Stuffy, unhealthy or ‘just mid’ – are young people over wine?

“Wine just is mid.”

“It’s easier to smoke weed.”

“Alcohol is finally getting the rep it deserves.”

These are just a few of the reasons many young people are going sour on wine, according to a scroll through TikTok or Reddit.

The views lend weight to fears that gen Z and millennials are losing interest in the drink, with potentially disastrous consequences for the wine world. A seemingly endless stream of recent reports have warned that baby boomers, who have fueled the industry, are retiring and spending less, and millennials aren’t picking up the slack.

“You’re looking at a cliff,” the industry analyst Rob McMillan told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2022, following a key report that showed wine consumption in the US hadn’t grown in 2021 – despite bars and restaurants reopening. McMillan foresaw wine consumption by volume declining 20% in the next decade, with millennial habits key to the shift. Last year, Nielsen data showed 45% of gen Zers over 21 said they had never drunk alcohol.

The implications for winemakers are dire; late last month, one of the biggest US wine producers, Vintage Wine Estates, filed for bankruptcy, citing, in part, an “unanticipated steep decrease in demand”. And it’s not the only one facing a precipice: worldwide, wine consumption dropped 2.6% last year, hitting its lowest level since 1996, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. In California, vineyards are getting ripped out; France last year announced it would set aside cash to destroy excess wine.

While the data behind the downturn is complex, industry insiders say it’s time for a change. “Why hinge so much on the way it’s always been?” the wine writer and educator Maiah Johnson Dunn puts it. “We’re just all in this weird limbo figuring out what’s going to happen next.”

Drinking less, as new options blossom

In December, a TikTok from a millennial sommelier asking her audience why they weren’t drinking wine earned 1.6m views and tens of thousands of comments, with many pointing to the health risks of alcohol, the cost of wine, and alternatives such as cocktails, mocktails and cannabis.

Related: Cider is having an American moment – thanks to a new generation of crafters

This shift toward other types of drinks, or simply not drinking, rings true for Ellen McNeill, 28, who co-hosts Silverlake Jams, a Los Angeles neighborhood music night that draws a crowd of mostly 24- to 39-year-olds. McNeill, who previously worked for a hard seltzer company, loves wine but sees a number of obstacles to its success among young people – not least the growing variety of alcoholic options, from hard kombucha to pre-mixed, canned cocktails.

Another big one is health – the US generally doesn’t require booze brands to put nutrition facts on their labels, leaving consumers in the dark about what they’re putting in their bodies. When McNeill was marketing the seltzer to potential drinkers, “one of the top questions was: how much sugar does it have? How many calories? Can I see the nutrition?”

Her former employer does detail its nutrition facts, but “wine doesn’t really give a shit about calories. It’s about the taste and the experience.” Indeed, concerns about sugar content seem widespread among those who say they don’t drink wine. (Some on TikTok have linked high sugar to worse hangovers, though experts have suggested it’s not that simple.)

Another is a trend toward avoiding alcohol entirely – it tends to be older guests who drink, she says. “A lot of people do stay way more sober than I initially would have expected.”

That’s in line with a growing focus on the dangers of alcohol. The World Health Organization made no bones about it in April, proclaiming: “No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.” Between 2005 and 2023, the percentage of Americans who see moderate drinking as bad for you jumped from 22% to 39%, Gallup found. “I’ve heard wineries say it’s just been really challenging to deal with the aftermath” of the WHO statement, says Dunn, who is based in Rochester, New York, with people “scared to even visit sometimes”.

So it’s unsurprising that non-alcoholic alternatives seem to be popping up everywhere. Early this year, Stacey Mann and Summer Phoenix opened Stay, a non-alcoholic cocktail bar in Los Angeles, joining a number of similar bars and bottle shops across the city. They have customers of all ages, but the average visitor is between their mid-20s and mid-30s, they say. “We opened to a packed house. January was nuts,” Mann says, boosted by drinkers committed to avoiding alcohol for Dry January.

Related: Liquor stores are so 2019. Welcome to the age of the non-alcoholic bottle shop

The pair was surprised by the level of interest; 15 years ago, Phoenix says, the idea “wouldn’t have had any wheels whatsoever”. In addition to concerns about physical health, people are finally acknowledging, “for lack of a better word, the evils of alcohol on our mental health”. Meanwhile, social media heightens the risk of embarrassment after a drunken night out – a stupid mistake is no longer confined to your friend group, Phoenix adds.

At Stay, “you can have every drink, you can mix drinks, you can drive home, you can go to sleep, you can wake up not hung over”, Mann says.

Overcoming a stuffy reputation

Even for those who happily imbibe alcohol, wine in particular can have a steep barrier to entry, says Dunn. The 39-year-old teaches classes including Wine for Normals and DEI Over Wine at New York Kitchen, a non-profit food education center in the Finger Lakes.

Wine’s stuffy reputation can inspire a lingering “fear about saying the wrong thing” that’s less of an issue with beer. “You don’t even know when you’re stepping in it, right? Even just how you hold your glass is something that somebody will find a way to judge you on,” Dunn says. But since the pandemic and the racial reckoning of 2020, Dunn says, the industry has sought to do a better job welcoming the wine-curious, in part by being less prescriptive in how it discusses flavor: “My taste buds are going to taste different things than your taste buds versus anybody else’s,” Dunn says.

Getting more “interesting, innovative” brands on grocery store shelves – not just in fancy wine shops or on Instagram – could also help, says Charlie Brain, 30, co-founder of Lubanzi Wines in South Africa, which markets its products in the US. “On the grocery store level, there’s cool spirits and there’s cool craft beers. But I just think the wines on offer are all of our parents’ brands.” Still, it’s not easy to get shelf space in these shops: Brain spent time living in a van and “pounding the streets” with a backpack full of wine, going store to store to make his pitch.

Another way to appeal to a broader audience: offer something with less cultural baggage. Bradford Taylor, owner of Ordinaire, a wine bar in Oakland, California, says: “if anything, there’s more young people getting into the natural wine” the bar serves.

Natural wine – organically farmed, naturally fermented, without filtration or additives – has been trendy among millennials for the past decade or so (though it’s actually ancient), unburdened by industry tropes. “There’s not a culture of collecting. There’s not a culture of ageing wines. There’s not a fetishization of historic chateaux or buying futures,” says Bradford Taylor, owner of Ordinaire, a natural wine bar and shop in Oakland, California. “It appeals to people with less income, but also maybe with a little bit more skepticism” about those aspects of the traditional wine scene.

And perhaps any panic is premature. Taylor and Dunn both see reports of destroyed vineyards and oversupply as part of typical industry ups and downs – and for American winemakers, some data contains signs of hope. As for young people specifically, some seem to be ageing into wine fandom: yet another report, from the firm Wine Market Council, has found that in the US, with most millennials now in their 30s, the drift away from wine is reversing. Millennials with money, in particular, are proving to be a boon to the industry. High-income millennials have actually surpassed boomers as “core” wine consumers – those who drink wine at least once a week, the report says.

“Every year there’s some article that comes out about how the people who drink wine are ageing out and dying and oh my goodness, what is the wine industry gonna do?” Dunn says. “People like to drink things, even with this sober-curious era that a lot of us are in.”

Still, there’s a lesson in the recent wave of concern. As Dunn puts it: “If we can’t speak to more than one type of person, then we will always be in trouble.”