Most days in the tasting room start the same way. Someone approaches the bar with interest but hesitation. They want to try the wine. They want to understand it. They want, in some unspoken way, to “get it.” But there’s concern in their body language, a slight tension in the shoulders, a carefulness in how they hold themselves. They look like someone taking a test they didn’t study for.

Before I pour, I ask a question: “If I blindfolded you and handed you a strawberry, would you know what it was?”

The answer comes immediately. Of course. No hesitation.

“What about an apple?”

Yes.

“Cinnamon?”

Yes.

“Coffee? Lemon peel? Fresh-cut grass?”

Yes, yes, yes. No doubt. No pause. People trust their senses completely when it comes to the world around them. They’ve been smelling things their entire lives. They know what they know.

Then I pour the wine.

I watch them lift the glass, swirl it gently, bring it to their nose. And something changes. The confidence that was there five seconds ago evaporates. They inhale, pause, and then look up with an expression that’s almost apologetic.

“I don’t know what I’m smelling.”

“I’m not very good at this.”

“I never know what I’m supposed to say.”

The irony is striking. Five seconds ago, they were masters of their own senses. They could identify a strawberry blindfolded without a moment’s doubt. Now, presented with fermented grapes in a glass, they look as if they’ve forgotten how to breathe. They believe their nose has failed them.

But it’s not their nose that’s failed. It’s the story we’ve told them about wine.

Somewhere along the way, wine stopped being something you experienced and became something you’re evaluated on. It accumulated rules, hierarchies, vocabulary lists, and implied judgments. People were taught that there are correct answers, and those answers belong to experts. So instead of trusting what they smell, people wait for permission. They search their memory for the “right” descriptor. They worry about sounding unsophisticated or, worse, being wrong.

And in that moment of worry, they stop sensing altogether.

Not because wine is complicated. But because we made people doubt themselves.

Wine is not a puzzle to be solved. It’s a recognition exercise. When you smell wine and think of cherries, you’ve succeeded. When it calls up a memory: an orchard in summer, coffee brewing in the morning, the spice drawer opening… that’s the entire point. The aroma is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: connecting to something you already know.

But many people have learned to distrust their instincts. They’ve been taught that unless the aroma fits a prescribed list, it doesn’t count. Unless it sounds impressive, it isn’t valid. Unless an expert confirms it, it might be wrong.

In the tasting room, my job becomes less about explaining wine and more about undoing the damage.

I tell guests: “You’re not trying to guess what I smell. You’re noticing what you smell.”

There’s palpaple relief when that penetrates. Shoulders relax and tension leave faces; people stop performing and start paying attention. The conversation moves on from terminology to experience. Instead of “Is this right?” they say, “This reminds me of something.” And suddenly, we’re talking about wine again.

There's a power in giving someone permission to trust themselves. Wine, at its best, is not about expertise. It asks you to slow down, to notice what you're actually smelling, to stay with a sensation long enough for it to connect to something you already know. That's a human skill, not a professional one.

The tragedy is that the wine industry has done the opposite. We’ve rewarded certainty over curiosity. We’ve mistaken confidence for authority. We’ve convinced perfectly capable people that they don’t belong at our table.

But they do.

Wine existed for thousands of years before tasting notes. It was shared long before it was categorized. It was understood through repetition, through memory, through conversation; not through correctness.

When people stop worrying about being right, they start talking to each other, comparing impressions. They laugh when their descriptions don’t match. The table gets louder, warmer, more alive. That’s when wine does its best work: it brings people into the same moment, not as experts and novices, but as people noticing something together.

I don’t need guests to smell what I smell. I need them to trust that what they smell is enough.

Your nose didn’t get worse when the wine arrived. You were just taught not to believe it.

And once you unlearn that, once you give yourself permission to notice without judgment, the whole experience opens again. Not as a performance, but as a shared, human act of attention.

Which is what the table was always meant for.

Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca famously claimed he stuck his neck out for nobody, and yet every night he kept the café open, kept the piano playing, kept the glasses filled, kept the room available to whoever needed it, the desperate and the powerful and the merely lost arriving separately and becoming, across the slow continuity of shared evenings, something that resembled a community without anyone having planned for that to happen. The claim was the performance. The café was the reality. That gap, between what the operator says and what the room becomes in the hours when nobody is paying particular attention, may be the most honest description of hospitality ever committed to film.

Rick didn’t design a community. He kept the place open, kept pouring, kept the lights on past the point where a rational calculation would have told him to stop.

And the room did the rest.

I have five customers who have nothing in common with one another except that they met at my bar, each of them having spent years insisting they are not wine people, each of them stopping by for just one quick glass in the particular way that people stop by for just one quick glass when what they actually mean is that they have not yet admitted to themselves how much the room matters to them, arriving so predictably that my staff unconsciously begins setting aside their preferred table before any of them have walked through the door, laughing at the idea of being regulars in the way that people laugh at something that is completely true and slightly embarrassing.

The room knows otherwise. It has been keeping track.

This is the paradox underneath so much of American social life: we are a culture that prizes independence, self-sufficiency, the myth of the self-made man who needs nobody, and yet we organize our emotional lives around the rooms that provide exactly what we claim not to need.

We mourn our neighborhood bars with a grief that embarrasses us slightly, returning to the same table week after week as though something important depends on it, feeling the closing of an ordinary diner as a loss disproportionate to anything we could rationally explain. We say we don’t need the square. Then we spend twenty years telling stories about the bar that was the closest thing we had to one.

To understand why rooms like Rick’s ended up in the margins of American life rather than at its center, it helps to walk through an American city for a while and pay attention not to what it contains but to what it was built for.

America was built for movement. For the efficient passage of people between destinations that never quite become places, for the extraordinary American optimism that there would always be somewhere better just beyond the edge of town, which made building for arrival feel less urgent than building for departure, built not for lingering or the accidental encounter or the kind of slow proximity that allows strangers to become, across the unremarkable accumulation of shared mornings, something warmer than strangers-- but for speed, for distance, for the restless forward momentum of a country that had not yet learned to stay.

