my parents, I suppose I am a millennial. However, I don't pretend for a moment to represent the millennial wine drinker. Having joined the wine trade seven years ago, I've had access to wines that are way above my pay grade.
Before any parents reading this start composing sternly worded letters, this isn't an article peddling wine to 15-year-olds. "Millennial" is a poorly defined demographic, sometimes described as those born post-millennium, but according to our ultimate millennial resource, Google, it is "a person reaching young adulthood around the year 2000".
Millennials are among the most maligned and marketed-to groups. Employers bemoan their sense of entitlement, laziness and constant demands for feedback while marketers wet themselves at the prospect of selling to them en masse.
Having partied like it's 1999 in braces, spectacles and the company of my parents, I suppose I am a millennial. However, I don't pretend for a moment to represent the millennial wine drinker. Having joined the wine trade seven years ago, I've had access to wines that are way above my pay grade.
However, wine for millennials is a subject close to my heart, having watched an industry I love dearly turn itself inside out trying and failing to win the hearts and dollars of my less wine-soaked peers. How is it that so many other industries have cracked that market while wine seems unable to?
Wine's closest rivals, craft beer and boutique spirits, which have remade two fairly generic categories in the image of wine, have surpassed it.
One possible reason for their success is that craft beer and spirits are not patronising. A genre like Scotch whisky, arguably the peer of wine in complexity and expense, welcomes young people into the fold, encouraging them to geek out over distilling minutiae. Wine, meanwhile, attempts to connect with youth by putting cartoons on the label, assigning quizzical names like "Arrogant Frog" and "Menage a Trois" and dumbing the whole thing down. These tactics work well for the mass market, evidently, but don't attract anyone to the far more profitable premium wine sector.
Dumbing down is not limited to young people, with wine usually taking the same approach to "new" demographics (women) and markets (China). And yet neither of these groups - nor young people - wants simplicity. Maybe wine needs to stop assuming it's the smartest person in the room.