America has long been a land of innovation – from blue jeans and fast food to lightbulbs and telephones. American ingenuity and the country’s talent for dreaming big have led to novel solutions to complicated problems. In wine, this means that new consumers, changing tastes and traditions in food and wine pairing, industry leaders, new technologies and new names are leading American wine into its next wave.
Of course, there are many issues facing American wine – wildfires and smoke continue to torment wine-growers in the American west, fewer young Americans are drinking wine as their beverage of choice, and the global climate crisis rumbles on.
But there are also many promising innovations. Climate change and new wine drinkers’ adventurous tastes are allowing winemakers and growers to explore new and not-so-new wine grapes in different ways. And there are brand new demographics of wine drinkers to whom influencers, rather than traditional industry gatekeepers, speak directly.
So what will America’s next wave of wine be, where will it come from, and who will be riding it? Here’s our US-based team’s selection of questions, answers, people and ideas...
Young Americans
Why aren’t younger demographics in the US turning to wine? Is it a simple lack of advertising in the wine sector or a combination of factors?
‘Growing up, for me,’ says Steve Matthiasson, winemaker at Matthiasson and popular Napa Valley vineyard consultant, ‘it was a given that wine was good for you. That’s not the message today, and I believe this is why younger drinkers are attracted to natural wines.’
His suggestion is that when young people today, Millennials and Generation Z, reach the stage of having sufficient money and the wherewithal to start properly enjoying wine, they don’t do so in a context framed by the ‘French paradox’ – the contention, first popularised in the 1980s, that the Mediterranean diet (relatively high in fats and oil, but also including regular consumption of wine, and in particular red wine) contributed to lower rates of heart disease deaths in France.
‘It’s not a given for younger people that wine, conventional wine, is healthy,’ Matthiasson continues. ‘If you grow up instead hearing that alcohol is unhealthy for you, and then you’re presented with a different type of wine that is “natural” or healthy, that’s very persuasive.’
These notions of health, sustainability and responsibility are essential to buying decisions for