The streets are wide because they were made for cars, and cars move differently than people move, faster, more purposefully, sealed against the weather and the noise and the person on the sidewalk who might otherwise catch your eye and change the shape of your afternoon. The blocks stretch longer than a comfortable walk. The zoning has separated things that once lived usefully together, the shop below the apartment above the café beside the bar beside the place where someone’s grandmother has been getting her hair done for forty years, into categories that require a vehicle to connect, each use isolated from the others, each day requiring a series of deliberate trips between destinations rather than the casual drift through a neighborhood that deposits you, almost without meaning to, somewhere worth staying.

On a Friday night in my own neighborhood, just down the block in Jack London Square, you can still watch someone leave dinner, hear music drifting from an open door, step into a tasting room for one glass, run into somebody they know, and accidentally remain out in public three hours longer than they intended. That sequence, unplanned, entirely dependent on the physical proximity of things worth stopping for, is what urban designers mean when they talk about walkability, and what the rest of us mean when we say a neighborhood feels alive. It is also, in most American cities, increasingly difficult to find.

America had the land, and the land made density a choice rather than a necessity, which meant the square, which requires density to function, never became inevitable the way it did in places where people had no alternative but to share space and eventually, across enough generations of sharing it, stopped being able to imagine doing anything else.

In parts of Italy and Spain, in Florence and Siena and Seville, in the old Portuguese praças, the square remained embedded in daily life long enough to become ordinary rather than remarkable, which is the only condition under which it actually works. The piazza didn’t teach people to linger. It simply gave lingering somewhere to happen, and then had the good sense to get out of the way.

America built for movement instead, and somewhere in that building, in the widening roads and the lengthening blocks and the spreading subdivisions and the shopping centers oriented toward the windshield rather than the sidewalk, in the frontier logic that made distance feel like freedom and proximity feel like a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be made livable through design, the conditions that once made the square feel inevitable began to fray, the daily repetition of shared space growing scarce, the accidental encounter becoming harder to arrange, the face seen so often it becomes familiar before it becomes known retreating into a kind of social inaccessibility that looked, from the outside, like preference but was really just the built environment doing what it had been designed to do.

And yet something persisted.

Because people kept searching for the square anyway, even inside a landscape that had never been designed to provide one, finding it in the margins of the system, in coffee shops and neighborhood bars and bookstores and breweries and diners with cracked vinyl booths and tasting rooms where nobody seemed especially eager for you to leave, places that were technically commercial but socially behaved like civic infrastructure, not because anyone designed them that way but because the need for the square doesn’t disappear simply because the square was never built.

It just finds somewhere else to live.

So we built our piazzas in the margins instead, carried forward by the people willing to keep the lights on past the point of pure efficiency, held together by the particular human stubbornness of returning to the same room because the room has learned to expect you, because recognition, that small, unremarkable, unrequested fact of being known somewhere, turns out to be one of the things people will travel surprisingly far and pay surprisingly much and simply refuse to leave without finding, even while insisting, with complete sincerity, that they are only stopping by for one quick glass.

Rick Blaine stuck his neck out every night.

He just never admitted it.

This is why the rooms he kept open feel simultaneously so beloved and so fragile, never fully supported by the architecture around them, never protected by the civic infrastructure that might have made their survival less precarious, never quite acknowledged for what they were.

Only carried, briefly and imperfectly, by the people inside.

For the past few months my essays have largely approached questions of belonging, conversation, hospitality, and social life through the lens of wine.

This essay, and the next one as well, widen the frame somewhat, stepping outward toward the broader civic and cultural architecture underneath many of the themes that have been appearing here all along: lingering, familiarity, gathering and belonging.

After this brief detour, the essays will return more directly to wine itself… though perhaps with a slightly larger frame around it than before.

There are still places in Europe where the square fills itself every evening without anyone particularly organizing it.

Nobody sent an invitation. Nobody booked a reservation or curated a guest list or designed an experience. Children move in loose circles between tables. Older couples sit facing outward, watching the room move around them. Someone pauses halfway through a walk home because they recognize a face two tables over and that recognition, that small moment of being seen, turns out to be enough reason to stay for a while. A café keeps its chairs out late enough for the evening to find a second shape after dinner. A bar fills gradually, then settles into itself for a while, then slowly empties without anyone marking the transition. Nobody seems especially hurried to leave.

Americans returning from places like this often reach for the word “atmosphere.”

But atmosphere is the wrong word. Atmosphere suggests something designed... lighting, music, a particular aesthetic someone carefully curated. What these squares possess is older and harder to manufacture than that. They are environments built around repeated casual human contact, places constructed not simply for consumption but for lingering, where familiarity accumulates slowly enough that eventually people stop feeling like strangers to one another. The piazza works because nobody has to earn the right to remain there.; you can arrive alone and stay without urgency. You can sit with a coffee or a glass of wine or a beer or nothing at all, and observe for a while before deciding whether to enter the social current. The space itself lowers the cost of human interaction.

That’s not accidental civic design. It’s social infrastructure.

It has a history worth understanding: from the Greek agora to the medieval market square, across centuries and cultures, cities organized themselves around a central space that belonged to everyone; not to commerce exclusively, not to government, not to any particular group, but to the accumulated daily life of people who needed somewhere to be that was neither home nor work. These spaces were not amenities, instead they were the mechanism through which strangers became neighbors and through which a collection of individuals became community.

America largely chose a different path.

After the Second World War, the country set out to build a new kind of life, modern, mobile, private, and efficient. The yard. The car. The suburb. The drive-through. The housing development without a center. The mall as the ersatz square, privately owned and optimized for purchase rather than presence. These were not accidents of planning. Nay, they were deliberate expressions of a particular idea about what the good life looked like, and for a generation that had grown up in cramped cities during depression and war, that idea had genuine appeal.

