The Room That Wasn’t There

How a generation missed the rooms where wine becomes a habit

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.