A Bootlegger of Positivity
I want to be a glimmer of hope in this industry because I don’t want my career to become a highlight reel of only good times in the past.
Lately I have found myself incredibly frustrated by the beverage industry. An industry that I’ve been in for 20+ years that has taken me to some of them most wonderful places around the world, introduced me to some of the most creative, inspiring, supportive, insightful and fun people. An industry that has provided for me and my family for multiple decades now. But the narrative around the industry right now is making me disheartened. And I hate feeling this way.
I noticed this feeling started last year when all the articles were coming out about wine and health or alcohol and health. These big glaring headlines that pretty much implied if you took one sip of alcohol your liver would shrivel up, disease would plague your every cell, and your life was destined to be a place of misery. It was awful and as each article came out, the mood of the industry started having a very large dark cloud over it. The stress and pressure we are facing and the scrutiny we are put under by our own companies was one thing (that comes with any job), but now it’s trickling out into mainstream media, and we can’t escape feeling like we were being examined under a microscope. Let me tell you, it’s exhausting.
Years ago, the conversation revolved around, “What do we about the millennials?” and now it’s, “What do we do about Gen Z.” I literally feel like for the last 10 years in the industry, the sky has been falling. And then there is today’s latest article “Are We There Yet? Wine’s Search for Rock Bottom”. The article goes on to interview some very well-respected analysts and one of them, Joe Moramarco is an optimist, but the sentiment is still the same. We’re fucked. We’re all fucked. Right?
Wrong.
I want to be a glimmer of hope in this industry because I don’t want my career to become a highlight reel of only good times in the past. I want to feel like (and help build) good times for the future. I’m not denying there are challenges. But isn’t that what being human is about? How do we rise up during the times of hardship and develop our resiliency? Maybe I feel akin to a bootlegger of the prohibition era. I’m willing to sneak around and share a message of positivity instead of negativity. And that’s the hardest part. Negativity is SO loud. It is the killer of all things. Don’t confuse my positivity with naivety though. There are real world and real time problems, I know.
But where are the solutions? To learn how to predict the future you have to look at the past. In the past we had great swings of ups and downs, prosperity and stagnation. I feel like so people making the most noise about the problems, generations etc., aren’t even the people in those generations. We have taken this “nose down” perspective of age to declare all the things of the next generations. But there was truth in the statement that Joe Moramarco said, “Gen Z is between 12 and 26 right now. Gen Z seems anti-alcohol. The 23, 24, 25 year olds, about the same percentage (as older generations) say they drink, but they say they're drinking less. I think in the future they might start drinking more. Once they get married and have kids, their kids will drive them to drink. It's a joke but there's truth to it.”[i]
So, Gen Z is anti-alcohol now, yes, but one of the problems isn’t that they are drinking less it’s that the sheer size of these generations is greater that the boomers and the Gen X’ers. Have we looked at real time numbers like apples to apples of the size of each generation and then compared the numbers? Are we still that off base? And if we aren’t, what are we doing to meet this generation where they are at?
I sit in conference after conference and listen to trends about cocktails and mixed drinks. It’s like no one wants to even talk about wine anymore because we don’t even know what to say. We got into this habit of letting the “experts” dictate how we spoke about, and how we drank, wine. Somewhere along the way we completely ostracized the common everyday drinker and then we ignored the ways in which they approach food and wine.
I recently finished watching “The House of Guiness” (a fun, if not embellished series) about the Guiness family. And while I enjoyed the series, the one thing that stood out to me in every episode was that they drank wine out of these wonderful, beautiful glasses. I’m sure my husband got sick of me pointing out in every scene “look at how pretty that is” or “I’d drink wine out of that”.
I was at a friend’s house this weekend and she poured her Sauv. Blanc into an 8oz mason jar type of glass and then put ice in it. Did I scoff at how she was drinking it? No, I was thrilled that on a Sunday at noon she was having wine. Did you know that 19-23% (depending on the varietal) of wine drinkers like their wine over ice?[ii]
My daughter moved into her first apartment this fall, and we went to the Anthropologie outlet to shop. She made a beeline for their wall of colorful and pretty glassware and proceeded to picked put purple and gold etched wine glasses. They were gorgeous and I said, “you don’t care about drinking wine out of a non-traditional wine glass?”
Her response, “No. These will low-key look fire on my table when I host dinner parties.”
Do I even need to tell you what generation my daughter is with a response like that?
Somewhere along the way, we [collectively] decided that the only way to enjoy wine was out of a Riedel or Schott glass, except what do you think the average bottle cost is of a wine on a BTG menu? $8 dollars? $10? 12? And then how much does that glassware cost. If we set a restaurant table and the cost of the glassware is more than the total bottle cost of the wine, doesn’t that become a lopsided equation too?
In the last few days there have been a multitude of articles about the launch of the Starbucks “Bearista” mug, and it has sent consumers into a FRENZY. People lost their minds over it. It was cute and fun and guess what, it looks great in pictures. Do you think they cared that their coffee was no longer in the traditional paper cup? Hell no. So why does our wine still need to be in a traditional wine glass?
Look, I’m not saying I am turning a blind eye to the increasingly long list of challenges life, the economy and more are presenting to us. I’m saying if Bartles and James can sit on a porch in their rocking chairs and drink wine coolers at 70+ years of age, it’s not too late to start to change the narrative around our occasions. We all started our lives drinking grape juice out of pouches (hello Capri Sun), so why can’t we turn the conversation around and try to make drinking wine fun?
The industry doesn’t need another panic headline or another doomsday panel; it needs people willing to carry the torch of joy again. If that means drinking Sauvignon Blanc over ice or out of a mason jar, so be it. I’ll happily be the bootlegger of positivity, smuggling optimism into a world that could use a refill. Here’s to rewriting the story—one glass at a time.
[i] Gray, W. Blake, Are We There Yet? Wine’s Search for Rock Bottom, www.wine-searcher.com, November 11, 2025.
[ii] McClennan, Colleen, Navigating What’s Next in Wine & Spirits [PowerPoint Slides], SommCon, San Diego September 8, 2025, www.datassentials.com.
Take time to celebrate the wins no one sees…