What if there had been a way to predict the decline in the US wine market? What if there had been readily available statistics a decade ago that hinted at the beginning of the end of the country’s wine boom, as well as the eventual drop in demand and younger consumer’s indifference to wine?
There may well have been: The long, steady fall in White Zinfandel sales. At one time, White Zin — the sweet pink stuff that isn’t rosé that is almost exclusive to the US — may have accounted for one in four bottles of wine sold in the US That was in 1993, when it was even more popular than Cabernet Sauvignon and still hadn’t reached its peak in terms of volume or market share.
Today, though, White Zin is barely a footnote, just another sub-$10 wine whose sales keep shrinking, and whose sales have fallen by almost 8% in the past year or so.
White Zin — the sweet pink stuff that isn’t rosé that is almost exclusive to the US — may have accounted for one in four bottles of wine sold in the US.
Why White Zin? Because it was the quintessential Baby Boomer wine — inexpensive, easy to drink, and without any of the pretentiousness that scared so many others away from wine. If it wasn’t the mythical entry level wine — there’s little evidence white Zin Drinkers did much trading up — it still introduced millions of consumers to wine.
And what happened when the Boomers, who were the most important demographic in the history of US wine, started to age and drink less (as well as to die)? White Zin’s sales seemingly followed that same downward trajectory.
Does it sound familiar?
“You know, I watched that happen while it was happening,” says Napa-based wine marketer Tim McDonald, who worked at white zin powerhouse Sutter Home in 2001 and 2002. “It happened slowly, but it happened. Younger drinkers just didn’t like that style of wine. So no, it’s not an outlandish theory at all.”
A caveat: Not everyone is convinced there’s something worth noting here. Several analysts interviewed for this story were more than skeptical that any sort of relationship exists between wine’s US slump and White Zinfandel’s decline; wines go in and out favor all of the time, they said, noting the rise and fall of Moscato and even rosé in the US.
“I don’t see the fall in White Zinfandel as a predetermination of tough times,” says Silicon Valley Bank’s Rob McMillan. “Because of the population size moving through time, we can see the evolution of palates from [flavored wine coolers like] Bartles & Jaymes to White Zinfandel, to buttery Chardonnay, to drier Chardonnay, to Merlot, and then Cabernet. So to me, if there was something predictive about White Zinfandel, it was that a huge number of consumers were adopting wine and would continue on their palate evolution for 40 years.”
Perhaps. But few other wines enjoyed such a long heyday — some two decades — and such overwhelming popularity, but then declined so precipitously.
As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2003: “… from the early 1980s until the late 1990s, it was the most popular varietal in the United States, supplanted by Chardonnay in 1998. Although sales of White Zinfandel have dropped since its heyday, Trinchero still sells 4.5 million cases of it a year and says the category is an $800 million annual business, with Sutter Home and Beringer Vineyards the major volume players.”
The birth of a phenomenon
Ironically, White Zinfandel was a mistake, famously made when Sutter Home’s Bob Trinchero realised that a lot of Zinfandel had unintentionally gone through stuck fermentation, which left the wine with a pinkish hue and more than twice the residual sugar of a typical dry red wine. This event, not quite 50 years ago, came when rosé was almost unheard of in the US and pink wines were called ‘blush’.
In fact, white zin was such a category leader that it spawned white Merlot at the turn of the century (apparently, reported the New York Times, to soak up an excess of California Merlot), as well as products like pink Moscato and pink Pinot Grigio. And it had such an overwhelming presence that many consumers and retailers referred to two kinds of Zinfandel — white and red, as in, “No, I don’t like red Zinfandel. Do you have any White Zin?”
Yet, by 2013, White Zin accounted for just 4% of the US wine market by volume. The size of the market was much bigger, by about a scale of five, but even that increase doesn’t account completely for the decline. For example, Cabernet’s volume percentage of the market stayed about the same.
By 2013, White Zin accounted for just 4% of the US wine market by volume.
Rather, the US wine market had started the demographic change that it is dealing with today. In 2010, reports Wine Intelligence, 28% of what it defined as “regular” US wine drinkers were aged 21-34. By 2018, that figure had dropped to 18%. In other words, as younger consumers drank less wine, white zin’s sales declined, even though the overall market had grown substantially.
One telling number is that in 2018, just 22% of those aged 18 to 29 years said that they had bought White Zinfandel in the past three months.
Few people noticed this at the time. In 2013, a Nielsen analyst reiterated that wine “tends to attract upper income consumers and all legal drinking age groups,” while one of the leading wine consultancies issued a report that said US consumption would likely expand during the next decade, and that wine is “attracting new consumers and boosting consumption.” The reasons were “favorable demographics” and “a widening consumer base.”
Which didn’t exactly happen.
In fact, if the wine zin decline was noticed at all, it was because it was infamous as the wine that the wine business loved to hate (all the way to the bank, of course). Who could forget “Friends don’t let friends drink White Zinfandel,” a takeoff on the anti-drunk driving slogan, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” One wine website, discussing the White Zin decline, was blunt: White Zin wasn’t considered “real wine,” so consumers were shifting to more dry and traditional wines like Chardonnay and rosé — ignoring the fact that many of the most popular of those wines were made in California, sometimes with stuck fermentation, and often included higher residual sugar.
“We overthink the drinking ladder and about where people go next,” says McDonald. “There’s no evidence they start at $10 and then move up the price ladder, going from White Zin to red Burgundy. They drink what they like, whether it’s wine or beer or cocktails. And the new, younger drinkers just didn’t like White Zinfandel.”
How the market has changed
If this is true, it speaks to choice and how the entire alcohol market has changed in the past decade given that consumers have more choices than ever. One thing most analysts do agree on: Wine’s demographic changes are inextricably linked to those increases in drinking choices. A Boomer who wanted a so-called “premium” sweetish glass of wine in those long-ago days had few to choose from that weren’t White Zinfandel — there was little Riesling, imported or otherwise, and much of the rest was cheap, fortified wine.
As McDonald says with a laugh, there weren’t even that many cocktails to choose from back then — and certainly not compared to today — and a craft beer was something like Lowenbrau or Heiniken.
So is it any surprise that, given all those choices, the Boomers’ children and grandchildren opted for something else — and especially something else that wasn’t wine? Would that someone had noticed.
