This article is adapted from a presentation entitled “Murder on the Dancefloor” originally delivered by Polly Hammond at the Wine Sales Symposium in May 2024. It has been expanded and refined for written form, while preserving the core insights shared with wine industry leaders.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Question We Keep Asking Wrong
The first wine conference speech I ever gave was titled “How to Sell Wine to Millennials.” That was years ago, before the world had been collectively traumatized by a global pandemic. It seems fitting that my first in-person presentation since COVID ended would ask me to address the same question, with their little siblings, Gen Z, tacked on for good measure.
“What do we need to know to sell wine to Millennials and Gen Z?”
I’ve heard this question in conference rooms from Napa to Bordeaux. I’ve seen it in strategy decks, marketing briefs, and panicked email subject lines. And every time, I want to stop the conversation and ask: What if the question itself is wrong?
Because here’s what I’ve learned after a decade of answering variations of this question: We’re not really asking how to reach a generation. We’re asking how to stay relevant in a world that’s already moved on from the way we used to do things.
To understand why, we need to go back. Way back.
The Generational Marketing Trap
Let’s start in post-WWII America, when life as a Baby Boomer looked like this: Your parents had experienced collective trauma. You were the result of homecoming, born into a world of patriotism, church on Sunday, and community potlucks. You could buy a home and feed a family on minimum wage. You trusted your institutions and believed what you read in the newspaper.
On the surface, Boomers were a productive, homogeneous cohort. They bought homes at the same time, got pregnant at the same time, moved up the corporate ladder at the same time, retired at the same time.
Of course, they also smoked on airplanes. Men weren’t supposed to cry. Interracial marriage was illegal.
Smart business people saw opportunity in these life phases. People like Eli Broad famously followed the Boomers through their predictable milestones, building entire industries around their synchronized progression through life.
And the idea of generation as a marketing demographic was born.
It seemed to work. Until it didn’t.
How Each Generation Shaped All of Us
Along came Gen X. We grew up with TV and birth control. You might even say we were TV-and-birth-control natives. We learned that smoking on planes—or anywhere—maybe wasn’t the healthiest option. That it was okay for men to cry sometimes. That we could marry, but not if we were gay.
We were, at the time, “the most educated generation ever.” But there was no living off minimum wage anymore. Instead of a balanced pursuit of trades and professional degrees, a disproportionate number of us borrowed money to study communications and women’s studies, hoping to get well-paying jobs.
We learned that Mr. Brady was gay, that student loans never go away, and that leaders would lie for oil.
The Boomers learned these things too. And to many of them, it mattered.
Along came the Millennials. They grew up with the internet and cell phones. You might even say they were internet-and-cell-phone natives. They learned that if they asked for what they wanted, we’d get mad. That a college degree was useless because now they needed a master’s to get a job. They were, at the time, “the largest, most educated generation ever.”
But if they wanted to live in the city, they were probably still going to have to share a flat with friends. And it’s hard to have babies when you’re flatting with friends. There was no living off one wage, so they embraced the side hustle. They were tired, so they embraced self-care.
The Boomers and Gen X learned these things too. And to many of them, it mattered.
And now, along comes Gen Z. They grew up with social media and climate change. You might say they are social-media-and-climate-change natives. They are “the largest, most educated generation ever.”
They also grew up with recession, war, American school shootings, debt. They may live at home forever. They have learned that gender is fluid, that mental health matters, and that aesthetic is crucial.
The Boomers and Gen X and Millennials learned these things too. And to many of them, it mattered.
Each generation’s defining experiences didn’t just shape them. They reshaped everyone who lived through them.
But Generations Aren’t Really That Different
Here’s where it gets interesting. When you actually look at the data—not the headlines, not the think pieces, but the research—the characteristics we attribute to generations start to fall apart. And I’m not the only one saying it:
Pew Research Center, which literally created the generational cutoff dates most marketers use, released a statement in 2023 essentially saying: We made these up. The boundaries are arbitrary. The differences within generations are often greater than the differences between them:
So What’s Happening Here?
Phases of life have nothing to do with age. And generational demographics, as a marketing tool, are increasingly useless.
