Hopes of the wine industry rest on millennial shoulders

I recently received a news release and some samples of a “new, edgy” brand of wines called TXT Cellars. The line included the following four bottles:

OMG!!! Chardonnay

(Vision Wine and Spirits) - OMG!!! Chardonnay from TXT Cellars.

LOL!!! Riesling

LMAO!!! Pinot Grigio

WTF!!! Pinot Noir

The punctuation is included, and I am not making this up. The marketing material talked about how these wine were “unpretentious” and “easy to relate to,” and how their tasting notes avoided “wine geek talk” because “We don’t like wine geeks.” Ahem.

Recommendations: Gateway wines for millennials

TXT Cellars certainly isn’t the only wine company targeting millennials these days. Brands such as Cupcake Vineyards and Middle Sister Wines and the multicolored store displays of the HobNob line make no secret as to their target demographic.

But it isn’t just cutesy brands. I hear a lot of chatter these days about marketing wine to millennials. Many believe this enormous generation, ages 21 to 30, will be the saviors of the wine industry.

Market research seems to back that up. In late January, the nonprofit Wine Market Council released a survey showing that millennials most closely mirror what the council terms “high-end wine buyers” (meaning people of all ages who buy bottles priced at more than $20 at least once a month). Like high-end wine buyers, millennials are more likely than other demographics to try wines they’ve never heard of before, more likely to consult wine reviews and more likely to visit wine bars. Millennials also consume more wine per occasion and use Twitter and Facebook overwhelmingly more to talk about the wines they drink.

“Millennials are drinking more wine and better wine at a young age than any other generation has,” says Leah Hennessy, owner of Millennier, a marketing and design firm based in Los Angeles that works with wineries to reach millennials.

This is all very exciting for people in the industry who hope millennials will lead an adventurous new age of wine consumption: caring about both quality and value; championing hip grapes such as gruner veltliner, carmenere and Riesling instead of old standbys such as Chardonnay, pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon; and challenging, once and for all, the stuffy wine establishment.

Still, when I hear this high-minded talk of millennial wine drinkers, I often think about the university students I teach, who mainly fall at the younger end of the Millennial generation. Lots of my students have studied abroad and are more educated about, with more fully formed opinions on, what they eat and drink than those in my generation at the same age. However, another segment of my millennial students told me about something called slap the bag. This is a drinking game in which the bag of wine is removed from, say, a box of Franzia. The bag is held high, and everyone slaps the bag while someone chugs from the spout. The harder the slap, the bigger the chug.

Now, I make no judgment. But my point here is that the true wine-drinking nature of a generation as vast as the millennials probably falls somewhere between that of the educated, high-end wine buyer and those who play slap the bag.