But something was traded away in the process.

Urban planners eventually gave it a name, or rather, they gave a name to what replaced it. When developers of skyscrapers were required in the 1960s to include plazas in front of their buildings, a nod, albeit a reluctant one, to the importance of communal civic space, the resulting spaces failed so consistently and so predictably to become actual gathering places that planners developed a nickname for them. They called them blah-zas. Spaces that look like squares but produce none of the conditions that make squares work. Technically accessible, emotionally uninviting, used primarily by workers with nowhere else to sit during lunch and empty by six o’clock.

The blah-za may be the most honest architectural symbol of modern American civic life.

I’ve sat in both. In the plaza, I checked my watch. In the piazza, I forgot I was wearing one. The difference wasn’t the architecture. It was whether the space assumed my continued presence or merely tolerated it.

We built the shape of the thing and then wondered why people weren’t using it the way Europeans use theirs. We installed the plaza and withheld the permission to linger. We created the space and then optimized it for throughput. The architecture announced a gathering place but he experience communicated something else entirely, that your presence here is conditional, your time is being managed, and the expectation is that you will complete whatever brought you here and move on.

The social cost of this has been difficult to measure precisely because it accumulates slowly and leaves no obvious record. Nobody files a report when a neighborhood loses the informal gathering place that once held it together. Nobody tracks the conversations that didn’t happen, the acquaintances that didn’t form, the sense of local belonging that never quite developed because there was nowhere for it to develop. Even where the spaces still exist, many Americans increasingly find themselves without the time stability that casual civic life requires, the loose Tuesday evening, the unhurried lunch, or the afternoon that belonged to no particular obligation, as work expands outward and economic pressure narrows the hours available for simply being somewhere without a reason. In 2023, the United States Surgeon General issued an advisory declaring loneliness and social isolation a public health epidemic, finding Americans measurably more isolated than they were a generation ago. The built environment is not a minor contributing factor. It is structural.

Over half of American households report wanting to live in walkable, communal environments. Yet according to Smart Growth America’s 2023 Foot Traffic Ahead report, less than two percent of land area in the country’s thirty-five largest metropolitan regions comprises walkable, well-connected development. That gap is not a taste problem. It is by design, the accumulated result of decades of civic and commercial decisions that consistently prioritized individual convenience over shared space, private ownership over public gathering, and the efficiency of movement over the value of staying.

What filled the gap were the places that remained open to lingering by nature of what they sold. The bar that had been on the same corner for thirty years. The coffee shop with enough tables that nobody felt rushed. The restaurant where the owner knew your name and the by-the-glass list was short enough to navigate without Mapquest. The wine shop with a counter in the back where someone would open something interesting on a Tuesday afternoon, for no better reason than it happened to be Tuesday. The neighborhood places where a drink, wine, beer, coffee, something, was the excuse rather than the point, and the point was the room and the people who kept appearing in it. These were not the square, but were imperfect substitutes that turned out, for the people inside them, to be genuinely enough.

These places became, without anyone intending it, the closest thing many American neighborhoods had to a square.

Not because anyone planned it that way. Because they were designed to keep people inside them long enough for something to happen, for the conversation to start, for the familiar face to become a name, for the regular to become the kind of presence that no longer needs to justify itself, that has moved past the threshold of stranger into something the room simply expects, the way a room expects the light to change at a certain hour or the evening to find its particular shape. A shared bottle at a table sets an unspoken clock that matches the rhythm of conversation rather than commerce. A coffee refilled without asking signals that your continued presence is welcome. A bartender who remembers what you drink is practicing a form of civic recognition that the blah-za, by design, cannot provide.

These moments serve as the mechanics of belonging.

They are under the same pressure that has always worked against the square in America, the pressure of rent and margin, and the cold arithmetic that makes a room full of lingering regulars look like underperforming inventory rather than the entire point of the enterprise. The neighborhood bar closes. The independent coffee shop gives way to a chain optimized for throughput. The wine shop with the back counter loses its lease. The restaurant that held the neighborhood together for twenty years discovers that holding a neighborhood together was never going to appear on a balance sheet in a way that justified the cost.

Each closing is reported, if at all, as a business story.

What it actually is, most of the time, is a civic loss. The disappearance of a space that did the work the square was supposed to do… the work of making strangers into neighbors, giving people somewhere to belong lightly, and allowing familiarity to build until it became community.

The question worth sitting with is not whether Americans want this; they demonstrably do. The response to European squares among American travelers is not admiration for something alien but recognition of something absent.

The salient question is whether we are willing to treat these spaces as the infrastructure they actually are: as essential to civic health as roads and schools and parks, rather than as amenities that survive or fail according to market forces that were never designed with their survival in mind.

The square we never built is not entirely lost. Versions of it still exist, in the bars and the coffee shops and the neighborhood restaurants and the wine bars and the bookstores with chairs, in the places that have somehow survived long enough to accumulate the kind of memory that makes a room feel like somewhere rather than just anywhere. They are fragile; economically vulnerable in ways that the European square, embedded in civic life and protected by urban design, generally is not.

But they are there.

And on any given evening, in the places lucky enough to still have them, the square fills itself without anyone particularly organizing it.

Someone arrives. Someone nods. A drink appears. The evening begins finding its shape.

That is still possible.

It is worth protecting

“I’ve been a regular since 2019. Tiger’s is one of the best third places in Oakland. You can put an Underberg on my tab — Brian will know who I am.”
— Reddit, r/OaklandFood, on the closing of Tiger’s Taproom, Oakland CA, March 1, 2026

For Tiger’s Taproom. And for Brian, who knew everybody’s name.

The girl behind the bar knew you drank Tempranillo now because three years ago you ordered Cabernet like a man trying to impress an imaginary judge. Nobody announced any of this. Nobody ever does.

