Darin Szilagyi, APR
Wine X Online Edition
In the 1990s, the wine industry made a bold, profitable decision that looked brilliant in the moment and got quietly expensive over time. Wine stopped being a drink and started being a personality test. It was no longer something you opened with dinner. It was something you qualified for, talked about in a special tone, and ordered like you were trying not to look dumb.
That pivot had real upside. Wine got upgraded in the cultural hierarchy. Prices rose. Prestige rose. The critic era hit full stride, scores became shorthand for legitimacy, and producers learned they could sell mystery, scarcity, and authority as a package. In the moment, wine as “art” was not just marketing. It was a working economic model.
But here is the boomerang. When you elevate a thing high enough, normal people stop reaching for it. Then, very slowly, they start reaching for something else.
This is how you wake up one day and realize a whole segment of drinkers has replaced wine with drinks that feel easier, safer, more legible, and less likely to spark a lecture. Congratulations. Wine won the 90s and then lost the kitchen table.
The 1990s prestige play, sponsored by anxiety
It is worth admitting why “wine as art” worked so well. Art has useful features if you are trying to build margin. Art is expensive. Art is exclusive. Art is mysterious in a way that can be sold as depth. Art comes with gatekeepers, and gatekeepers create ecosystems where people compete to feel like insiders. Wine did not invent those tricks, but it adopted them quickly and professionally. Frankly, at the time, I thought it was brilliant.
The problem is what that model does to the consumer. Art is not casually remixed, and it is not supposed to be. You admire art. You study it. You are careful around it. You worry whether you “get it.” You worry whether you are doing it wrong. When wine adopted the art posture, it also adopted the emotional friction that comes with it, and that friction gets worse as cultural attention spans shorten.
Wine did not become less delicious. It became higher risk. The consumer stopped thinking, “Do I want red or white,” and started thinking, “What if I pick wrong and look like an amateur.” That one thought is lethal in a modern retail and social environment where people are overloaded, time-scarce, and allergic to embarrassment. If the purchase feels like an exam, consumers choose a category that does not grade them.
Beer does not grade you. A vodka soda does not grade you. A canned cocktail does not grade you. Even a spritz feels like a template, not a trap. Wine, especially as packaged and narrated in the post-90s prestige language, too often feels like a silent judgment. The consumer experiences that judgment as anxiety, and anxiety does not drive category growth.
The irony nobody wants to say out loud
Here is the part that should annoy everyone who sells wine for a living. The people who actually make wine do not treat it like art in daily life. They drink it like a drink.
They drink it on porches. They drink it with tacos. They drink it with whatever is on the table. They open bottles on Tuesdays. They use whatever glass is clean. They do not narrate tertiary notes to their friends like they are reading a legal affidavit. Even many sommeliers, once they clock out, are not sitting at home whispering “saddle leather” to their spouse.
Behind the scenes, wine is normal. Publicly, wine got turned into a theater production where the audience is expected to clap politely and never ask why the ticket price is $110.
That disconnect matters because the consumer can smell it. They can tell when a category is being sold as untouchable, even when the makers live it as accessible. You can only sustain that kind of posture for so long before the public starts opting out.
The internet is fixing wine without asking permission
This is where the current wave of absurdity becomes important. The internet is doing what it always does. It takes stiff things and makes them ridiculous again. Wine poured over ice cream. Wine mixed into meme drinks. Pop-culture “vibes” tasting notes. No-alcohol wine presented as a serious lane. Trendy spritz culture pulling attention away from wine’s historic role as the low-ABV social drink with food.
It is tempting for wine people to be offended. It is also a mistake. These are not just jokes. They are consumers building their own user interface for wine because the industry’s interface got too complicated, too status-coded, and too easy to fail at. If wine feels like a museum, people will try to sneak snacks into it. They will also spend more time in places that do not treat them like they need credentials.
The deeper message is simple. Stop making me audition to drink a beverage.
The Wine X take: wine needs to quit cosplaying as a museum
Wine can be art. Great bottles exist. Serious winemaking exists. Beauty exists. None of that is in dispute. The issue is that wine cannot only be art if it wants to be culturally alive. Art is admired. Beverages are consumed. A category that becomes “important” but not “everyday” becomes socially optional, and socially optional is where categories go to slowly shrink.
The fix is not to abandon quality or craftsmanship. The fix is to restore normalcy and reduce friction. That means making wine legible, lowering the fear of being wrong, and designing occasions that fit real life, not just special nights. If you want wine to compete with modern drink behavior, wine has to become easier to choose, easier to talk about, and easier to enjoy without performance.
This is where my book Taste Curves pivots the conversation away from trend spotting and into the why. The “wine as art” boomerang is not just cultural. It is behavioral. Consumers live in an overload environment. They want clarity, control, and low social risk. The 1990s prestige framework optimized for expertise, scarcity, authority, and hierarchy. Those value systems do not overlap as neatly as the industry wishes they did.
Taste Curves digs into consumer research and intent data to explain the mechanism behind the opt-out, then it gets practical about solutions. That is where you move from “wine is losing relevance” to “here is how we reduce decision friction, rebuild trust, and make wine feel like life again.” This is not vague “tell better stories” advice. It is about readability in ten seconds, occasion-based choices, honest cues, and letting preference be normal instead of treated like a moral failing.
Wine does not need to become less good. It needs to become less weird.
