We Need to Stop Talking About How Shit the Wine Industry Is Doing
Because every time we say “wine is dying,” the world believes us.
Last week I learned a new-to-me term: Henny Penny. It’s in reference to Chicken Little, who runs around saying that the sky is falling!
This term came to me while scrolling through LinkedIn (as one does), where a commenter was responding to yet another post saying something along the lines of, “this is why the wine industry is dying.”
My dad sends me articles all the time about how the wine industry is crashing, but what’s wild is that many of these articles aren’t coming from trade journalists. They’re coming from mainstream outlets that consumers read. But the reason those stories exist in the first place is because we wine folks keep telling anyone who will listen that the wine industry is going to shit right now.
How do you say, “The Doom Cycle” in French?
Barbara Gorder, whom I recently interviewed for the Wine Marketing Podcast, summed this up well in a comment about James Silver’s article Wine Isn’t Suffering from Elitism:
“I think that people in the business and specifically wine writers are in a doom cycle. This does lead to a lack of consumer confidence. It’s a version of the old adage, ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ The inundation of the negative affects the market — it’s neither silly nor unrealistic.”
In other words, if all people see is doom and gloom about wine, of course, they’ll start to lose confidence in it.
Silver, who is the CSO for WineDirect Fulfillment and author of The Post Pandemic Wine Market, responded to Barbara by arguing that it’s not that deep:
“Us sitting here talking to each other is not eroding confidence, or even moving the broad market’s needle whatsoever. It’s an echo chamber. We didn’t create the negativity. We must face it squarely and realize, we are going to get smaller as an industry. It was never about us anyway — it was always about them.”
In his original article, Silver also makes a broader argument: that wine lost something important when it tried too hard to be ordinary. In chasing accessibility, the industry often strips away the history, geography, artistry, and complexity that makes wine feel aspirational. His point is that what sets wine apart isn’t that it’s “easy,” it’s that it’s layered, mysterious, and worth leaning into.
I don’t disagree with him. Complexity, heritage, and the whole gosh dang romantic nature of it all are part of what makes wine so special, and stripping it of that entirely risks making it feel ordinary. But mystique only works if people care in the first place.
And that’s where the doom cycle becomes dangerous: if all consumers ever hear is that wine is failing, they won’t stick around long enough to be inspired by the mystery.
That’s why Tyler Balliet, author of Rebel School of Wine, pushed back on Silver’s ‘echo chamber’ idea, because those doom-and-gloom messages aren’t staying inside the echo chamber. They’re seeping out into lifestyle media, where consumers are paying attention.
“Where do you think lifestyle media got the idea that ‘wine is dying’ and ‘no one is drinking wine anymore’? Editors at places like The Cut, Betches, or Cosmopolitan are not combing through 10-year market data. They’re picking it up from us. From industry executives and winery owners saying ‘wine is dead.’ Based on these rumors, editors are passing on wine content altogether.”
She goes on to compare it to Google: if employees kept posting that “Google is dead,” the stock would tank overnight, regardless of reality. Rumors can crash companies and drag down industries.
About that On-Ramp
And if negativity is keeping consumers from even showing up, then the next question is, how do we actually get them in the door? That’s where the idea of an on-ramp comes in.
Jessah Diaz, Director of DTC at Cakebread Cellars, put it beautifully in her own comment on Silver’s article:
“There needs to be an on ramp. Finding ways to be more inclusive doesn’t mean losing the education or mystique. It means becoming more refined in how we meet people where they are. If I am a consumer new to wine and hear about loamy soil on my first experience, are you actually speaking to me? Or are you creating a world I do not feel a part of? We don’t teach kids to write full words before they know the alphabet, and yet in wine we start explaining carbonic maceration to people who don’t know the ABCs.”
Without that on-ramp, the wine industry is just talking to itself. This is something I talked about in my article, “Not Everyone Wants to be a Wine Geek.” If we don’t meet people at their starting point, we risk losing them before they ever get a chance to fall in love with the mystery of wine.
And this is where the negativity becomes especially damaging. If consumers aren’t given an accessible entry point and all they hear is that wine is dying, why would they bother to stick around?
The Power of Suggestion
This is why I keep saying: the call is coming from inside the house.
Believe what you will about manifesting, but the power of suggestion is real. When enough voices in wine say “wine is dying,” the world will believe it. And then they’ll act on it. Journalists will stop writing, and consumers will stop caring.
And to be very clear here, we should NOT bury our heads in the sand. Wine is struggling for so many reasons, but maybe we need to start with reframing it internally.
Wine isn’t dead or dying, but it sure as shit is changing.
So, maybe we should stop talking about it like it’s already in the grave and find ways to reframe it for ourselves so that when the Cosmopolitans and the Betches of the world go sniffing for a story, we’re not giving them a reason to turn away.
Instead of “wine is dead,” we could instead acknowledge THE TRUTH, BY THE WAY, that “wine is evolving.” Instead of “no one cares,” we acknowledge that “we need better on-ramps.”
The TL;DR
So, here is where I land on this: the wine industry as we know it is indeed different. It’s also still alive and still worth believing in (and romantacising). If we want consumers to keep caring, we need to stop feeding journalists (and by extension, consumers) the doom and gloom narrative (Le Cycle Catastrophique??)
And that doesn’t mean we ignore the problems. It DOES mean that we talk about them responsibly, with an eye toward solutions.
Because if we keep running around like Henny Penny shouting the sky is falling, don’t be surprised when people stop looking up at the sky at all. (In this analogy ‘sky’ = ‘wine’)