The experiences that have profoundly shaped younger lives have equally reframed how all the rest of us relate to brands. From tech-savvy grandparents to Gen Z who just started turning 21, we’re all navigating the same fundamental shifts: digital-first communication, values-based purchasing, the expectation of transparency, the demand for convenience.
Think about three different women, all shopping for wine online. One is 28, one is 45, one is 63. If you were forced to predict their behavior based only on age, you’d likely be wrong two out of three times. But if you knew their lifestyle, their values, their motivations? You’d get it right.
That 63-year-old who runs a consulting business, travels frequently, and buys everything on her phone has far more in common with the 28-year-old digital marketer than she does with another 63-year-old who’s retired, lives rurally, and prefers to shop in person.
The Real Answer: Psychographics Over Demographics
The answer to selling wine today starts with a skill we all have: empathy.
Get beyond the basics—age, income, location—and get to know what actually matters. Your starting point isn’t a birth year. It’s understanding personalities, lifestyles, interests, opinions, and values.
This is psychographics. And unlike demographics, psychographics actually predict behavior.
Demographics tell you who someone is on paper. Psychographics tell you why they make the choices they make. Demographics might tell you someone is 32, lives in Portland, and earns $75K. Psychographics tell you they value sustainability, prefer experiences over possessions, research purchases extensively online, and buy wine primarily for dinner parties where they want to impress friends with interesting stories.
That’s the difference between knowing a fact about someone and understanding what motivates them.
Until recently, psychographics were harder to access than demographics. You couldn’t just pull age and income from a census report—you had to actually talk to people, observe them, study their behavior. And even when you had psychographic data, it wasn’t always clear how to make it actionable at scale.
The internet changed all of that.
The Five Psychographic Categories That Matter
When we talk about psychographics in wine marketing, we’re really talking about five interconnected categories. Each reveals something different about why someone buys wine—and more importantly, why they buy your wine instead of someone else’s.
Personalities
Personality describes the collection of traits that someone consistently exhibits over time. Are they risk-averse or adventurous? Introverted or extroverted? Detail-oriented or big-picture thinkers?
Remember Cambridge Analytica? Whatever you think of their ethics, they proved that personality-based targeting works. They used the OCEAN model (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) to create psychographic profiles so accurate they could predict political behavior better than demographic data ever could.
For wine, this matters enormously. Someone high in openness is far more likely to try an orange wine or an unfamiliar varietal. Someone high in conscientiousness might obsess over vineyard practices and certifications. These traits don’t correlate neatly with age; they correlate with purchase behavior.
Interests
Interests include hobbies, pastimes, media consumption habits, and what occupies someone’s time.
Luxury champagne brands understood this decades ago. Look at the Krug partnership with IRCAM. They’re not selling wine to an age group—they’re selling to people with a shared interest.
Tennis lovers? Moet and Roger Federer are a match made in heaven.
Someone who cares deeply about F1 might be 25 or 55, but their interest creates a shared identity that makes them receptive to the same messaging.
The same person might share multiple interest communities with completely different age demographics.
Lifestyles
How do we spend our day? What do we DO?
When we talk about Lifestyle, we’re thinking of the daily habits and commitments, everything from work to social engagements, housing, parental duties, relationship status, and leisure activities. These factors impact our customers’ day-to-day decisions and help us craft content and messaging that speaks to the specific needs of their lifestyles.
Someone’s lifestyle often predicts their consumption patterns better than their birthdate ever could:
DryDrinker.Com is only one example of the myriad sellers who are leveraging dietary choices, amongst other criteria, to reduce purchasing friction.
Alternative packaging can be a great choice for the person who lives alone and still wants a nice glass of wine.
Need Delivery? I live in Barcelona where I don’t need a car. That means I know every fine wine delivery company in the area, and which ones can deliver in the next 60mins. I have NYer friends who’ve never owned a car. For us, Delivery and local pickup locations are essential.
Social Status and Identity Signaling
Social status is the dirty little secret of marketing. Whether luxury is the norm, or luxury is an aspiration, messaging and the customer experience can make your audience feel like this is where they are meant to be (and by be, I mean, spend their money).
