MITCH FRANK: It's Time for Wine to Wake Up

My challenge to wine companies: Listen to younger consumers and offer them affordable, quality wines.

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At a time of flat sales, why aren’t wineries actively innovating and searching for new customers? Forty years after a brief sojourn in wine, Coca Cola is rejoining the alcohol business. But, tellingly, they are not investing in wine. Hoping to court young adults, the company has partnered its Simply fruit juice brand with Molson Coors to create Simply Spiked Lemonade, a fermented sugar cane canned beverage. This comes less than a year after Coke introduced Topo Chico Hard Seltzer and Fresca Mixed.

Coke has been successful for decades by knowing what consumers, especially younger consumers, want. Sadly, wine companies are proving blind.

This was drilled home in Silicon Valley Bank’s latest State of the Wine Industry Report. Every year, the firm surveys wineries and crunches sales data to provide one of the best snapshots of America’s premium wine industry. At the start of 2021, Rob McMillan, the founder and head of the bank’s wine division, predicted that the year would spark a boom in alcohol sales as pandemic restrictions started to unwind. He proved partially right. “It turned out that a celebration did take place, but the wine category wasn’t invited to the party!” he admits.