There is an appealing theory making the rounds about what ails wine. In a recent edition of the Everyday Drinking newsletter, the case is made that, amid declining consumption, the industry is overlooking a more immediate problem: a crisis of discovery.
It is a given that there are still a lot of people who want to drink interesting wine. However, a range of factors complicate connecting the dots. There’s industry consolidation, the decline of sommeliers and wine media, and a distribution system built more for moving product than getting cool wines in front of new drinkers. At the same time, an industry obsessed with “demystifying” wine has pushed homogeneous, mass-market products as supposedly accessible “starter wines.”
The proposed solution then is to rebuild the machinery of discovery around distinctive, affordable wines.
It’s an appealing case, but it mistakes one symptom of wine’s problems for the disease.
The most obvious complication is history. It’s not as if wine consumption suddenly began declining after American distributors consolidated or sommeliers started disappearing. France, the world’s quintessential wine-drinking nation, has experienced an extraordinary decline in per capita consumption stretching back more than half a century. Similar long-term declines have occurred elsewhere in Europe’s traditional wine cultures. I wasn’t able to immediately find data for the last 12 years, but you can see from this chart that the decline in wine consumption among a handful of major wine nations has been steady for a long time.
That doesn’t disprove a contemporary American crisis of discovery, but it makes it difficult to believe discovery is the fundamental problem. When similar changes occur across different countries, generations and wine markets, something larger is perhaps at work.
The uncomfortable possibility is that this isn’t a marketing problem, and never really was one.
Modern food and beverage markets are exceptionally good at rewarding products that can be made cheaply, consistently, and at enormous scale. Agricultural systems have evolved toward efficiency, standardization, and high yields. This was incredibly obvious to me when I covered the industrial meat industry, which has become so industrialized that policy battles in Washington can revolve around something as minute as how fast chicken line speeds can move while still being reliably monitored by humans for defects. You see similar threads in the food manufacturing space, all those packaged goods that people consume across the globe. None of this necessarily means that mass-produced products are bad. What it does mean is that the economic characteristics our modern food system rewards do not necessarily correspond with the characteristics wine enthusiasts tend to celebrate: distinctiveness, vintage variation, small-scale production, healthy soils, minimal intervention, and a transparent relationship between an agricultural product and the place it came from.
This was essentially the objection raised to me by wine writer Aaron Ayscough when I asked him whether hybrid grapes might provide an answer to Everyday Drinking‘s argument about the discoverability problem in the wine industry. I tend to agree with him.
Wine’s decline, he argued, belongs to a much larger movement separating consumers from transparent agricultural production. A hard seltzer is extraordinarily scalable. A wine made by a farmer attempting to express the peculiarities of one vineyard isn’t. The former fits remarkably comfortably into the modern beverage economy. The latter clearly does not.
This distinction, simple as it may be, matters because it sort of alters what we think storytelling can accomplish.
This is why I think hybrid grapes make for an interesting lens to approach the case being made. For someone interested in discovery, hybrid wines look almost absurdly promising. Grapes such as Marquette, Frontenac or newer disease-resistant PIWI varieties can introduce drinkers to unfamiliar flavors and unexpected wine regions. Their resistance to fungal disease can reduce the need for vineyard treatments. They carry stories about climate adaptation, agricultural experimentation, and the future geography of wine.
It would be amazing if the solution were as simple as people simply needing to encounter these wines, to fall into their story, and then give them a chance.
The challenge here is pretty straightforward, though, even if depressing. What if stories aren’t enough?
Imagine that tomorrow Americans suddenly became fascinated by hybrid grapes. Producers would still have to get those bottles through a highly consolidated distribution system. Retailers would still have limited shelf space. Small wineries would still compete against suppliers with enormous economies of scale and marketing budgets. And an agricultural product whose appeal partly rests on local variation would still be competing in a beverage market extraordinarily good at delivering inexpensive, predictable alternatives.
The argument being made by Everyday Drinking is considerably more sophisticated than simply telling wineries to market themselves better. And their proposed “wines of discovery” could plausibly help the portion of the wine business still capable of cultivating curious drinkers. I suppose the disagreement is really about the size of the solution.
If wine primarily has a discovery problem, then hybrids offer something genuinely exciting: a vast, underexplored territory capable of giving drinkers new reasons to care about wine. If wine’s crisis is instead part of a decades-long transformation in agriculture, consumption, and the economics of selling beverages, hybrids cannot solve it. They have to operate within it.
That doesn’t make discovery irrelevant. It makes it insufficient.
And perhaps that’s the more useful way to think about hybrids. They aren’t an antidote to wine’s problems. They are a test of them. If we can produce wines that are environmentally compelling, genuinely distinctive and rich with stories, but still struggle to put them in people’s glasses, then the question stops being how to make wine more interesting. It becomes more about imagining what kind of system allows interesting wine to survive.