My Mom Likes Merlot

Saturday nights have been the same for generations. It's everything else that's changed

Three old friends visiting Napa Valley. It all started with Merlot.

It was a lazy early Saturday evening in the second floor TV room at 30 Holyoke Street. Three of us were sprawled across the room, one on each end of the long leather couch and the other sunken into a large armchair with one leg draped over the side. “Booya!” exclaimed a voice on the television as Stuart Scott described a series of Karl Malone dunks on the SuperSonics’ defense. The sun was fading as we pondered our plans for the night. Typically beer was involved, but a kind of sud-soaked malaise hung over the dark green walls and white painted paneling as we contemplated the relative merits of Bud Light versus Bud Ice. Gazing up at old photographs above the door, members of the class of 1920 and 1921, I was inspired to make another suggestion.

“Let’s get some wine,” I proposed.

“Booya!” came a response from the other side of the couch.

Twenty-one years old and knowing nothing about wine, I paused. “Well what kind of wine should we get?”

This question was met with extended silence, until at last a voice from the corner armchair replied, “My mom likes Merlot.”

I took up a collection of fives and tens and walked three blocks to The Pro, a wine and spirits shop that had been serving thirsty students for a hundred years or more. Fifteen minutes later I was back, two bottles of Merlot under my arm.

Those were the first bottles of wine I had ever bought.

….

In the late 1990s, wine captured the country’s imagination in a way it never quite had before. America was prosperous, confident, and eager to live well. Wine fit that moment perfectly. It rewarded study and attention. It connected you to history and to culture. It was something you could get better at, which appealed deeply to a generation that defined itself through experience and the deliberate cultivation of taste. For many Americans, wine became a symbol not just of the good life but of a particular kind of life, one lived with ambition and a healthy appetite for pleasure.

Robert Parker stood at the center of this cultural moment. No single figure in the history of American wine exercised comparable influence over what people bought, what producers made, and what was desirable. His 100-point scale gave consumers a legible map in a category that had always felt intimidating, and his independence from advertising and his practice of paying for his own tastings gave him a credibility that felt genuine. He democratized access to wine knowledge at exactly the moment a large and prosperous audience was ready to receive it. He was, in the most literal sense, the original wine influencer. A personal brand built on taste and the trust of a mass audience, and on the assumption that trust, once established, would hold.

In the 1990s, a handful of Napa wines became something more than just bottles.

The technology boom of the late 1990s deepened this culture further. The new prosperity of the internet economy created consumers who were young, intellectually engaged, and drawn to wine as both pleasure and pursuit. Cult Napa Cabernets, Screaming Eagle, Harlan, and Colgin among them, emerged from this moment. Their scarcity made them objects of desire, but they were the apex of something that ran all the way down to a twenty-one year old with a collection of fives and tens in his pocket.

It was a genuinely exciting time for the wine business. Demand was growing, new consumers were arriving, and the shared culture around wine gave everyone in it, producers, importers, retailers, sommeliers, writers and consumers, a common enthusiasm. The industry and its audience were moving in the same direction.

….

That was then.

….

It is a slow early Saturday evening. Three college students are spread across the room, one on each end of the couch, the third sunk into a chair, phone in hand, one leg draped over the side. The game is on, though it competes with a steady rhythm of notifications, clips, and conversations that start on the screen and spill into the room.

As they discuss what to drink that night there is the usual debate around High Noon or Coors Light.

He looks up from his phone.

“Let’s get some wine,” he says.

“What kind?” someone asks.

He is twenty-one years old. He has seen plenty of wine, follows a few people who seem to know what they are talking about, and picks up things here and there. But asked to choose, he wants to get it right.

He picks up his phone.

Within a minute all of them are looking at wine ratings, short videos, a producer someone has seen on Instagram, and a natural wine somebody’s older sister brought to Thanksgiving. Somebody mentions Burgundy. Someone else says that is too expensive. A third pulls up a list of the best wines under twenty dollars and they look at it for a while without settling on anything.

Eventually one of them just says, “this one looks good,” and holds up his phone. It is a California Cabernet Sauvignon. It has decent ratings and costs fifteen dollars. Nobody disputes it.

He puts on his jacket and walks a few blocks to a local wine shop. He finds the California section and asks the employee about the bottle on his phone. They don’t carry it, the employee says, but he reaches for something nearby. Similar style, he says, maybe even better. The employee sets it on the counter and says a few words about it.

He buys two bottles and walks back. His friends Venmo him their share.

Those were the first bottles of wine he had ever bought.

….

This is the same student, in the same moment, more than twenty years later.

His generation grew up differently than the one before it. More connected, more informed, and more accustomed to having every option available and every opinion amplified, he came to wine the same way he came to everything else, through a phone, through a feed, and through the recommendations of people he chose to follow rather than authorities he had been advised to trust. The curiosity was real. The desire to find something worth caring about was real. What changed was the landscape he had to navigate to satisfy it.

The same generation that sought out the local brewery and the farm to table restaurant brought those same questions to wine. Where does it come from? Who made it? Why should I care? These were not radical questions. They were the natural extension of values that had been forming across food, music, and lifestyle, in a culture that had learned to read character through consumption. What you drank was not merely what you liked. It was part of the definition of who you were.

In a world where every experience can be shared, even a sip becomes a statement. Source: Emily in Paris, Season 3, Episode 1

And then there was the noise. Smartphones put the entire wine world in everyone’s pocket and social media amplified every opinion. The knowledgeable voice behind the counter did not disappear. It just became one voice among thousands, and it was no longer obvious why it deserved more trust than any other. More information did not produce more clarity. It produced more options, more uncertainty, and more anxiety in roughly equal measure.

