Why Isn’t Wine a Moving Day Beverage?

How people drink wine is so at odds with how it's marketed.

This past weekend, I helped my dad pack up our family home in Pasadena as he prepared to move to the Central Coast to be closer to me. This house has been in our family for nearly 60 years. It’s the house my dad grew up in, and the house my sister and I grew up in. The move was filled with complicated emotions—nostalgia, gratitude, and a bit of survivor’s guilt, knowing our neighborhood was one of the few that remained standing after the fire in January.

Knowing all of this, I went to Mission Wine & Spirits in Altadena and picked up a couple of special bottles to toast the end of this chapter. We opened Champagne because, obviously, Champagne is the celebration wine. But we also opened a bottle of Vouvray—something to enjoy for itself, with food, and because we are a household that likes wine as much as beer.

In the way of moving, only a motley collection of drinkware remained unpacked, so we drank our Champagne and Vouvray out of tumblers, mason jars, and a homemade coffee mug while eating pizza off paper towels (because the dishware was packed, too).

And as we sat there, surrounded by the holes in the walls where art used to hang and the ghosts of decades of memories, I thought: This is how people actually drink wine.

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The Disconnect Between How Wine is Marketed and How People Actually Drink It

When scrolling through the Instagrams of most wineries, you’ll see a lot of beautifully staged tables, perfectly plated meals, and pristine glassware. The lighting is always golden. The pours are always just right. The models’ hair is always coiffed, and their fits are fire.

But that’s so at odds with how people enjoy wine on the day-to-day. People really do drink wine out of mason jars on moving day. They open a bottle after getting home from work and take a quick swig from the bottle while deciding what to make for dinner. They take it camping, pour it into enamel coffee mugs (or in my case, out of the top of my Thermos), and pair it with whatever snacks they grabbed at the last gas station.

That gap between the polished, aspirational version of wine marketing and the messy, casual way people actually drink it is such a missed opportunity.

Wine doesn’t need to be decanted and paired with a five-course meal to be worth drinking. It can be the thing you pour when you finally sit down after packing boxes all day. The bottle you open when you need a moment of quiet on your back porch. The drink you reach for just because you feel like it.

But how often do we see wineries actually talking about those moments?

How Wineries Can Tap Into These Occasions

Beer has this figured out. There’s beer for tailgates, golfing, fishing trips, and yes—moving day. Beer marketing is great at making the drink feel accessible and like it belongs in real life. Wine, on the other hand, still carries the rather heavy weight of tradition and ceremony. I mean, ‘Tastings’ columnists, Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, at The Wall Street Journal had to create a whole holiday (Open That Bottle Night) just to get people to stop hanging onto wine for “only” special occasions for fuck’s sake!

But as I watched my brother-in-law play a live game of tetris with my family’s old bookshelf, I kept wondering what it would look like for wineries to lean into the real moments people drink their wine?

• Instead of just romantic date night or holiday dinner, what about post-yardwork wine? Tuesday night, what’s-in-the-fridge wine? Ah, shit, the power just went out wine?

• Instead of another very staged tablescape, what about a photo of a bottle on a cluttered kitchen counter, half-drunk, next to a bag of takeout?

• Instead of pairing guides full of foie gras and duck confit, what about a fast food and wine pairing series? (Fuck me, I LOVE a high brow, low brow moment.)

There are some wineries who have touched on this a bit:

Canned wine company Alloy Wine Works did a post about drinking wine in your garden with your chickens:

alloywineworks

A post shared by @alloywineworks

Foxen has a few posts showing wines being enjoyed on a camping trip:

foxenwines

A post shared by @foxenwines

One of my first photoshoots with Camins 2 Dreams involved eating cheese and drinking wine in the back of their pickup truck during peak allergy season:

craftandcluster

A post shared by @craftandcluster

All I am saying is there’s a huge opportunity to reposition wine as something that fits into everyday life, in all of its beautiful, chaotic, unpolished moments. I think that’s something the younger generation would really appreciate as well.