That’s what the white papers never capture. The country didn’t lose “social cohesion.” It lost places where a guy could walk in half-dead from the day and hear somebody say, “Hey, Stew, same thing?” And for one hour the whole machinery of modern America loosened its grip around the throat.

That was the miracle. Not wine. Wine was just the prop. You could substitute coffee. Beer. Meatloaf. Cigarettes twenty-five years ago. Didn’t matter. What mattered was repetition. The kind that doesn’t get tracked.

The old couple by the window every Friday. The woman grading papers with one glass of Sauvignon Blanc she nursed for two hours. The tech kid pretending not to eavesdrop while learning how adults talk to each other. The divorced contractor who suddenly realized six months had gone by and somebody would notice if he stopped coming in. That last part matters more than anybody wants to admit. Now the stool is just a stool.

America used to accidentally manufacture familiarity. Now everything is optimized. The tables turn faster. The menus rotate quarterly. The apartments empty every fourteen months. The bartender disappears because the rent went up. The wine list arrives like a tax document written by a frightened consultant. And then people wonder why nobody under forty “connects with wine.”

Connects with wine? Jesus Christ. People are having trouble connecting with each other. Wine just happened to be standing nearby when the collapse came.

That’s what the industry people don’t understand when they stare at spreadsheets showing declining consumption and start screaming about Gen Z and RTDs and branding and cans and influencer strategy. A person usually learned wine because somebody handed them a glass in a room where failure carried no penalty. That was the whole system. Not scores. Not terroir maps. Not lifestyle marketing. Not a sommelier reciting soil types like he’s negotiating a hostage release. A room. A room where nobody minded if you got it wrong. That’s how people became wine drinkers.

The first glass was never really about taste anyway. It was about permission. Permission to stay awhile. Permission to ask stupid questions. Permission to become recognizable somewhere. And once enough of those rooms disappeared, the pipeline disappeared with them.

But people only notice a thing after it’s gone. That’s why everybody talks about loneliness now like it’s weather damage instead of zoning policy, labor economics, urban design, smartphones, exhaustion, and a culture that decided every square foot of human life had to produce maximum revenue. You walk past the plywood. Eyes down. Thumbs scrolling. Nobody looks up. Nobody sees what’s missing.

The old neighborhood joints understood something the consultants forgot: a regular customer is not a transaction. A regular customer is a person building part of their identity inside a room. That takes time. Time is expensive now. So the rooms vanish.

And one night somebody looks around at a city full of expensive cocktails, luxury apartments, delivery apps, optimization software, private streaming queues, and isolated people staring into little blue screens and wonders why it suddenly feels so cold. Meanwhile the old bartender who used to know thirty-seven names retired three years ago and nobody replaced him.

That’s the whole story right there.

By this point most years, the wines are already decided.

Contracts signed. Fruit locked in. Barrels ordered early enough to save something… fifty, seventy-five euros here and there. Not a huge number on its own, but enough across a cellar to matter.

This year it’s May, and I’m still deciding.

Most of my days right now are spent in the caves. Racking barrels. Checking malolactic fermentations that went on a bit longer than usual. The first week of May opened warm: mid-seventies, the kind of weather that makes you think the season has finally committed. Then it pulled back. Today it’s 52 degrees and overcast. The vines outside don’t seem to mind. Neither do the wines.

The caves are quieter than a library. In a library there’s always something: pages, chairs, someone clearing their throat. Down here there’s none of that. Just stillness. The smell of wet oak. A bit of mustiness, like a forest floor after rain.

I find myself coming down here when I need to clear my head.

Above ground, it doesn’t clear.

There’s a rosé I’m being pushed to produce, even though last year’s never really moved outside the tasting room and club... and even there it competed with the sparkling we already make. There’s Rockridge Red, the entry-level blend that has probably converted more people to our wines than anything else we produce, being questioned by people who don’t see what happens when someone tastes it for the first time and realizes they’re not out of their depth. There’s a Sauvignon Blanc that’s really starting to move in our tasting room, at weddings, the kinds of places where people aren’t looking for something to decode, just something they can say yes to. Then, there are wines I’d make if the decision were only mine. Lately even small decisions arrive carrying the weight of larger ones.

All of it sits there at once.

The decisions don’t stay contained. If I make one wine, I may not be able to make another. The wines aren’t even made yet and already some of them aren’t going to happen.

Back in the cave, none of that is visible.

The reds are finishing their malolactic fermentations. The barrels settle after racking. I taste, I wait, I make small adjustments here and there.

Down here, the decisions have already been made. Everything in barrel is becoming what it’s supposed to be. It’s everything outside of it that isn’t.

Cheers ran for eleven years. That’s a long time for any show, but the longevity isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is what the show was actually about: which wasn’t a bar in Boston, and wasn’t the romantic tension between Sam and Diane, and wasn’t the eccentricity of the supporting cast. It was about a room where everybody knew your name. Not your résumé. Not your ambitions. Just your name, and your usual drink, and the rough shape of your week. A place where showing up was enough to belong.

The show ran for eleven years because people recognized something in it that they couldn’t easily name anywhere else.

That something has a structure, even if it rarely gets described as one. It exists in the space between the relationships that are formal enough to protect: family, institution, employer; and the encounters that are too brief to accumulate into anything. It’s built from people you recognize without knowing, places that feel like yours without owning them, evenings that don’t need to justify themselves. This middle layer isn’t important in any official sense. It doesn’t show up in measures of social health or surveys of meaningful connection. And yet its presence changes the texture of a week in ways that are difficult to articulate and surprisingly easy to underestimate, until it’s gone, at which point the absence is specific in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t felt it.

What makes it work is not the quality of the connections but the conditions that produce them. Regularity, low stakes and physical proximity over time. The kind of space where you can be present without performing, where you’re not required to be interesting or certain or especially yourself in any deliberate way. You’re just there, and other people are just there, and the accumulation of that shared presence does the work that no single meaningful encounter ever could.

