Vindication in a $400 Bottle of Solaia

For the past few years I’ve been told, repeatedly and confidently, that wine is dying. You’ve seen the articles. THC beverages are replacing it. Young people aren’t drinking it. Health concerns are ending it. Restaurants are abandoning it. Bourbon is king. (The bourbon boom really stings because we do not sell spirits. Fielding non-stop requests, we added a non-alcoholic bourbon to give our customers the semblance of a Kentucky hug.)

And yet every single week I unlock a wine shop door and watch something very different happen, and I have expanded on this before in posts — this one in particular.

Here’s the truth: wine isn’t declining — cheap wine is. The top three best-selling wines by volume may still be Barefoot, Franzia, and Bota Box, but they are not helping wine stay relevant. Sassicaia, Solaia, and let me see if I can find another great wine starting with an “S.” SILVER OAK! These highly allocated and overpriced wines are breathing so much relevancy into the wine market we are going to need a bigger boat.

What’s been collapsing is the middle and the bottom — the part of the business that was built on habit, grocery shelves (end-caps and BOGOs), and the assumption that consumers wanted Robert Mondavi Private Selection Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Zinfandel forever. The consumer changed. Now the saviors of the wine industry drink Super Tuscans for over $100 a bottle (if there’s a flash sale). Because at the exact same time the industry and media — for them, the worse the better — were predicting catastrophe, another part of the market quietly strengthened.

Limited-production wines, allocated wines, and serious Napa Cabernet never slowed in the way the broader statistics suggested. In fact, in many cases, they tightened. Thank you, Chris Carpenter, aka the Mountain Man, who knows how to manipulate fruit from various benchlands to taste like something GRAPE — specifically, Mt. Brave Cabernet Sauvignon 2021.

Silicon Valley Bank’s Rob McMillan — whose annual report the industry both anticipates and fears — now says the worst of the downturn is likely behind us. Meanwhile, Liv-ex’s market indices have been rising steadily since late 2025. Those two signals matter, but I didn’t need a report to see it. I had an order and shipping log.

Cabernet shipments alone accounted for roughly a third of the $3.4 billion direct-to-consumer wine market, and the most telling statistic wasn’t volume — it was price. Cabernet averaging $200 or more grew in both value and volume, while bottles under $60 fell sharply.

That is not the behavior of a dying category. That is a market undergoing dislocation. For years the wine industry depended on a casual drinker — the person who picked up a bottle of Chloe Pinot Grigio because it was there. That buyer is now drinking mocktails, seltzers (really just Suncruisers), or smoking cannabis. The vast majority of industry watchers interpreted this as “wine is losing relevance.”

But the serious buyer — the person who chooses a bottle — has never been more active.

Collectors, restaurants, and enthusiasts have become more selective, not less engaged. A $400 bottle no longer sells because it’s expensive. It sells because it’s trusted. Provenance, producer reputation, and track record now matter more than marketing ever did.

Even Champagne shows the same pattern. Prestige cuvées and intellectual blends — wines built around identity rather than vintage — hold demand because they represent something consumers understand: intention. What changed is not interest in wine. What changed is how people choose it. Consumers today don’t want anonymous bottles, i.e., winery-direct (LMAO, and I don’t care). They want a story, a producer, a reason. Just the other day, one of our cherished regular customers remarked, after mulling whether to buy two or three different Italian gems for sale in the $150 to $250 range: “Oh, just give me all three because I love all their stories.”

From a retailer’s perspective, the “wine is dying” narrative came from looking at the wrong metric. The industry watched volume. But wine has never been a volume product. It has always been a story. The shift looks like contraction on paper. In reality, it’s maturity.