In the words of Peter M. F. Sichel (The Secrets of My Life: Vintner, Prisoner, Soldier, Spy):
Tastes differ. In addition tastes tend to change with time. This is due both to increased sophistication, which comes from experience and to age: as we get older, our taste preferences often change. In my old age [Peter is a nonagenarian], I increasingly prefer wines lower in alcohol, with less forward fruit and more style and elegance.
This statement represents two that I want to make:
- No two age generation groups have the same focus, because every generation has its own preferences, based on the condition of the times.
- It’s impossible for one advertisement to appeal to all age groups. Nike’s “just do it?” I was “just doing it,” before Nike decided to coin it, for instance.
In Peter’s Bordeaux Chapter: “I started to spend more time in Bordeaux, to get a feel for the wines and the culture of Bordeaux. Knowing the wines was not the same thing as getting to know complex society.” The wine industry is a very complex society… That is for certain. Once an age demographic gets that, and I believe it will come after about a decade of trying to reestablish an old order, life begins to settle into who is really whom and making it as a future leader.
It’s like been there, done that, and welcome to the wine world.
We all watch each other’s generations speaking to each other on our devices, and to us. I watch info on my devices and husband has plenty of info on his, too. He’s got way more hours on his ahead of me. And, he points to all sorts of in-coming stories that are new to me. We share. This one was about a millennial writer, who was just furious that the paradigm shift he was trying to create a few years ago hadn’t caught on yet. It just hadn’t, in his estimation, guided the world of wine away from itself, and moved into a new time zone… It just hadn’t… Not one iota…
Segue ~ Hippie
Husband says he’s never been one. I overhead someone in Bar Harbor say, “Look, Maud, there’s a real hippie,” when they exited a tour bus, as I walked by. I’ll go with Donald Trump on this one, “People say she’s ‘a real hippie,’ so she must be one,” right? In those hippie days, all we wanted was peace, love, and flowers; what we got was war, civil unrest, and assassinations.”
So
…as I watch Millennials struggling, because time isn’t moving fast enough for them, I remind myself that life is like an LP. The quicker one gets to the center, the faster the revolutions. I’m not sure the shift that’s wanted could or would be the be all to end all, but it might be a start. Nothing ever completely is… nothing.
Then, there’s that other thing…
Like it or not, the world of wine has been a world of romance since… forever. Hey, if you don’t like it, I’m just saying that the odds are pretty, pretty good that the first person to be printed with the quote “Wine, Women, and Song” was mostly likely a guy thinking about a gal. So, as I saw this posting from someone who’d like to completely change a promotional video about wine. He would have taken it away from what he saw as over produced schmaltzy romance. I understood his struggle. I, too, had a struggle of wanting to change the business of wine about 25 years ago, and that didn’t work to my liking fast enough either. I was way ahead of the curve.
Now, it’s happening all of the time at wineries, and it’s called “live music.” I put on a jazz concert at a winery I worked at through the marketing department, and the tasting room manager locked the attendees out of the tasting room. Funny now, but not then.
I saw his struggle and understood his frustration for wanting to see some visual evolution from his point of view. And, there isn’t a quick solution, time doesn’t work that way. Each generation has a lot of repetitive learning curves, for that time.
Old World versus New World
I’d like to show you the video in question. It’s been taken down. There was an debate going back and forth about live and let live. I don’t know what the final outcome was; as of right now, it’s gone. I can’t reference it. I can however, come up with the ad’s image of it’s essence’s representation.
In both images, the one above and this one below, people are happy, excited, involved, exuberant, and enjoying wine.
As my Mimi used to say, “Age before beauty” as this Boomer writer is watching Millennial writers.
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