The spaces that host this kind of belonging have a particular character. Not structured, not clubs or organizations with membership dues and a stated purpose, but spaces with a different logic entirely. Open enough that arrival requires no explanation. Familiar enough that faces repeat without planning. Neither so formal that you have to justify being there nor so anonymous that being there means nothing. The wine bar. The neighborhood restaurant. The tasting room built for lingering. These spaces are not passive containers. They create a scaffolding of ease... a pace, a temperature, a set of small social permissions, that either allows the middle layer to form or it doesn’t.

Few things build that scaffolding as well as a shared bottle. Wine has always been part of what makes these conditions possible and understanding why requires looking at what it actually does in a room rather than what it is.

A bottle opened at a table sets an unspoken clock: an evening’s worth of poured wine, three or four refills, a conversation given room to move past the surface of things. You can’t rush it the way you rush a beer, or finish it in a fixed number of sips. The bottle creates an implicit commitment to the duration-- someone will pour, someone will receive, the glass will be refilled at a pace that roughly matches the pace of talking, and the evening will be allowed to find its own length. That pacing is not incidental; it’s the mechanism by which a gathering becomes something other than a transaction.

The gestures that cluster around an open bottle matter too. Refilling someone’s glass before they ask. Tilting the bottle toward a neighbor who’s gone quiet. Setting it within reach of everyone rather than keeping it close. These are small acts, almost invisible, but they are how informal community builds itself; not through declarations or commitments but through repeated, unremarkable signals that say: you are included here, this is not rushed, there is more.

What this kind of return does, over time, is specific and underappreciated. It doesn’t create friendship exactly, not the kind you’d call in a crisis.Rather, it creates recognition. The sense that a place and its people are continuous, that showing up again will find something similar to what you found before, that you don’t have to establish yourself from scratch each time. That recognition, accumulated over enough ordinary afternoons and evenings, is what transforms a space from somewhere you go into somewhere you belong-- lightly, without obligation, but genuinely. It’s what the regulars at Cheers had. It’s what made the room feel like a room rather than a venue.

The fragility of all this is inseparable from what makes it valuable. Nothing protects the middle layer. There are no bylaws, no infrastructure that compels return. You can stop showing up and the place continues without you, and if enough people stop, the place becomes something else: still a room, still a wine list, but no longer the thing it was. The voluntary quality is the source of both its fragility and its freedom. You’re there because you choose to be, and so is everyone else, and that mutual voluntariness is what gives the recognition its weight.

When wine becomes occasional, when the Tuesday bottle becomes the Saturday reservation, when the casual habit becomes the planned event-- something in this holding pattern breaks. The regularity withers. When that happens, recognition fades. When recognition fades, the space loses the quality that made it worth returning to. The familiar faces become occasional faces. The bartender who poured without asking starts asking again. The ease of a room that knows you-- not well, not personally, just enough, disappears without announcement.

The pressures driving this are structural and worth naming clearly. The economics of the spaces that once hosted the middle layer have tightened. The by-the-glass price that once felt like an easy decision now sits at a threshold where it becomes a considered one. The neighborhood restaurant operating on thin margins has less room for the slow evening. The tasting room built for lingering is competing with a beverage landscape that has gotten very good at offering certainty without requiring patience. None of these pressures are directed at informal community specifically. They are simply indifferent to it... and indifference doesn’t leave a target to argue with or a decision to reverse. It just gradually removes the conditions under which the thing was possible.

Nobody canceled Cheers. They just made the bar harder to find.

What the show captured, and what eleven years of viewership suggests people recognized and wanted, was not nostalgia for a particular kind of establishment. It was something more specific: the experience of a place that held your shape between visits. Where you could walk in after a bad week and not have to explain yourself, because the room already knew enough. Where belonging didn’t require performance or maintenance or anything beyond the habit of return.

That experience is not gone. But it has become harder to stumble into, which means it has become harder to build by accident, which means the middle layer- the one that forms without anyone deciding to form it- forms less reliably than it once did.

And what it produces when it works, and what disappears when it doesn’t, is the kind of thing you only fully understand in its absence: the slight weight the week has when the places you return to are places that remember you.

Everybody knowing your name.

It turns out that was the whole thing.

In April of 2020 my Brooklyn West Winery tasting room was open, technically. We had set a folding table across the doorway so that nobody could come inside, and we stood behind it and handed bottles to people who had called ahead and driven over and now stood in the parking lot in the particular way people stood that spring; a little uncertain, a little too aware of the distance between themselves and everyone else. We took their card, ran it on a reader, passed the bottles across. Some of them said thank you. Some of them didn’t say much at all. Nobody stayed.

I had built the tasting room to be a place where people lingered. Where the evening found its shape around a table, a flight of glasses, a conversation that went longer than planned. That was the whole premise; not the wine exactly, but what the wine made possible when people were actually in the room together. The room was doing something that I could feel but not quite name until it was gone. And in April of 2020 it was gone, replaced by a folding table and a parking lot and the particular transactional silence of a moment that had no room for anything else.

What I didn’t understand then, and what took time for me to see clearly, was that the loss wasn’t only mine.

Habits don’t form through decisions. They form through repetition inside environments that make the repetition feel natural. You don’t decide to become someone who drinks wine at dinner; you end up in enough dinners where wine is present, poured without ceremony, part of the rhythm of the table, until one day you notice you’ve become someone who reaches for it without thinking. The decision was never made. The habit accumulated, slowly, in rooms where the conditions were right.

This is how most people came to wine. Not through study or intention but through proximity; a friend’s table, a restaurant where someone ordered a bottle and poured around, a first apartment where wine was what you brought because it felt like the right thing to bring. The early glasses weren’t always good. The choices weren’t always informed. But they were low-stakes and repeated, and repetition inside a forgiving environment is the only reliable way a habit forms.

The environment did the work. The room was the thing.

