Gen Z Doesn’t Hate Wine. It Hates the Wine List.

There is a particular moment that happens in restaurants. The cocktail menu arrives and everybody behaves like a functioning adult. Spicy Margarita: tequila, lime, chilli, agave. Excellent. I know exactly what sort of evening this drink intends to create. Then the wine list arrives. “Domaine de Something, Les Something-Else, Premier Cru, Appellation Something Contrôlée, 2022.” Suddenly dinner has become an exam, and apparently I forgot to revise.

Wine spends an extraordinary amount of time worrying about how to make itself attractive to younger drinkers. Perhaps we’re solving the wrong problem. Maybe Gen Z doesn’t hate wine. Maybe Gen Z just hates the way we sell it. Because if a 24-year-old were asked to design a restaurant wine list from scratch, with no knowledge of how these things have traditionally been organised, I find it almost impossible to believe they’d arrive at: FRANCE, BURGUNDY, CÔTE DE NUITS, GEVREY-CHAMBERTIN. It makes perfect sense to me. It probably makes perfect sense to many of you. But that’s because we’ve spent years learning the secret handshake. Someone new to wine doesn’t necessarily know that Gevrey-Chambertin means Pinot Noir, whether it’s light or heavy, whether they’ll like it, or even how to pronounce it. All they know is that it costs £120 and the waiter has returned with a little notebook. Welcome to wine.

Before everyone starts blaming TikTok and Ozempic, we should clear something up: the endlessly repeated story that Gen Z has abandoned alcohol isn’t true. IWSR data has repeatedly shown drinking participation among legal-age Gen Z rising, not falling. In the UK, participation climbed from 66% in March 2023 to 76% in March 2025, and IWSR’s July 2026 Bevtrac survey put Gen Z’s global drinking rate at 74%, up from 66% three years earlier and now nearly level with the 76% overall adult rate. In the US the shift is even starker: the share of Gen Z adults who’d drunk in the previous six months jumped from 46% in 2023 to 70% in 2025. IWSR’s president Marten Lodewijks has been blunt about it, telling the trade the idea of Gen Z as the generation of moderation is now effectively debunked. They’re drinking. They’re just not drinking like their parents did, a shift I dug into more fully in how Gen Z actually drinks.

What has changed is how, and how often. IWSR reports Gen Z now averages 3.9 drinks per occasion, down from 4.4 a year earlier, and centres alcohol on occasions rather than habit. Crucially for wine, this is a cocktail-first generation: 84% had drunk cocktails in the previous six months. They’ll happily move between categories, experiment, moderate, buy no-alcohol drinks, and choose something because it looks interesting rather than because their father ordered it for thirty years. Which hands wine an odd problem, because wine is arguably the category best equipped to satisfy exactly that curiosity. Thousands of grape varieties. Hundreds of regions. Volcanic vineyards, orange wines, wines made beside the sea, wines aged underground, wines made by monks, wines made on islands that look like somebody planted vines on the moon. Wine should be brilliant at attracting adventurous young drinkers. Instead, we hand them a geography test.

This isn’t only a vibe problem, it’s a commercial one. Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 State of the US Wine Industry report puts it bluntly: the older, wine-focused cohort is ageing out, and younger adults aren’t replacing them at the same rate. The US has lost around nine million wine drinkers since 2023, falling from roughly 85 million to 76 million adults who drink wine at least every few months. And the generation long assumed to be wine’s backbone, the Boomers, now has the lowest drinking rate of any age group. Meanwhile the Wine Market Council’s benchmark survey shows the audience quietly reshaping: Gen Z’s share of US wine drinkers grew from 9% to 14%, Millennials are now the largest single group at 31%, and Boomers have slipped to 26% from 32% in 2023. The customers are arriving. The list is what’s turning them away.

So let’s try it. Forget everything you know about restaurant wine lists. We’re opening a new restaurant tomorrow, and nobody is allowed to organise the wine by France, Italy, Spain and Rest of World. What happens? I suspect something like this.

Immediately I know what I’m buying. And here’s the interesting bit: I’ve just placed a £30 Picpoul next to a £60 Chablis and a Greek Assyrtiko the customer may never have heard of. Suddenly Assyrtiko doesn’t look frightening. It belongs to a family. If you like this sort of wine, try this one. Wine discovery has begun, and nobody required a map of France.

That’s it. No master’s degree required. You ordered a steak, you want something big and red, and here are four increasingly irresponsible financial decisions. Enjoy yourself.

This section alone might introduce more people to interesting red wine than another thousand articles explaining the cru system of Burgundy, and it quietly opens the door to the great reds of Italy without anyone feeling examined.

These are the bottles that arrive at the table and make somebody ask “what is that?” They’re expensive. They’re interesting. They’re probably going on Instagram. We may not like that last sentence. It doesn’t make it untrue.