People who get it right
The best news is that some producers never bought into the museum version of wine in the first place. They kept doing what wine has done for thousands of years: make it well, drink it normally, invite people in. They prove that you can produce serious wine without demanding reverence, and that the “porch” posture is not a downgrade. It is credibility.
Below are three producers who get it right, not because they pander, but because they refuse to confuse posture with quality.
Pestoni Family Estate: Napa without the velvet rope
If you want proof that Napa does not have to feel like a private equity presentation, you can find it at Pestoni. Napa has a talent for turning hospitality into a silent interview, where consumers feel they are being assessed for whether they belong. Pestoni is the opposite kind of confidence. It feels rooted, welcoming, and unbothered by the need to impress you with architecture, jargon, or forced mystique.
This matters because the consumer’s nervous system is the real gatekeeper. When the tone is relaxed, people ask questions without fear. They try wines without worrying they will be corrected. They buy bottles because they like them, not because they feel obligated to prove they understand them. In a category that increasingly triggers decision anxiety, that is not a small advantage. It is the whole game.
The wines can be serious without the experience being theatrical. Pestoni does not need to cosplay as a cathedral to justify quality. That is the point. Napa can be elite without being elitist, and Pestoni’s posture is a reminder that prestige is more believable when it is not begging to be recognized.
The subtext of the place, and the people, feels like this: We have been here a long time. We care about farming and craft. We are happy to share it with you. Now, do you want another pour, and do you want to take a bottle home for dinner this week? That is porch energy translated into Napa, and it is exactly the kind of cultural correction wine needs.
Smith-Madrone: mountain wine, zero theater
Smith-Madrone is the ultimate argument against wine-as-performance. High on Spring Mountain, they have every ingredient required for luxury mythology: elevation, longevity, pedigree, and the kind of quiet seriousness that could easily be wrapped in elaborate storytelling. Instead, they offer something more radical. They offer directness.
There is no tasting room theme park. There is no architectural ego flex. There is no attempt to sell you on the idea that you are standing inside history. They are not trying to seduce you with a narrative. They let the wine do what wine is supposed to do, which is taste good, age well, and make sense with food.
The tone is what separates Smith-Madrone from the 1990s art posture. The people behind the wines talk about them like craftspeople, not like curators of sacred objects. Technical when necessary, plainspoken when possible, and grounded in the reality of farming and making. That tone does something powerful: it lowers the consumer’s defensiveness. It signals that curiosity is welcome and that preference is allowed.
Smith-Madrone also demonstrates something the wine industry keeps forgetting. Seriousness does not require reverence. In fact, reverence often makes a category fragile, because it makes consumers afraid of breaking the rules. Smith-Madrone builds seriousness through reliability and integrity, which is more durable than performance.
If the future of wine belongs to credibility, not cosplay, then Smith-Madrone is already living there. They make wines that command respect, but they do not demand submission. That distinction is not a stylistic preference. It is a growth strategy.
Tablas Creek: transparency instead of posture
If the 1990s made wine mysterious on purpose, Tablas Creek has spent decades doing the opposite. Tablas does not lean into mystique. It leans into transparency, and somehow it pulls off a rare combination: academically rigorous and socially relaxed.
They talk about clones, farming choices, biodynamics, and Rhône varieties that many consumers still cannot pronounce without a warm-up lap. Yet the effect is not intimidation. The effect is invitation. They treat consumers like curious adults, not applicants to a secret club. They explain what they are doing and why, and they “show their work” in a way that modern consumers trust more than polished claims.
That is not just a brand preference. It is aligned with how trust works now. People are tired of being sold to with prestige language. They want clarity. They want the human logic behind a choice. They want brands that feel like people, not brochures. Tablas Creek delivers that without sacrificing seriousness, and that is why it resonates.
Culturally, Tablas still feels like a place where wine belongs to life. Rhône focus does not have to mean solemnity. Their work proves you can be deeply committed to craft while maintaining porch energy as your public posture. It is the kind of model that makes a consumer think, “I can enjoy this without needing permission.”
In a category fighting social optionality, Tablas Creek is a reminder that transparency is not just ethical, it is commercially smart. It reduces friction, builds confidence, and makes the consumer feel included. That is what the internet is trying to do to wine anyway. Tablas just does it on purpose and with competence.
The lesson the porch already knew
Pestoni, Smith-Madrone, and Tablas Creek are different producers with different styles and different markets. What they share is the refusal to confuse posture with quality. They treat wine as a living thing, not a museum exhibit. They make it well, then they let people enjoy it without performing intelligence.
The 1990s art narrative was not evil. It was effective. It built prestige and wealth and global recognition. It also narrowed wine’s cultural footprint by making the category feel harder, higher risk, and easier to get wrong. Over time, that posture boomeranged, and now the market is correcting it in real time, sometimes in absurd ways, because that is how culture works.
If wine wants to win back the people who quietly replaced it with something easier, it does not need to become less serious. It needs to become more normal. It needs to become easier to choose, easier to talk about, and easier to enjoy without social risk.
Wine does not need a reinvention. It needs a chair on the porch, and a little humility about what the consumer actually wants from a beverage at the end of a long day.
And if you want the deeper explanation of why this boomerang happened, along with the consumer research and practical fixes that can reverse it, that is exactly why I wrote Taste Curves. It starts with the cultural symptoms, then it goes where the industry avoids going: the actual mechanics of choice, friction, and identity, plus clear solutions that make wine feel like life again, not like an audition.