What closed in March of 2020 wasn’t just bars and restaurants. It was a specific window in a person’s life; the window when those rooms do their most important work. Junior and senior years of college. The first years after. The period when people are old enough to be in the rooms and young enough that the rooms are still teaching them something. When a bad glass of wine is a story rather than a grievance, and a good one is a small revelation, and the accumulated exposure of enough evenings builds a relationship with the category that will last decades.

That window has a shape. It doesn’t stay open indefinitely. A person in their late teens and early twenties is in a specific state of formation; habits are being built, preferences are being discovered, identity is being assembled from the available materials. What’s present in that window tends to stay. What’s absent tends to stay absent too, not as a rejection but as a gap; something that never became familiar because it was never consistently there.

For the generation that turned 21 between 2019 and 2023, the rooms closed during that window. Not at the edges of it. At the center of it. The years when the habit would have formed were the years when the environments that form habits were suspended, and the people moving through those years adapted; not by choosing differently, but by building their social lives around what was available. Smaller gatherings in private spaces. Patterns that didn’t require a room because there was no room to require.

Those patterns proved more durable than anyone expected. When the bars came back, when the restaurants reopened, when the tasting rooms took the folding tables away from the doors and invited people inside again; the people who had spent two years building habits without those rooms didn’t simply return. Some did, but for many, the window had passed. The moment when proximity and low stakes and repetition would have done their work had been replaced by something else, and the something else had set.

This is not a story about a generation that chose not to drink wine. Choice implies a considered evaluation of alternatives, a weighing of options, a decision made from a position of familiarity with what’s being declined. Most of the people who aren’t drinking wine now never had the chance to become familiar with it. They didn’t reject the room. They were never in it.

I think about the people who stood in my parking lot in April of 2020, taking their bottles across the folding table. Some of them were in their early twenties. They had driven out because they wanted something, and what they wanted was probably more than wine; they wanted the thing the wine usually came with, the room, the table, the particular ease of an evening that has found its shape. But the room wasn’t available, and so they took their bottles and drove home and did what everyone was doing that spring, which was adapt.

The adaption was rational. It was even, in many ways, successful. People found ways to gather, to connect, to make evenings work inside the constraints of what was possible. What they didn’t find; what the constraints made structurally unavailable; was the incidental encounter. The one that doesn’t feel like an encounter at all. The glass poured before you thought to ask for it, the bottle passed around a table too full of people to plan anything carefully, the evening where wine was simply present and its presence was unremarkable and you drank it because it was there and it was fine and gradually, over many such evenings, you became someone who knew what you liked.

That accumulation; unintentional, built from repetition in rooms where the stakes were low enough that nothing about it felt consequential; is how most wine drinkers became wine drinkers. It is not currently happening at the scale it used to happen, and the absence is not a preference. It is an interruption that became a pattern.

The window closed. The room wasn’t there. And now the industry is wondering where its next generation of drinkers went, as if they departed rather than simply never arrived.

I stood behind a folding table in a parking lot in April of 2020 and handed bottles across a threshold to people who couldn’t come inside. The room was right there, thirty feet away, set up and ready. But it wasn’t available, and so it might as well not have existed.

The room that wasn’t there.

I.

Back in late 1991, my senior year of college, my major advisor, Professor Sealey, took a few of us to dinner at Chez Panisse. It was the kind of invitation that carried an expectation. You were being encouraged, gently but unmistakably, to stay on, to pursue a doctorate, to consider teaching.

At some point he told us to order a bottle of wine. I remember looking down the list and trying to find something that felt safe. One bottle was around twenty dollars—about what I might have spent on a couple of shots of decent whiskey at a bar. Wine hadn’t really been on my radar before that evening, but at that price, it didn’t feel like a risk. Had it been forty or fifty, I would have hesitated, maybe even avoided choosing at all. So I ordered the cheaper one. It arrived, was poured, and we drank it without much discussion.

That was it. No revelation, no conversion. Just a glass of something unfamiliar at a price that made the uncertainty feel acceptable. Most people don’t decide to drink wine. They end up drinking it.

That kind of evening-- unremarkable, low-stakes, the kind where wine appears without anyone making a decision about wine-- was how most people of my generation found their way into the category. For the generation that came of age during the pandemic, those environments were closed.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Bars shut down. Restaurants went dark or went to takeout. The social infrastructure of early adulthood: the unremarkable settings where taste is built through proximity and trial and the low consequence of getting it wrong, was suspended at exactly the moment it would normally have been doing its work. Junior and senior years of college. The first years after. The period when people typically figure out what they like by being in rooms where liking things is easy and cheap.

That window closed. And when it reopened, the people who had moved through it had already built different habits: smaller gatherings, private settings, social patterns that didn’t assume alcohol as a connector. Those patterns didn’t dissolve when the bars came back. They had already set.

We talk about Gen Z as if they made a choice. They didn’t, or not entirely. What looks like a generational preference is partly a generational interruption; a cohort that was never given the conditions under which the habit normally forms, and then adapted to their absence in ways that have proven durable.

That’s a different problem than the one the industry thinks it has. And it sits on top of a structural failure that was already underway before any of this began.

II.

Writing in an April 2026 piece for Wine Searcher, Randall Grahm described his career with characteristic self-deprecation and unusual candor. He had been, he wrote, “enormously favored to have found myself borne along in a rare historical moment, astride the vinous rocket ship that was the wine business in the ‘80s, ‘90s and early aughts.” The boom, in his telling, was not a permanent cultural shift toward wine. It was a convergence-- Boomer demographics, disposable income, Robert Mondavi’s seductive promise of Gracious Living, that produced a specific and unrepeatable moment. The rocket ship was not the baseline. It was the exception.

Grahm is an uncomfortable witness for the industry precisely because he was so central to what it became. He helped build the culture he’s now eulogizing. And his diagnosis is unsparing: “We seem to have lost our ability to replace our sunsetting customer base, and to meaningfully speak to the younger consumer. We have become Rune Rangers.”

That’s a remarkable thing for one of American wine’s most celebrated figures to say in print. It deserves to be taken seriously.