2020s’ research on luxury goods consumption reveals a fundamental shift in status behavior: conspicuous consumption (the overt display of wealth through recognizable luxury brands) has given way in many contexts to quiet luxury. This is consumption that signals status to those “in the know” while remaining invisible to outsiders.
Anyone out there watch Succession? It was like winelover bingo as many of us paused to see what was being poured, from high end grocery champagnes to premium super Rhones.
Want a deep dive into wine aspirations? Be sure to check out “wine cellar Instagram” (which honestly is one of my fave haunts).
The key insight: status motivations don’t correlate with age. They correlate with social context, peer groups, and self-concept. A 30-year-old sommelier and a 60-year-old collector might both be deep into insider knowledge signaling. A 25-year-old consultant and a 55-year-old executive might both default to traditional luxury markers.
Understanding which status game your customers are playing (and which communities they’re signaling to)tells you more about positioning and pricing than their birthdate ever could.
Core Values
Someone’s values describe their sense of right and wrong, what they believe matters in the world.
We’re seeing this play out in real time with political wine brands and cause-driven marketing. Some wineries lean into environmental activism, social justice, or community support. Others deliberately avoid politics entirely. Both directions work, but only when they’re aligned with the values of the customer base.
The data shows that values-based purchasing is increasing across all age groups. According to research on luxury goods consumption, buyers increasingly make purchase decisions based on whether a brand’s values align with their own. This isn’t generational. It’s cultural.
For each of these examples, there are dozens more of brands who are succeeding because they understand the intersection of what matters to them and what matters to their customers. So how do you become one of those brand?
How the Internet Changed Everything
The internet has fundamentally transformed the relationship between demographics and psychographics in three crucial ways:
It made psychographics more actionable.
Before digital advertising, even if you knew your ideal customer valued sustainability and loved natural wine, reaching them at scale was nearly impossible. Now you can target people based on their actual behavior: the accounts they follow, the content they engage with, the communities they’re part of. You’re not guessing based on age. You’re targeting based on demonstrated interest.
It made psychographic differences more important.
The internet helps people find like-minded souls regardless of geography, age, or demographic background. People spend more time engaging with communities of shared interest than they do with their geographic neighbors. This consolidates psychographic differences and leads people to identify more with their values-based tribes than their demographic cohorts.
A 50-year-old natural wine enthusiast has more in common—and more frequent interaction with—a 28-year-old natural wine enthusiast than they do with a 50-year-old who drinks only Napa Cab. They follow the same Instagram accounts. They read the same newsletters. They show up at the same wine bars. Age is irrelevant.
It made psychographic insight easier to access.
You no longer need expensive research firms to understand your customers’ psychographics. The data is everywhere, if you know how to look.
Gathering Psychographic Data
So how do you actually learn about the psychographics of your target market? The good news: you probably have more access to this information than you realize. The challenge is being systematic about gathering and analyzing it.
Market Research
Start with formal research methods:
- Focus groups remain one of the most revealing ways to understand psychographics. Gather a small group of customers and ask open-ended questions. Don’t just ask what wines they like—ask why they buy wine, what occasions they buy for, what they worry about when making a selection, what they wish was different about the wine buying experience.
- Customer interviews go deeper. One-on-one conversations reveal motivations people won’t always share in group settings. Ask about their lifestyle, their values, their daily routines. Where does wine fit? When does it matter most? When is it just functional?
- Customer surveys allow you to scale these insights. Once you’ve identified psychographic patterns in qualitative research, you can test them quantitatively. But be careful: closed-ended surveys can only test hypotheses you already have. Start open-ended.
- Questionnaires, quizzes, and A/B testing on your website can reveal preferences and personality traits. A wine quiz that helps people discover what they like also teaches you about their taste profiles, their willingness to experiment, their price sensitivity, their occasion-based needs.
Digital Analytics
Your website and digital platforms are psychographic goldmines:
- Website analytics through tools like Google Analytics show you not just who visits, but what they care about. Which pages do they spend time on? Do they read your sustainability story or skip straight to the shop? Do they engage with winemaking details or just look at ratings? Browsing behavior reveals interests and priorities.
- Social media analytics—both first-party and third-party—tell you what content resonates. Which posts drive engagement? What topics spark conversation? Who shares your content, and what else do they care about? Social listening tools can show you the broader conversations your customers are having, even when they’re not talking directly about wine.