The young man standing in that wine shop with a phone in his hand is not disengaged. He is trying. He wants to get it right. He is concerned about what his choice will say about him, because in his world it will. That desire is not so different from the one that sent me to the wine shop on a Saturday night in the late 90s. What is different is everything around it.

….

The student in that wine shop wants exactly what I wanted. He wants to discover something and share it with people he likes. He wants that night to feel like something more than ordinary. That desire is as old as wine itself, and wine has endured for millennia because it is uniquely suited to satisfying it. It rewards wonder. It gives people something to talk about. It marks an evening as intentional rather than accidental. It turns a typical Saturday night into a distinct memory. The student with a phone in his hand and the one with a collection of fives and tens are after exactly the same thing. The world they are moving through to find it is completely different.

This distinction matters. The conversation about younger consumers and wine tends to focus on what they lack in terms of loyalty, patience, and reverence for tradition. But I doubt that is the correct frame. They are not a diminished version of the consumer who came before them. They are the same human beings plotting a route through a more arduous terrain. The curiosity and desire are as real as ever. What is missing is an effective and reliable way to connect wine to it.

Brooke Crowe has thought about this as carefully as anyone in the industry. As the founder of SocialSomm, a platform that connects wine consumers to sommeliers whose taste and personality they trust, she has built her business around exactly this problem. “Young people today have an inherent distrust of established voices and brands that have disappointed them their entire lives,” she told me. “There are strong feelings of betrayal.” That distrust did not originate with wine. It arrived in wine from everywhere else, from institutions that disappointed them, from media that misled them, from brands that marketed to them while delivering less than they promised. It is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to a specific set of experiences.

Brooke Crowe & Jillian Puskas Perkins, creators of SocialSomm

What SocialSomm understands is that trust has not disappeared. It has simply changed shape. The vertical authority that once moved from critic to retailer to consumer has given way to something more lateral and more personal. People trust those whose taste they recognize, whose recommendations feel genuine, and whose motives seem aligned with their own curiosity rather than someone else’s commercial interest. This takes the shape of a sommelier who feels like a knowledgeable friend rather than an institutional voice, or a community of people who find that they care about the same things. This is not trust diminished but trust redefined.

The challenge is not how to sell wine to a generation that is skeptical. It is how to create the conditions in which the same desire that has always driven wine culture can be honestly satisfied. That is a different problem. It is also a more interesting one.

….

Now this.

….

She is twenty-one years old. It is a Saturday evening and she and her friends are in the mood for wine. She opens her phone and types out what she is looking for. Something fun and interesting, she writes. A sparkling wine. Under twenty dollars. We are just getting the night started.

The response comes back specific and brief. A Crémant d’Alsace, it suggests. Traditional method bubbles from northeastern France, made mostly from Pinot Blanc. Dry and refined with fine bubbles and a little toasty character. At that price point it will outperform almost anything else in the glass.

She reads it once, puts her phone back in her pocket, and walks to a wine shop a few blocks away.

Inside she finds the sparkling wine section. There are three Crémants on the shelf, one from Alsace she does not recognize, one from the Loire, and one from Burgundy. None of them is the producer she was told to look for. She takes out her phone and photographs all three. Which of these, she types, is closest to what we discussed?

The answer comes back in seconds. The Loire, it says. Chenin Blanc based, similar elegance, good producer. You will not be disappointed.

She picks up two bottles, carries them to the register, and pays.

On her way out the store employee compliments her choice. She smiles as she departs.

Those are the first bottles of wine she has ever bought.

….

Artificial intelligence has been present and behind the scenes in consumer technology for years. Recommendation engines, curated feeds, and personalized search were all early expressions of the same underlying nascent capability. It has evolved into a public interface with the ability to provide deep, personalized and rapid intelligence. Conversational AI has given consumers a way to describe what they want in plain language and receive a specific, reasoned response. Not a list of options, not a set of ratings to evaluate, but an answer. We are only beginning to understand what it all means. The emerging consumer experience is closer to asking someone who knows than searching for information. That turns out to be a meaningful difference.

“The Treachery of Taste” not by Magritte

For wine the implications are significant. The paralysis of the earlier scene, twenty minutes of scrolling to arrive at a fourteen dollar Cabernet that nobody feels strongly about, is not an inevitable condition. It is a problem of guidance. And guidance, it turns out, is something AI can provide with a specificity, friendliness and swiftness that no search engine, store clerk, or rating app has managed.

Human beings have not changed all that much. Who we are today is recognizably who we were thousands of years ago. We want to discover things worth caring about. We want to share them with people we like. We want to have fun with our friends. Every generation inherits these impulses and carries them into a world that looks very little like the one before it.

And the world keeps changing. The culture shifts, technology evolves, and the landscape each generation has to navigate is shaped by forces that no one fully anticipates or controls. What remains constant is the person standing in the wine shop on a Saturday evening, looking for something worth bringing back to the people waiting for her or him. Every generation sends someone through that door. What they purchase may change, how they decide will differ, but the desire that sends them remains the same.

Author’s Note

This piece would not have been possible without the generosity of several people who shared their time and perspective.

Brooke Crowe and Jillian Puskas Perkins, founders of SocialSomm, offered a forthright account of how younger consumers are navigating their relationship with wine and the institutions that have historically served them. Their work building a platform grounded in trust and community is one of the more thoughtful responses I have encountered to the challenges this piece describes.

The third scene in this piece, set in the present day, is drawn in part from a conversation with Louise K, a current undergraduate student, who described with definitive clarity how she and her peers use AI to discover and select wine. Her account was more instructive than anything I could have invented. I am grateful she was willing to share it.

Any errors of fact or interpretation are my own.