Younger Drinkers are not Stupid

The “accessibility” discourse mistakes hospitality for condescension — and younger drinkers are smarter than the industry thinks

Thirst Behavior is a project about wine, taste, and the social performances that form around them, the rituals of enjoyment shaped by status, media, money, and desire. Wine is the entry point; the real subject is how taste gets made, circulated, and contested, especially in New York and the Hamptons, where leisure and tastemaking overlap most visibly.

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People are getting all kinds of information about wine on social media. Mostly, I think this is this is a good thing, even when it’s painful for me to watch. However terrible algorithmic media is for society in general, in the wine world, the harms are relatively minor and generally outweighed by the benefits. The only real problem for me is when a twenty-something downtown bro in baggy jeans looks up from the wine list and says with absolute confidence, “we’ll have the BOO-jo-lay.”

Now, I want him to have this wine, and I want him to enjoy it without a lot of intervention on my part. I also want to correct his pronunciation, to save him future embarrassments. I can’t obviously correct him because that would harsh the vibe table-side and potentially make him look silly in front of his date, or his friends. I also can’t let him go through life speaking like this forever. So I resort to a third thing, which anyone who has spent time working in restaurants knows well: I simply repeat the order back to him, but pronounced correctly, without emphasizing the correction.

This is a micro-calculation I and my colleagues in the restaurant business have performed thousands of times. How do we make it known, without making it known? The person in front of us, dumb as they may appear, has gone out on a limb to express interest in a wine. We do not want to scold them. We do, however, want to offer an example of how someone fluent in this world speaks, because it usually seems clear that this person wants to become someone who knows what they’re talking about.

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There’s been some very good writing on Substack lately about wine, elitism, and younger drinkers, including pieces by Jim Silver, David Mastro Scheidt, and two especially strong essays from Everyday Drinking by Caroline Lamb and Jason Wilson . Together, they form a rich conversation about expertise, aspiration, alcohol culture, and the increasingly fragile social conditions under which people learn to care about anything at all; unfolding against the alcohol industry’s constant panic about why Gen Z is supposedly abandoning wine.

Silver’s piece, which prompted my own earlier essay Build a Bigger Table, Not a Dumber Wine List, argues that wine did not lose cultural relevance because it became too elitist, but because parts of the industry became embarrassed by expertise altogether. Strip away the history, ritual, specificity, and pleasure of becoming more perceptive over time, and wine simply becomes another lifestyle product competing against canned cocktails designed by branding agencies. I argued in my own piece that you can create a plurality of entry points without dumbing down wine’s complexity in the vague name of “demystification.”

I still think Silver is right. What I underestimated in my first response, however, is the degree to which younger drinkers are already demonstrating enormous appetite for complexity — just not necessarily inside institutional wine culture itself.

This is where Caroline Lamb’s piece comes in. Her central observation is almost embarrassingly obvious once stated plainly: younger drinkers are not stupid. They are not uniquely incapable of nuance, patience, curiosity, or obsession. The modern internet is basically an engine for turning ordinary people into highly specialized amateurs. Entire subcultures now revolve around espresso extraction variables, Japanese denim provenance, obscure fragrance notes, modular synthesis, and baseball stats. People willingly spend thousands of dollars and countless hours acquiring fluency inside worlds that would appear completely psychotic to outsiders. Nobody watches a man explain the infield fly rule with the intensity of a medieval theologian and concludes that baseball needs to become less elitist.

What Lamb also points out is that much of the contemporary “accessibility” discourse around wine does not actually serve wine culture so much as it serves the commercial interests of large-scale commodity producers who benefit from wine functioning as a frictionless, low-engagement consumer product. A culture that encourages people to care deeply about producer, farming, vintage variation, geography, and style is ultimately a culture that becomes harder to sell industrial sameness to. Which means some portion of the endless insistence that wine must become simpler, easier, less specific, and less serious is not really about democratization at all. It is about maintaining a consumer base trained not to look too closely.

David Mastro Scheidt David uses baseball to interrogate this tension between enthusiasm and snobbery. Wine remains unusual in that it is one of the only enthusiast cultures where expertise itself is routinely treated as vaguely suspect. A person can spend twenty minutes explaining natural-process Ethiopian coffee and be understood as passionate; explain the difference between Côte Chalonnaise and Côte de Beaune and suddenly everyone starts reaching for the word “pretentious” like it’s a fire extinguisher.

