HEALTH WARNING: Contains sweeping generalisations, use of stereotypes, and half-believed opinions dressed up as facts. If you feel agitated, apply “not everyone, but some…” liberally throughout. Abandon reading if agitation persists. Check with your doctor if you should be reading Pharos. Not recommended for people over the age of 55.

To be fair, writing this piece, heck, even writing the title. seems to have all the wisdom of running with scissors. Firstly, while I have no data and I would love to imagine myself as the writer of choice of the young, I strongly suspect the vast majority of my readers remember seeing the Berlin Wall coming down. Secondly, because it’s easy to be accused of an -ism. But, hey, while ageism can be a thing in specific contexts, I’m not sure I buy it as an issue on a par with others. Most forms of discrimination and marginalisation, assume an othering, an inherent difference between perpetrator and victim. But being old? Not only we can all envisage ourselves in old age – reaching it is actually the best case scenario.

You will hear a lot in the wine industry that “young people these days” are not interested in wine. I’m not sure I buy it, and not only because I am old enough to remember the same false alarm being sounded about millennials. I am actually worried about the opposite. Not that young people are not interested in wine, but the wine industry is not interested in the young.

A look at wine media is a good start. An assembly of prominent wine writers has all the youth and vigour of a Morris dancing group. Now, I am neither saying that there is nothing a person of a more mature vintage can offer those just released, nor am I expecting anyone to commit professional ättestupa. But when the answer to “wine critic hair colour” is the same as to “best-selling novel by EL James”, something seems a bit off. It was nice complaining about wine writers – until they became a species at risk of extinction. Another Instagram reel of rosé by the pool anyone?

It is easy to blame this on the media world and its woes, but it is not like the wine industry’s own communication efforts are any better. The last time there was positioning and messaging aimed at a younger audience was the golden decade of natural wine – which everyday looks more and more like BBC Radio 6 Music, a bunch of people in late middle-age, heartbreakingly insisting they are still hip (also, my radio station of choice). The, very occasional, attempts of the wine mainstream to reach out to the under-40s have all the finesse of a skateboard-carrying Steve Buscemi asking “would you like some canned wine fellow kids?”

Wasn’t it always thus, you might well ask. Well, no. In countries with a wine culture that cut across social classes, wine was every bit a young person’s drink. In more stratified societies, like the UK, the target was every bit the Oxbridge undergraduate, as their grandparents. Even the Australian capitalo-punk invasion of the ‘80s focused on the yuppies and topped at the middle-aged. They were happy to leave the pensioners to the Douro and the Mosel.

What is wrong with that, you might well ask. People are in the wine business to make money so it makes sense to go after the ones that have more of it: don’t blame us, blame r > g. I think that’s a mistake, and not only because, by definition, it’s better business going after the people that have more glasses ahead of them. Making this an old person’s game is both a self-fulfilling prophecy and the quickest route to irrelevance.

It’s not that I cannot see the business appeal: I guess older people are more likely to be responsive to flattery and obsequiousness, and quicker to part with a buck, having more of them. But, hey, you’re selling wine, not houses. People in their 20s and 30s spend tons of money on all sorts of things (video game tokens for crying out loud – see, I am old too). And you definitely don’t want 65 and up to be the only crowd in the discourse. I have often been told that one of the greatest benefits of becoming old is you stop caring what other people think. Which sounds like a really neat trick – and adjacent to the clinical definition of sociopathy.

I am not advocating for wine’s demographics to reflect those of a Billie Eilish concert, but is a mixed audience too much to ask? Oscar Wilde gave the young a bad rap. It’s not that they think they know everything, it’s that they care about everything, even things it is not really worth caring too much about – ring a bell? They’re enthusiastic, passionate, involved. They have strong, maybe misinformed opinions – but they’re open to changing them, indeed, they’re bound to. Frankly, I could do with more of that, as opposed to one more half-remembered truism about Châteauneuf-du-Pape, 40 years obsolete, delivered with the pomposity and self-assuredness of a home counties Tory councillor. The delusion that “it was always thus” and the world stopped turning when the speaker turned 55. Give me a pompous and self-assured 20–year-old any day instead – at least they’re willing to learn.

Now, I wish I had a proven magic bullet to change this. Like any commentator, if I did I wouldn’t spend time writing columns, but business plans. Yet, I can give you my two cents on what won’t work. First of all, stop infantilising younger people. There is nothing as patronising and alienating as thinking that young equals simplistic. From the outside, it can feel like wine professionals don’t get their own product. When beer, spirits, and coffee all ape the language and mannerisms of wine to fuel their rise, wine looks towards.., I am not even sure, fruit squash?

The things that will attract people in wine today are the same that has attracted people, of all ages, to wine always. The complexity, the age-worthiness, the link with other cultures, the matching with, and elevation of, food. The links, even if tenuous, with a craft product and the land. And yes, the suggestion of aspiration, the vague illusion of becoming better (of course wine doesn’t make you a better person – which product or pastime does?). I wonder sometimes if the persistent impression that “the young” want something different doesn’t come from a sound, detached business analysis, but from a semi-subconscious desire to keep wine culture a thing of the old – just one more thing Boomers enjoyed when young before pulling the ladder behind them.

And, yes, it helps not to be greedy too. It seems that we have moved to a narrative where “serious” wine culture is increasingly reserved for wines £50 and up. Everything else is consigned to some variant of glou-glou, lest anything deeper will scare away the fawns. Maybe it helps to take a leaf out of menswear’s playbook: the vocabulary, affectations, and mystique don’t change dramatically between a £300 and a £1500 suit. Id est, you can ask someone to pay 4x the baseline price for an entry to a different world. But 20x? Yes, you’re squarely in 50 plus territory now (and the occasional crypto bro).

I guess there are few examples better at crafting a product and culture targeted almost entirely at upper-middle class, upper-middle age Boomers than Napa Valley’s two decades of plenty. And, to be fair, it quickly made a lot of people a lot of money, for a bit. How do you rate its chances going forward?

Photo by Jack Finnigan on Unsplash