Oh Yes They Are! Young people are, in fact, drinking wine
Three weeks ago Boston was privy to a trailblazing wine event called Femme Fete. Organized by wine veteran Haley Fortier, owner of two renown wine bars called Haley.Henry and Nathálie, Femme Fete was a walk-around wine tasting featuring 100 international female producers of wine, cider, spirits, and even oyster purveyors/shuckers. Serious without taking itself too seriously, the event had the credentials and star power we see at trade tastings with none of the big-brand energy that dominates and sullies. A new generation of wine had its say that day!
On simple tables adorned with white paper and low-key signs, the bottles beckoned. The beckon-ees? Over eight hundred guests, a majority of them women, and astoundingly, more than half of them under thirty. There was a palpable, jubilant crackle of energy in the airy Cyclorama venue space. I won’t say people had pre-gamed exactly, but over 60 offsite events associated with Femme Fete had taken place around the city leading up to this buzzy day. Haley began marketing last October to make sure that everyone was in the know, especially young wine fans. They showed up in droves.
I was honored to pour the wines of Noelia Paz, talented wine maker and owner of La Osa wines from Leon, Spain, for these happy hordes who came with questions, enthusiasm, and an admirable thirst. One group had even driven down from Burlington, VT! They were employees of Mayday Restaurant, where there is a succinct, appealing wine list. As I poured, I took in the colorful future of wine-love that was lining up before me: wonderfully edgy, thrillingly curious, and utterly independent. My generation better get this right, I thought to myself. Give them the right amount, and better yet, the right kind of information to feed their inquiry and encourage their quest. Let them experience wine in their way.
Since selling my restaurant Taberna de Haro, I’ve poured wine at several tastings, bottle in hand and facts on tongue. I always aim to form a connection between taster and wine, but first I must make a connection between the outstretched glass and the hand it belongs to! To the experienced wine professional who owns a shop, I’ll speak of the wine’s provenance, price, and peculiarities. To a mature collector, I’ll talk about cellar-worthiness and vintage. And to a young person, I’ll talk farming techniques and the winemaker’s ethos, as well as the price and varietal. Budding consumers deserve to be met where they are.
These youngsters want delicious wine with twofold value. First and most obviously, they demand price value, as job insecurity and a grossly lopsided economy lock most of them out of expensive wine consumption. Second, they are drawn to the values per se of the wine creator or winery itself.
I trained scores of young servers at Taberna de Haro, and I witnessed the attraction they felt toward winemakers who had conquered tall odds to become an oenologist or had vanquished the ogres of class to found a small winery of their own. The come-from-behind stories and David-besting-Goliath allegories led them to champion those very wines in my dining room. The sales log indisputably reflected their passion.
When I asked Haley about training her young staff, she outlined a similar approach. “Besides a bit of technical information, I always give them something interesting and personal about the winemaker, maybe a little story to tell guests.” She is, after all, a disciple of Cat Silirie, Boston’s grande dame of wine, with storytelling at the forefront of connecting people to wine. Her favorite winemakers “have land firmly in hand.”
Respectful stewardship of the land also resonates profoundly with young consumers, a generation steeped in climate disaster threat, and they gravitate toward producers committed to sustainability. They understand terms like biodiversity and regenerative farming. They want fewer chemicals and more water conservation. They prize small over mighty. They relish all the personal details: the family stories, the use of the local artist’s work on the label, the recovery of underdog grape varietals, the small-scale vintner working out of a garage.
The cherishing of small, plucky wineries isn’t new, but it is not how my generation learned about wine. We read Hugh Johnson’s books and then The Wine Spectator and we sought out the recommended bottles. We learned not to drink wine advertised on billboards. We eagerly attended tastings at wine shops and learned to revere Burgundy and Bordeaux, whose prices relegated them to Saturday night wine. Now those same wines are unattainable to all but a minuscule percentage of young wine drinkers. In the early nineties I could buy a bottle of delicious if not transcendent Burgundy for $35. That same ilk of Burg now goes for $350 or more while real wages have declined, not risen, in this time period.
They are not drinking brand names, these new wine lovers, and that’s a beautiful thing. Gone are the bragging rights to 96 point bottles and the idolizing of the chateaux who still produce the same amount of wine but now need to sell it all around the world, leaving less and less for the Boston market, at ever-soaring prices. The new wine drinkers fall for wines that pique their interest in the now - the in-store promotion, the cool label, the recommendation from a friend virtual or other, the six-word description on the shelf talker. This is positive, this is discovery, and this is a valuable learning experience. They are on the prowl for what’s good, not necessarily what’s famous, and their minds are wide open. This utter lack of prejudice is precious.
Finally, Femme Fete confirmed what I’m seeing: plenty of young people love wine. Statistics show they drink less wine than prior generations, and the wine industry fixates on that, but Gen Z drinks less of all things alcohol in general. Behemoth wine producers are feeling the pinch, and I say, let them. There is a glut of factory-like wine in the world, and it’s simply not intriguing to this cohort of the social-minded and the health-conscious. Ironically, as local wine stores in the Boston area are sold off to chains and family groups, shelves around town contain more big-brand, chemical-laden, uninteresting plonk than ever. This makes the hunt for what’s pure all the more challenging, and I think these spirited youngsters relish that.
It’s just one more example of the ‘establishment’ keeping from their dreams, in this case delicious, affordable, respectable wine.
Deborah Hansen
Wine Matters