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Part of this is because wine carries the residue of class performance and social sorting in ways that many other enthusiast cultures do not. People do not merely fear being wrong about wine; they fear being revealed as the wrong kind of person around it. The anxiety is often less about taste itself than about public self-consciousness.

This is why so much contemporary wine discourse ends up trapped between two equally condescending extremes.

The older form is familiar: the weaponized wine list, the sommelier monologue delivered like an oratorio, the subtle implication that ignorance is embarrassing. But the newer form — the aggressively flattened “wine should just be fun!” posture — often arrives at an equally insulting conclusion. In an effort to appear democratic, parts of the industry now speak to younger consumers as though they are incapable of seriousness altogether. Expertise gets apologized for before it is even expressed. Complexity becomes something to disguise beneath memes, cartoon labels, and the kind of chirpy anti-snob rhetoric that increasingly resembles a children’s television host explaining orange wine to someone with a master’s degree.

The irony is that younger drinkers are already entering highly coded taste systems all the time. They are perfectly comfortable learning difficult symbolic languages online. What they reject is not expertise, but asymmetrical social and financial risk. They prefer environments where curiosity is rewarded rather than punished.

That distinction — between initiation and humiliation — increasingly feels central to the entire conversation. Every meaningful enthusiast culture contains forms of initiation. You learn terminology. You make mistakes. You slowly develop sensitivity. You acquire references. Ideally, you become more perceptive, more attentive, more capable of noticing pleasure at higher resolution. This is not oppression. This is culture. What people reject is humiliation masquerading as expertise.

And what the wine industry often misunderstands is that hospitality and aspiration are not opposites. Under current economic conditions, they probably need each other more than ever.

A glass of wine in New York now routinely costs somewhere between sixteen and thirty dollars, which means every recommendation carries actual emotional risk. Younger drinkers are navigating wine culture under radically different material conditions than the ones that produced earlier generations of aspirational dining culture. Rent is higher. Social life is more fragmented. Restaurants themselves increasingly feel overdetermined by status signaling and financial anxiety. Going out often involves the strange psychological experience of spending half your grocery budget in a room where everyone is pretending not to calculate the math in real time. Young people simply do not have a lot of extra money to spend.

Under those conditions, condescension becomes economically intolerable very quickly.

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Jason Wilson’s recent essay widens the frame. His invocation of Hilton Als’s fairly brutal Whitney Biennial review — particularly the observation that contemporary social life increasingly oscillates between isolation and managed spectacle — gets at something larger than wine marketing. Many of the institutions that once slowly inducted people into communal forms of taste and pleasure have either collapsed, become prohibitively expensive, or been replaced by algorithmically flattened substitutes. Drinking itself now exists inside a strange moral atmosphere: simultaneously aestheticized, optimized, pathologized, and distrusted.

And the answer is, of course, better hospitality.

The best sommeliers I know understand this intuitively. They do not dumb wine down, nor do they perform expertise like a dominance ritual. They create permeability. They make it possible for people to move upward into greater fluency without pretending the fluency itself is meaningless. They also understand that part of what people are paying for is permission: permission to participate in a world that still believes attention, sensitivity, and cultivated pleasure matter.

This is why I remain skeptical of any framework that treats aspiration itself as inherently exclusionary. Most people want access to richer forms of cultural life. They want to care about things. They want to become more interesting versions of themselves. The popularity of niche expertise cultures online demonstrates this constantly. (The dude ordering ‘BOO-jo-lay’ probably knows more about sports betting and no-smoke nicotine delivery systems than I ever will!) What people do not want is to feel managed, patronized, or socially punished for trying.

And this is where the contemporary anti-elitism rhetoric in wine rings hollow. In trying to make wine appear maximally accessible, parts of the industry have accidentally evacuated the category of conviction altogether. The subtext increasingly becomes: relax, none of this really matters anyway. And by the way, why aren’t you buying the cheapest and least interesting bottles anymore?

But if nothing matters, eventually everyone tunes out. Wine does not need to become less intelligent to survive. If anything, it probably needs more spaces where intelligence, pleasure, and hospitality can coexist without embarrassment.

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