What Grahm describes is the setup. The demand was real, but it was never permanent, and the industry treated it as if it were. That mistake would have been costly on its own; but it compounds sharply when you place it alongside the structural decisions the industry made during those boom years-- decisions that made the category progressively harder to enter even as the demographic tailwind that had sustained it was fading. Grahm identifies the conditions that created the market. What he doesn’t fully examine, and what the data makes increasingly hard to ignore, is what the market built around those conditions, and what happens to that structure when the conditions change.

That’s the next part of the problem.

III.

In the early 1970s, a glass of wine in a restaurant cost close to what a cocktail cost: both were normal bar choices, both unremarkable in price, both accessible to anyone at the table who felt like it. Beer was cheaper. The differences were real but not decisive. Wine was one option among several, not yet weighted with the significance it would later carry.

What happened over the next fifty years is more interesting than simple price inflation. When you adjust for inflation and look at what each category actually cost in real terms, wine didn’t increase that far from where it started. A glass that ran the equivalent of eight or nine dollars in the 1970s runs around fourteen today... a meaningful increase, but not an extreme one, and well within the range of what happened to food and drink across the board. Cocktails followed a similar arc. Beer stayed low and stable, the reliable anchor it has always been.

So wine didn’t become dramatically more expensive relative to history. What changed was something harder to see in the numbers: the relationship between price and certainty collapsed.

Beer has always been cheap and known. You order a beer and you know what you’re getting-- not just the brand, but the experience, the flavor profile, the way the evening will feel. Cocktails rose in price over the decades but rose with something attached. The menu tells you what’s in the glass before you order it. Yuzu, chili, smoke. Elderflower, cucumber, gin. The ingredient list is a flavor map. The drink interprets itself. You can spend sixteen dollars on a cocktail and feel entirely confident doing it because the uncertainty has been removed in advance.

Wine sits between them in price, cheaper than a cocktail, more expensive than a beer, and asks more of the drinker than either. A grape and a region is not a flavor map. It’s a code, and decoding it requires either prior knowledge or someone at the table willing to explain it.

The problem is visible on any serious wine list. A cocktail menu tells you what’s in the glass before you commit to ordering it. A wine list offers something like “Franz Künstler Hochheimer Kirchenstück Spätlese Gold Capsule QbA” and considers the matter settled. Every word in that name is a code: the producer, the village, the vineyard, the ripeness level, the capsule color denoting sweetness, the quality classification. To someone who knows German Riesling, it’s a precise description. Conversely, to someone approaching wine for the first time, it’s gibberish with a high price tag; and unlike the cocktail menu, nothing on the page explains what any of it means or why it’s worth finding out.

Through the boom years, that explanation was available in the room itself. Sommeliers, engaged servers, wine programs built around discovery rather than efficiency. Gen X came of age during this period, when by-the-glass programs were expanding and the infrastructure around wine still oriented itself toward bringing people in. The category was harder to enter than it had been for Boomers, but it was still trying to reach you.

That infrastructure didn’t survive; as lists narrowed and purchasing consolidated around what moved reliably, the human layer that once softened the decision dissolved. Turnover rose. Training shortened. The server who might once have guided a table through an unfamiliar bottle was replaced by someone managing six tables with a list designed for efficiency rather than exploration.

That’s the distortion the inflation-adjusted data reveals. In real dollars, wine hasn’t moved as far as it feels like it has. What’s changed is not the price. It’s the certainty.

A $16 cocktail feels like a reasonable choice because you know what you’re getting. A $14 glass of something you don’t recognize, with no one there to explain it, in a category that has spent decades signaling that you should already understand it... that feels like a risk, and risk, when it sits alongside a beer that costs $8 and tells you exactly what it is, tends to lose.

The on-ramps that might have built the familiarity needed to absorb that risk were gone. White Zinfandel was not a great wine, but it was a functional one-- affordable, forgiving, the kind of thing you could order without knowing anything and feel immediately that you had made a reasonable choice. The industry dismissed it, distanced itself from it, and watched it disappear without replacing it with anything that did the same job at the same price. The beer industry made the opposite decision. Budweiser and Coors stayed on the shelf through the craft revolution, alongside it rather than despite it. Nobody made entry-level beer feel like an embarrassment. The floor was stable. Wine removed its floor and called it progress.

By the time the pandemic arrived, the first glass of wine was already the highest-risk purchase on the menu, not because it was the most expensive, but because it was the only category where price and uncertainty had been allowed to accumulate together, unchecked, for decades.

That’s the structure a generation of uninitiated drinkers is now being asked to walk into. Most of them aren’t walking in.

IV.

The picture that emerges from both is not what the industry thinks it is.

The industry has spent the years since the decline began looking for its consumers: trying to understand why they left, what would bring them back, what the category needs to do differently to recapture their attention. That framing assumes a relationship that existed and then eroded—a consumer who was present and departed.

For a significant portion of the generation now entering its prime drinking years, that relationship never formed. There was no departure because there was no arrival. The structural conditions that might have initiated them-- the accessible first glass, the floor-level price point, the server with enough knowledge and time to make an unfamiliar bottle feel like a reasonable risk-- those were already gone before the pandemic hit. The pandemic then closed the rooms where initiation might have happened anyway, through proximity and accident and the low-stakes repetition that builds most adult habits.

The industry is not facing a retention problem. It is facing an initiation problem... and those require entirely different responses.

A retention problem means the category failed someone who was already inside it: priced them out, gave them too many bad glasses at too high a price, failed to hold their interest. The solution involves improving the experience for existing drinkers, rebuilding trust, lowering friction at the margins.

An initiation problem means the category never reached someone in the first place. The solution requires something harder: rebuilding the conditions under which the first encounter happens at all. Not a better wine list. A reason to approach the list. Not a more approachable label. A lower cost to be wrong about what’s behind it.

