Point/Counterpoint: Wine Should Be More Approachable

Point: Wine Should Be More Approachable

By Hollis Renaud, director of consumer education

We have a problem, and the problem is not the wine. The wine is better than it has ever been. The problem is that we built a wall around it out of French words and scoring systems and rules about which glass goes with what, and then we act genuinely surprised when a 28-year-old buys a seltzer instead.

Nobody is born knowing what Chablis is. I wasn’t. I learned it because somebody was kind to me across a counter in 2006 and didn’t make me feel stupid for asking.

Every one of us has watched this happen in person. Someone points at a bottle, gets corrected on the pronunciation, and never comes back. We lose them in four seconds, and then we spend $2 million on a campaign to win them back.

Take the tie off. Say “red” instead of the appellation. Put the price where a person can actually see it. Let somebody like a sweet wine without a lecture attached to it.

If this category survives the next twenty years, it will be because we made it easy to walk into. There is no version of this where we win by being harder to understand.

Counterpoint: Wine Should Be Approachable To The Right People

By Gordon Rasch, collector

Hollis makes a fine point and I don’t disagree with a word of it in principle. Wine should be welcoming. I have spent thirty years telling people exactly that.

What I would add is only that welcoming and open are two different things. A cathedral is welcoming. You still take your hat off.

The pleasure I take in a 1996 Barolo is not separable from the fourteen years I spent learning why it matters. Hand that bottle to somebody who hasn’t done the work and you haven’t democratized anything. You’ve wasted a bottle and you’ve bored a stranger.

So by all means, lower the barrier. Just not so far that everybody gets over it. There has to be some effort involved or the entire thing is worthless. Not worthless as wine. Worthless as a signal.

And that is the part I would ask Hollis to sit with honestly. When she says she wants a 28-year-old at the counter to feel welcome, what she means is that she wants him to feel the way I feel. He can’t. There is only so much room up here, I have been here since 1994, and I am not moving over so that a man in a fleece vest can tell me he likes big reds.