On a balmy late summer night, Frog, a natural wine bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was a busy place. Couples occupied the small tables lining one wall and the pool table was hopping. A bartender poured tastes of a red wine from Andrea Calek, a vigneron in the Ardèche region of France, to two women who were deciding what to order. In the big back yard, the picnic tables were packed. A happy buzz drifted upward into the night sky.
The crowd was made up almost entirely of people in their 20s and 30s, the millennials and Gen Z-ers whom the wine industry complains have turned their backs on wine. Yet nearly all of them were drinking wine. Natural wine.
Over the last couple of years, as I’ve traveled around North America and Europe, I’ve tried to keep my eyes on what young adults were drinking. Almost everywhere I’ve been, the sorts of restaurants and wine bars like Frog that attract a younger clientele are filled with people who are drinking natural wine.
At the same time, the entire wine industry has suffered. Sales post-pandemic are down while health concerns over alcoholic beverages have caused people to question their habits. Alongside, and perhaps inevitably, people have wondered if wine is no longer cool among young people.
My impressionistic response, bolstered by conversations with natural wine importers, retailers and restaurateurs, is that large segments of the wine market are in fact uncool. But natural wine is not one of them.
“They’re excited about wine, but they come in with preconceived ideas of what certain grapes are,” said Alexandra McCown, 35, an owner of Frog. “It’s kind of hard to sell a chardonnay. Everybody has their idea of what it is because their moms were drinking it.”
At Easy Does It near Logan Square in Chicago, a bar and retail shop that skews younger the later it gets, natural wines are largely the drinks of choice, along with beer and agave spirits.
“I see a lot of young folks drinking wine, said Zack Eastman, 39, an owner. “They’re also way more conscious about what they put in their bodies. The younger generation is leaning far more into low-intervention wines.”
Steven Graf, a natural wine importer based in Ridgewood, Queens, agrees that health concerns have drawn younger people to natural wines.
“I think people are being turned on to natural wines from Goop culture, wellness and the focus on natural products,” he said.
Though his business has hit speed bumps in the last couple of years, he said things for him were far less dire than it seems for the conventional wine industry.
“I’m pretty happy with our numbers,” he said. “I don’t share this sort of doom and gloom attitude.”
From its modern origins in Beaujolais and the Loire Valley in the late 20th century, natural wines, farmed without chemical fertilizers and sprays and made into wine with minimal manipulations and additions, were a natural fit with younger people.
Natural wine was rebellious and countercultural. Like children zeroing in on their parents’ foibles, natural wine mocked the pretensions and self-importance of the conventional wine industry.
It was never an organized movement but rather a diverse group of like-minded producers spreading globally from France. They all made very different sorts of wines but shared a distaste for authority and the priorities of a commercial culture. This has a particular appeal for the youngest generation of wine drinkers.
“There’s just a casual nature to Gen Z,” said Joe Hirsch, an owner of Terrestrial Wine Company, a natural wine importer and distributor in New York. “I was born in 1990. There’s just this eye roll of, ‘Dude, loosen your tie a little.’”
He contrasts them with an older generation of wine lovers, typified by a heightened expectation of formal knowledge and ready expertise.
“There was this somm attitude like, ‘If you can’t name all 13 grapes of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, get out of the room,’” he said. “If you interact with anybody in their 20s, that’s just not what they are looking for. Natural wine is fundamentally anti-bling. I like the fact that it doesn’t have this air of exclusion about it.”
In my experience, most wine drinkers, regardless of their age, don’t know much about wine beyond the fact that they enjoy it. Young wine bar patrons in New York whom I’ve spoken with about their tastes seem no different. Most are drawn to natural wine, though they are not sure exactly what it is. “Less toxic? Less artificial?” said one women who refused to identify herself. More important was the atmosphere and attitude of the staff.
At Frog, it did seem as if the casually welcoming vibe was as much of an attraction as the wine. Marie Vencil and Phelize Bristol, both 27, were both enjoying a Laurent Lebled sauvignon blanc from the Loire Valley in the yard as Ms. Vencil’s dog, Bandit, crouched under the table.
“I do like wine but I don’t know anything about it,” Ms. Vencil said. She said the staff had then helped them select their bottle. “They gave us tastes, I liked that.”
Natural wine may be a bright spot in a dimming wine world, but it cannot avoid the forces that are affecting all alcoholic beverages.
“It’s an economic and political shift, it has nothing to do with wine,” said Jorge Riera, the wine director at Frenchette, Le Rock and Le Veau d’Or in Manhattan, destination restaurants that pioneered the mainstreaming of natural wines. “I speak to so many people face to face, and they are spending less and drinking less.”
Even so, for younger people, Mr. Hirsch said, natural wine stands out from other options. “The world is serious, it’s depressing, and if your young adult life was messed up by the pandemic, natural wine is a little more fun and welcoming,” he said.
Established importers of natural wines seem to be doing well compared with more conventional wine businesses, although sales in bottles, which come almost entirely from small producers, might number in the thousands rather than the millions of bottles sold by big companies.
At Zev Rovine Selections and Jenny & François Selections, two longtime natural wine importers and distributors, sales are still climbing, though perhaps not at the dizzying rate of before and during the pandemic.
“We’re growing at a steady and standard pace,” Mr. Rovine said. “I know alcohol consumption is declining, but natural wine represents under 1 percent of production so I don’t think that data is relevant to us.”
For Jenny Lefcourt of Jenny & François, the end of the pandemic brought sort of a return to normality.
“We used to see 35 percent growth multiple years in a row,” she said. “Now, it’s like 5 to 10 percent. We had so much inventory after the pandemic, it’s sort of readjusted.”
But she did highlight a couple of differences. Jenny & François was not selling as much of their pricier wines as they once did, she said, and the public was no longer tolerant of the sorts of flawed bottles that the conventional wine industry has gleefully seized on to ridicule natural wine.
Jennifer Green of Super Glou, a newer importer, said she was still selling a lot of natural wine but had to work harder and more creatively, presenting her wines with pizza pop-ups or musical events. Much of the slowdown was related to the pandemic, she believes, but she also cites other factors.
“With inflation, going out to dinner became daunting,” she said. “And there’s a general malaise about the ongoing wars and the political uncertainty in the U.S. and elsewhere.”
Real world factors strike different parts of the country in culturally and economically specific ways. Before the pandemic, Los Angeles had been a hotbed of natural wine consumption. Partly that was because it seemed trendy, which holds immense sway in the belly of the entertainment industry. But the screenwriters strike in 2023 was a huge economic blow on top of what was affecting people nationally.
“It’s been a difficult year for me and for all areas of hospitality,” said Jill Bernheimer, whose wine shop, Domaine LA, has championed natural wines for 15 years.
She remembers just a few years ago when $90 bottles of natural wine would fly off the shelves. “That moment is no longer,” she said. “People want affordable bottles more than anything else, $20 to $30.”
Ms. Lefcourt of Jenny & François sees that as well.
“Costs have gone up for producers,” she said. “Electricity in Germany and Austria is insane, glass and corks are up, but people’s salaries are the same, so they’re not able to access the same wines.”
While the market for natural wine continues to skew younger, Ms. Bernheimer said the Los Angeles market was maturing and no longer chasing the latest thing.
“There was a sneaker-drop mentality, everybody seemed to need a certain winemaker or bottle,” she said. “People seem to have moved beyond needing what’s fashionable.”
Regardless of the current difficulties, Ms. Bernheimer is optimistic enough to be planning to open a restaurant in Los Angeles, inspired by places in Paris that she loves, all natural wine destinations.
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