The Boomer cohort that drove the boom is aging out. Grahm is right about that, and the data is unambiguous. Gen X participated in the category but never at the scale that would sustain what Boomers built, and produced nothing behind them capable of replacing it. Millennials engaged partially, unevenly, with one foot in wine and one foot in a beverage landscape that was beginning to compete for the same occasions. And Gen Z—the generation that would now be forming the habits that carry a category forward—arrived at exactly the wrong intersection: a system that had stopped building on-ramps and a set of formative years that removed the rooms where on-ramps once existed naturally.

The industry’s answer to this has not been to rebuild what was lost.

Constellation Brands divested its mainstream portfolio (Woodbridge, Robert Mondavi Private Selection, Meiomi, Cook’s) and retreated to wines priced $15 and above, concentrating on the existing premium consumer rather than the uninitiated one. Gallo, the world’s largest wine producer, found its growth vehicle in High Noon, a vodka-based ready-to-drink brand, not in rebuilding wine’s accessible tier. The strategy across the industry’s largest players has converged on premiumization, making better wine for the people who already drink it, while the foundation that might have produced new drinkers continues to sink.

And then there is the newest answer: functional wines. Low-alcohol products infused with vitamins, botanicals, and herbs. Varietals named FOCUS and RADIANCE, arrived this spring at Total Wine stores, promising to blend the ritual of wine with the language of wellness. It is innovation aimed at a consumer who has already opted out of the category on its own terms; an attempt to meet them where they are rather than rebuild the conditions that might have brought them in.

What makes this particularly visible is where the demand actually went. The wine industry has spent considerable energy explaining that Gen Z drinks less—pointing to health consciousness, changing values, a generation that simply prefers other things. But the data doesn’t support that framing. RTDs are the fastest-growing segment in beverage alcohol, driven overwhelmingly by drinkers under forty. Gen Z and Millennials together account for the majority of RTD consumption, and the category has continued to grow while wine contracts.

Gen Z isn’t abstaining. They’re opting in-- to a different system.

The system they chose solves every problem wine created. A canned cocktail arrives with a known flavor profile, a fixed price, a single serving, and no requirement that the drinker understand anything about how it was made or where it came from. There is no wrong choice because the choice has already been made. No knowledge barrier. No social risk. No $14 glass of something you can’t pronounce standing between you and an enjoyable evening.

This is not a new consumer behavior. It is a very old one, wearing new packaging.

White Zinfandel did this. Bartles & Jaymes did this. They were not accidents or embarrassments-- they were infrastructure. Entry-level products that asked nothing of the drinker, delivered a consistent and forgiving experience, and gave people a way into the broader category before they were ready to care about it. They occupied a lane the wine industry later decided was beneath it. They removed those products, dismissed the consumers who liked them, and left the lane empty.

RTDs didn’t steal that lane. They found it vacant and moved in.

The difference between White Zinfandel and a canned cocktail is not the consumer it serves-- it’s the category it serves. White Zinfandel, for all its limitations, was still wine. It still had the potential to lead somewhere. A drinker who started with White Zinfandel might eventually pick up a Barbera, try a Tempranillo, develop a palate. The on-ramp connected to the highway. RTDs don’t connect to wine. They terminate the journey in a different place entirely. A drinker who builds their habit around canned cocktails is not a wine drinker in formation. They are a fully formed consumer of something else. The category didn’t just lose a beginner. It lost the conditions under which beginners become something more.

These are not irrational decisions. Each one makes sense from inside the company making it. Premium wines have better margins. RTDs are growing. Functional beverages are growing faster. Chasing growth in adjacent categories is what any competent business does when its core market softens.

But taken together, they describe something else entirely: an industry that has looked at an initiation problem and responded with a retention strategy. Better product for existing drinkers. Adjacent products for people who’ve already opted out. Nothing that rebuilds the room. Nothing that lowers the cost of the first encounter. Nothing that addresses the question of how someone who has never had a reason to care about wine might be given one.

The industry is not losing its next generation of drinkers. It never formed them.

What the category is doing, collectively, is optimizing for the consumer it already has while the pipeline empties. It is stable in the short term. It is not survivable.

V.

The rooms didn’t disappear entirely. They changed shape.

The gathering moved indoors, into smaller groups, into homes and apartments where the choices were made in advance and the stakes of getting it wrong were lower because nobody was watching. The bar tab became a bottle from a grocery store, chosen quickly in a category nobody had much practice navigating, defaulting to whatever name was most legible on the shelf. The shared pitcher became a case of beer or a box of wine or a twelve-pack of something canned and pre-flavored that required no explanation and carried no risk of being wrong.

These are not bad choices. Some of them are genuinely good ones. But they are not the same as the room. They don’t produce the same kind of encounter: the incidental one, the one where you try something because it was already open and someone poured you a glass before you thought to decline. The encounter that doesn’t feel like a decision because it barely registers as one.

That encounter is where wine used to live. Not always. Not for everyone. But often enough that the category could count on it—could count on the accumulated exposure of millions of people in millions of unremarkable evenings building, slowly, a relationship with the glass in front of them.

That accumulation has slowed. The pandemic interrupted it for a generation. The structural conditions that might have sustained it were already eroding, and the industry’s response has been to make better wine for the people who already love it, and to chase the people who don’t with products that look like wine but don’t ask you to engage with wine on its own terms.

The question the industry hasn’t seriously asked is the one that matters most: where does the first glass happen now?

It isn’t happening in restaurants the way it once did. It isn’t happening in bars built for speed and turnover. It isn’t happening in the home, where the choice has already been made before the bottle is opened.

The first glass-- the ordinary one, the uncertain one, the one you’re not sure you’ll like--requires a room where the cost of being wrong is low enough that you’re willing to find out.

That room is harder to find now. In many places, it’s gone entirely.

Until it exists again, the category will continue to do what it has been doing: holding on to the people already inside it, waiting for a consumer it never invited in, and calling the resulting contraction a trend.