This section needs to exist immediately, and it needs to explain what orange wine actually tastes like instead of offering three producer names, two vineyard names and the type of clay vessel involved. Let people choose their own adventure.

This might be my favourite section. I have just redesigned the entire Champagne section of every restaurant in London, and you’re welcome. If you want the actual bottles behind those jokes, they live in my best Champagne guide, and the “someone else is paying” tier is basically my Cristal write-up in menu form.

Wine lists sometimes use phrases like “Value Selection,” and I hate it, it sounds like supermarket bin bags. Call it what people are actually thinking: great wine under £40. There’s no shame in wanting to know what something costs, particularly when restaurant markups mean ordering badly can turn a mediocre Tuesday dinner into a mortgage application. It’s the same instinct behind my cheap wine that punches above its price, and the evidence that expensive doesn’t reliably mean better.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Describe the sweetness, the acidity, the fruit, and translate it into the language people already speak, because this is a generation where 84% drank a cocktail in the last six months. Wine people may find this slightly horrifying. I find it extremely sensible. Cocktail drinkers aren’t philistines; they’re consumers who’ve become accustomed to menus explaining what drinks taste like before they order them. Radical concept. This is also the natural on-ramp from Prosecco to Crémant and beyond.

This is where the sommelier gets to have fun. But instead of “Envínate Benje Tinto, Ycoden-Daute-Isora,” give me one more line: “smoky, light-bodied red grown in volcanic soil in Tenerife, Pinot Noir drinkers, pay attention.” Now I want it. That extra sentence could be the difference between somebody ordering the wine and scrolling straight past because they have no idea what they’re looking at. And exploring Crémant or a volcanic red is exactly the kind of discovery this generation actually says it wants.

Here’s where the traditional wine world misunderstands the argument. Making wine easier to understand doesn’t mean making wine simpler, it could do the exact opposite. Give an inexperienced drinker a traditional 100-bottle list and watch what happens: they find something they recognise, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, Malbec, Prosecco, maybe Whispering Angel, and decide. Not because those wines are better, but because recognition feels safe. Now organise the same wines by flavour. Sauvignon Blanc suddenly sits beside Albariño, Verdejo and Assyrtiko; Pinot Noir beside Frappato and Gamay; Prosecco points someone towards Crémant. The supposedly dumbed-down list has just made the customer more adventurous. That’s the joke: perhaps all the expertise we’ve packed into wine lists has accidentally made wine harder to explore. And the trade is starting to notice, sommeliers quoted in the recent IWSR coverage describe Gen Z’s indifference to the appellation system having a “bottom-up” effect, nudging even older drinkers towards less familiar grapes and places.

Look at a modern restaurant menu. Food descriptions tell you ingredients. Cocktail lists tell you spirits, flavours and the style of drink. Craft beer menus tell you whether something is hazy, hoppy, tropical, sour or strong enough to make tomorrow morning unnecessarily difficult. Wine? We give you the producer, the region, the appellation, the vintage, occasionally the vineyard. All useful, but we forget the most basic question: what is this going to taste like? Obviously wine can’t be reduced entirely to “crispy white” and “big red,” nor should it be. Burgundy matters. Vintages matter. Producers, vineyards, terroir, all matter, and understanding why two vineyards separated by a small road produce dramatically different wines is one of the great joys of falling for this stuff. But perhaps you earn the right to teach someone all of that after you’ve persuaded them to order the bottle.

Gen Z’s imaginary list would almost certainly fix another peculiarity: no-alcohol wine would stop living in exile. Traditionally the alcohol-free options are treated like something faintly embarrassing, wine, wine, wine, fine wine, Champagne, dessert wine, and then, somewhere near the back, “NON-ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES,” next to elderflower cordial and Diet Coke. That increasingly makes no sense. No-alcohol wine is growing fast as moderation becomes a normal part of drinking rather than an ideological position, and the same IWSR research notes Gen Z is the generation most likely to actually follow official health guidance. So put it on the bloody list: “Not Drinking Tonight But Still Want a Proper Glass of Something.” There, fixed that too, and my best non-alcoholic wines guide will stock the section.

Whenever someone suggests making wine more approachable, part of the wine world gets nervous: we mustn’t dumb it down. Agreed, we shouldn’t. But explaining something clearly isn’t dumbing it down. A great teacher can explain quantum physics without demanding you understand quantum physics before you walk into the classroom. Wine sometimes does the opposite: it presents the syllabus and wonders why nobody enrolled. Gen Z doesn’t need wine to become less complicated, its complexity is precisely what makes it extraordinary. Keep Burgundy. Keep Barolo. Keep the obscure grapes, the growers, the vintages, the soils, the climates and the slightly deranged producers who make this world so fascinating. I don’t want wine turned into twelve colourful icons and an emoji, although now that I’ve written that, somebody in California has almost certainly raised £8 million to do exactly that.

WRITTEN BY VIM, EDITOR OF 12×75. Please drink responsibly.