Gen Z Isn't Killing Wine. The Wine Industry Is Doing That Itself.

Every wine conference this year has had the same ghost in the room: a twenty-six-year-old who won't buy a bottle. The trade has decided she is the reason sales are sliding, and it has been a comfortable decision, because blaming her asks nothing of anyone. The only trouble is that the data disagrees, and has done for a while.

Is Gen Z actually killing wine?

Start with the figure nobody at the panel wants to sit with. The Wine Market Council's 2025 benchmark study, built on a survey of nearly 5,000 American adults, found that Gen Z's share of wine drinkers climbed from 9% to 14%, even though only half of that generation is old enough to legally drink. Millennials, the other reliable scapegoats, have just overtaken Baby Boomers as the largest wine-drinking group in the country. And when the researchers went hunting for where consumption is genuinely falling away, the biggest erosion was not the young. It was drinkers over sixty.

Read that back. The people leaving wine are the people who were always going to age out of it. The people the industry keeps writing off are quietly growing their share. IWSR, which tracks this globally, put the wider panic in perspective too: Americans are drinking roughly as much as they have for four decades, and by the firm's own account we are "not at any sort of historic low."

“We're not at any sort of historic low.”Marten Lodewijks, President, IWSR

So the headline is wrong. "Gen Z killed wine" is a story the industry tells itself because it is easier than the alternative, which is that the problem might be sitting on its own side of the table.

Why does wine feel so complicated to younger drinkers?

Here is the part that stings. A national survey from WX Brands found that 65% of young wine drinkers think wine feels complicated. Not boring. Not unpleasant. Complicated. Two-thirds of the people already drinking the stuff are telling you the experience feels like an exam.

That is not a Gen Z failing. It is a wine marketing failing, and the industry half-admits it. Gallo's own chief commercial officer said the quiet part out loud: the wine industry "focused predominantly on premiumization and missed the consumer recruitment opportunity." In plain terms, everyone chased the expensive bottle and the ninety-five-point score, and nobody bothered to build the on-ramp. Wine spent twenty years making itself pricier and more intimidating, then looked baffled when the twenty-somethings ordered a spritz instead.

“The wine industry focused predominantly on premiumization and missed the consumer recruitment opportunity.”Britt West, Chief Commercial Officer, Gallo

The snobbery is not a rumour. It is baked into the product experience: the swirling, the sniffing, the vocabulary you apparently need a certificate to use without blushing. I have those certificates. I still think most of it is theatre. When your category's reputation is "lovely, but you're probably holding the glass wrong," you have a reach problem, and you built it with your own two hands.

Yes, I have the certificates. No, I still won't make you smell the cork.

Is this a marketing problem or an economics problem?

And yet, if we stop the story there, we have simply swapped one comfortable lie for another. "We just can't reach them" is every bit as convenient as "they don't like wine," because it shrinks a hard structural problem down to a soft branding one, the kind you can pretend to fix with a nicer Instagram grid.

Some of this is not a reach problem at all. Treasury Wine Estates estimates Gen Z has roughly 15% less disposable income than their Gen X parents did at the same age. Stack on student debt, later marriages, later mortgages, a jittery job market, and a restaurant charging 14 euro for a glass poured from a bottle it bought for 10 euro. None of that is undone by a wittier caption. You cannot storytell your way out of somebody's rent.

So the honest answer lives in the uncomfortable middle. Part of the problem really is that the industry does not know how to reach these drinkers. And part of it is that reach was never the whole story, and pretending otherwise lets everyone dodge the harder work a second time.

Do NASCAR and WWE wine deals actually reach Gen Z?

Which brings us to the current flailing. Faced with all of this, some of the biggest names in wine have concluded that the answer is simply to be everywhere the young people are. MD 20/20 became the official wine-based sponsor of the WWE. Franzia built a boxed-wine line for NASCAR. There have been Shark Week tie-ins. One executive summed up the strategy as "being less serious about ourselves, because that's what this consumer is demanding."

Perhaps. But turning up at the monster truck rally in a branded jacket is not the same as being wanted there. This is the mistake underneath the mistake: confusing reach with relevance. Being seen by millions of Gen Z wrestling fans achieves nothing if you have not given a single one of them a reason to care about what is in the glass.

Being loud has never been the same as being wanted.

How do you actually get Gen Z to drink wine?

The wineries actually pulling this off are doing something far less flashy. They are dropping the velvet rope without dumbing down the wine. Vina Robles built a "Rookie Club" that is one bottle, no obligation, no jargon, run over text message, and it filled up with drinkers in their twenties. The magic is not the format. It is the posture. Meet people where they are, tell them the truth about the wine, and let the story do the work the score used to do.

That is the whole game, and it is a wine storytelling problem long before it is a sales one. Gen Z will pay attention to wine. They already are. What they will not do is climb a ladder to reach a product that keeps informing them they are holding the glass wrong. The brands that learn to write about wine differently, with warmth instead of gatekeeping, are going to inherit a generation the rest of the trade spent three years insulting.

None of that needs a wrestling sponsorship. It needs you to know exactly who you are talking to and then, radically, to talk to them. That is the piece most of the wine industry still gets wrong, and it is the piece I spend my days on: helping wine brands turn real expertise into a digital presence that a twenty-six-year-old actually wants to read. If your winery keeps reaching people and somehow never quite landing, that gap is usually the story, not the spend.

Gen Z was never the problem. The problem is that wine kept describing itself to a room that had already left, in a language the new arrivals were never taught. Fix the language, and the room fills back up.

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Written by

Margot van Lieshout DipWSET FWS RV

Wine marketeer, sales expert with over 20 years in the trade, public speaker and international wine judge. Thousands of wines scored from Steiermark to Ningxia, and a trade she knows from the inside out. Wine with Margot is where she helps wine brands tell the stories that sell them.

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