I'm halfway through the book The Post-Pandemic Wine Market by James Silver and have thoughts to jot down. First, I was expecting more of the contents to be unique to the world of wine, but that doesn't happen until chapter four on wholesale distribution. As it turns out, DTC (direct to consumer) sales is DTC no matter what you're selling. The biggest difference between selling a bottle of wine and, say, a pound of coffee is in the amount of government regulation. Otherwise, much of the first half of the book is very familiar and could be applied to selling just about anything.
This is not a critique of Silver's work but another reflection on the state of the industry at large. The ideas and methods that Silver shares might be new to the wine industry, but to me they are tried and true. Some of them pioneered by Gary Vaynerchuk decades ago through his work on Wine Library TV. I take this to mean that the wine industry (front of house at least) hasn't evolved much, with maybe the exception of tasting rooms and member experiences. It makes a lot of sense why the industry flourished during the pandemic: so many wineries were already set up for DTC, whereas traditional retailers scrambled to shift everything to digital first.
I was glad to see Silver's thoughts on focusing less on demographics and more on psychographics. The industry line is that it's faltering because younger generations (Gen Z in particular) aren't consuming alcohol like their predecessors did at their age...that's starting to feel like a catch-all excuse. And it needs to stop, because if that were really the reason, wineries would need to take a hard look at developing new products the way McDonald's and Starbucks are battling each other with drinks that look like something from a tiki bar but likely taste like a snow cone—hold the snow. Hard pass.
I'm with Silver when he suggests that psychographics are more important than demographics. The latter worked well when we had just five television channels and people still read magazines. I get why businesses still look at that categorization, but the world continues to get a lot more complicated. If ecommerce is the main channel for DTC sales and the Internet is Tokyo, then the industry has to look at psychographics applied to segmentation differently.
Earlier this year, the Economist argued that wine sales are down because increasingly more people are eating alone, and since wine is what you drink with other people, nobody's opening a bottle.
"In 2023 almost 25% of American adults ate every meal alone on a given day, up from 17% in 2003; among under-30s the share has nearly doubled. […] The consequences are measurable. Around one in six people worldwide is lonely, reckons the World Health Organisation. In 22 European countries the share of people who said they were 'never lonely' fell from 59% in 2018 to 51% in 2022. The latest World Happiness Report found that across countries and ages, how often people share meals predicts life satisfaction almost as strongly as relative income or employment status."
This is but one signal. And my guess is there are a lot more. We just have to reconnect the dots in a myriad of ways until it makes sense and sells more wine.