Your Team’s Observations
Never underestimate the value of informal data collection:
- Train your tasting room staff to notice and note patterns. What questions do people ask? What concerns do they raise? What makes them excited? What makes them hesitate? Your staff talks to more customers in a day than most executives do in a year. Their observations are psychographic data.
- Sales team insights are equally valuable. What objections come up repeatedly? What features close deals? What use cases do customers describe? Sales conversations reveal the jobs people are hiring wine to do—which brings us to perhaps the most important psychographic framework of all.
The Why
The most important psychographic insight? Understanding the job wine needs to do.
Here’s where most wine marketing loses its way. We think of wine as a product, and the wine drinker as absolute. Fine wine drinkers are fine wine drinkers. Grocery store buyers are always grocery store buyers. Wine drinkers are wine drinkers.
But that’s not how people actually behave.
The same person who orders a $200 bottle at a Michelin-starred restaurant will grab a $20 bottle at the grocery store for Tuesday night pasta. The collector with a temperature-controlled cellar also buys boxed wine for the beach house. The sommelier who can discourse on minerality also just wants something cold and easy on a hot afternoon.
I work in wine. I’ve enjoyed some of the finest wines in the world. But one of the most important bottles I’ve ever had was a Cupcake Pinot Noir I bought from a gas station in Slidell, Louisiana. I was stranded without a car while my mother was in a coma. I drank it from a paper cup in a hotel room. Took it with me to the Waffle House in the parking lot.
That wine did a job no Grand Cru could have done. It was there. It was familiar. It didn’t demand anything from me when I had nothing left to give. Years later, I still remember it as one of the best wines I’ve ever had.
Why does someone buy wine?
To give to their son, mother, grandfather, sister-in-law
To impress their boss, girlfriend, boyfriend’s brother
To take camping, on the boat, to the bach, to the game
To fit in with a new crowd
To commemorate an occasion
To see what the fuss is about
To feel like a grown-up
To remember their youth
For fun
As a social lubricant
To unwind
To survive
To get drunk
The same person buys different wines for all these jobs. I certainly have.
This is why demographic targeting fails. A 32-year-old isn’t looking for “wine for Millennials.” They’re looking for wine that does a specific job in a specific moment. Understanding the job—the psychographic need behind the purchase—is what allows you to be there when they need you.
Conclusion: Finding Your Future Wine Drinker
We’ve come full circle.
By dismissing the notion of homogeneous demographic cohorts and taking the time to understand what actually matters to our audience, we can use empathy to find not the future wine drinker, but your future wine drinker.
That person might be 25 or 65. They might live in Brooklyn or Brisbane. They might have a graduate degree or a trade certification. None of that tells you whether they’ll buy your wine.
What tells you that? Understanding their personality, their lifestyle, their interests, their beliefs, their values, and the social context they’re navigating. Understanding what job they need wine to do in their life. Understanding how they make decisions, what they care about, what resonates with their sense of self.
The internet has made this level of understanding both more important and more accessible than ever before. Psychographic differences matter more because people increasingly identify with communities of shared values rather than demographic categories. And psychographic data is easier to gather because behavior is now visible, trackable, and targetable at scale.
Here’s the good news: this is exactly how we reach Gen Z and Millennials. And also Gen X, the Boomers, and whoever comes next.
Because once you understand that generations aren’t the differentiator we thought they were—that the real differences lie in psychographics, in values, in the jobs people need done—you stop chasing demographics and start building genuine connection.
You stop asking “How do we reach young people?” and start asking “Who are we for? What job do we do better than anyone else? What values do we share with the people we want to serve?”
Those questions don’t have generational answers. They have human ones.
And that’s precisely the point. We’re not marketing to generations. We never were.
We’re marketing to people—complex, multifaceted, value-driven people whose age tells us almost nothing about whether they’ll love our wine.
So the next time someone asks you how to sell wine to Millennials or Gen Z, you’ll know the real answer: Stop trying to sell to a generation. Start trying to understand the actual humans who might hire your wine to do a job in their lives.
That’s not generational marketing. That’s just good marketing.
And it works for everyone.
