25 Wine Trends That Defined the Last 25 Years

Everything, everywhere, all at once

Starting with the new millennium, a nascent trend became the new reality: Wines from everywhere, not just from the most famous regions in the most famous countries, became readily available, particularly on restaurant wine lists but also in stores. Hankering to try a Slovenian Rebula or a Blaufränkisch from Austria? Now you can without flying overseas.

Attack of the critter labels

Yellow Tail started this trend, led it, and eventually supplied more than half of all Australian wine imports to the U.S. These bright and often attractively priced bottlings made wine feel as affordable and easy-drinking as beer.

It also spawned a raft of four-legged or two-winged competitors: Little Penguin, Monkey Bay, Four Emus, Tall Horse, and more. Many of whom, thankfully, have passed on to the great wine zoo in the sky.

Screw caps are the new cool

Screw caps for inexpensive (i.e., jug) wines had been around a long time. But it took a gang of pissed-off Australian winemakers led by legendary Riesling producer Jeffrey Grosset, tired of their wines being pointlessly damaged by natural corks, to get the idea into people’s heads that high-end wines — in fact, all wines — could benefit from screw cap closures.

The side effect? Faced with competition, the cork industry cleaned up its act and modernized quality control. Today, incidences of cork taint are far lower than back in the early 2000s.

Pinot Noir & the ‘Sideways’ effect

A little movie about two pals on a wine trip down the Central Coast of California had one major impact on wine: it made Pinot Noir cool. Dubbed the “Sideways Effect,” sales of Pinot in the U.S. increased 16% in the three years following the movie. In California, production increased 170% (compared to an 8% increase for wine grape production overall) to keep up with the demand.

Biodynamic wine arrives

Biodynamic farming (not just for wine) was already a passion in Europe pre-2004. Its inflection point in the U.S., however, was French winemaker Nicolas Joly’s first “Return to Terroir” tasting in New York City. It introduced some of the world’s most influential sommeliers and wine buyers to the far-reaching diversity and quality of wineries following this somewhat outré approach. Lots of talk about burying cow horns by the light of the full moon ensued.

Natural wine

As with biodynamic wine, natural wine — essentially made with as little human intervention as possible — was well-established in Europe before it came to the U.S. But by the mid-2000s, natural wine specialist shops were opening in New York City, San Francisco, and other cities around the country. Ditto for restaurants and wine bars devoted to non-corporate, non-intervention wines like Ten Bells in New York City’s Lower East Side, which opened in 2008.

Sparkling wine takes over

There’s more to bubbles than just Champagne. Prosecco arrived in the U.S. in 1997, but it was in the late 2000s when it really took off. Between 2007–12, its sales more than quadrupled. And Prosecco isn’t the whole story. As Champagne prices rose and rose, people began to look to alternatives like Cava, American sparkling wine, Franciacorta, and more.

Top Burgundies become the most sought-after wines on the planet

Somewhere between 2005–09, prices for wines from top Burgundy producers started to rise rapidly. And then, post-2010, they simply skyrocketed. In 2004, you could buy a bottle of Domaine de L’Arlot Romanée St. Vivant Grand Cru for $128. Today, it will run you about $1,000, if you can find it. One reason? Burgundy’s market for its top wines, produced in notoriously small amounts, is now worldwide.

The rise of dry rosé

Death and rebirth is the way of all things, or at least the way of dry rosé. In 2008, The New York Times published a story about the “new” craze in the Hamptons: dry rosé from France. Dry rosé had been a non-category ever since semi-sweet white Zinfandel stomped it out of existence in the mid-1980s.

But after this glimmer of a reappearance, soon it seemed that everyone in the country was drinking (and posting pictures of) glasses of dry rosé, particularly in the pale pink Provençal style. Provence alone now sells almost two million cases of rosé a year in the U.S.

Wine info everywhere!

Once upon a time, to gain wine knowledge was an arcane pursuit. The internet changed all that, and by 2010, it was becoming hard to know how not to learn more about wine. Paul Grieco’s wine list for Terroir (2008) was massively influential — opinionated, jammed full of info, wildly varied, visual — and it spawned hundreds of similar lists.

The app Vivino launched in 2010: point it at a bottle, it tells you everything. Winery web sites blew up with technical info, vineyard maps, and more. The early 2010s were also the heyday of wine blogging. Want to be a wine expert? Just launch your own blog!

Obscure regions become somm catnip

It’s hard to pinpoint when this trend started, exactly, but at some point, sommeliers started to become much more excited about obscure or forgotten wine regions than the classic, blue-chip places for wine. Bordeaux? How about Rkatsiteli from Georgia instead. Napa Cabernet? No, I think I’d prefer volcanic Canary Islands whites. And, dude, have you tasted oxidative Jura wines? They’re amazing. There was, and is, a bit of flavor-of-the-month about this, but it goes on.

Grower Champagnes take over

Grower Champagne, or farmer fizz, whatever you like, first appeared in the U.S. in the late 1980s, thanks to wine importer Kermit Lynch. But in that era, they were just a whisper. A second wave began to attract more attention in the early 2000s, thanks to another visionary wine importer, Terry Theise.

It could be argued that the category really took off in the early 2010s, with a next-gen wave of younger (literally “next generation”) proprietors in Champagne; an increased interest in organic or biodynamic farming; a burgeoning number of “natural” Champagnes; new cult names like Ulysse Colin, Jerome Prevost, and Marie-Noël Ledru; and the rise of the overlooked, southern Champagne subregion of the Côte des Bar.

Red blends become inescapable

While the first vintage of The Prisoner was released 10 years prior, 385 cases do not a trend make. What really tipped the scale were its scions, oomphy reds with a barely perceptible touch of residual sugar to help boost their fruity appeal (e.g. Ménage à Trois and Apothic). By 2016, red blends were almost 40% of new labels being introduced to the U.S. market.

High-low pairings

Somehow, around this time, the idea to pair wine with, oh, French fries rather than foie gras bounded into view. Pizza and natty bottles from cool-kid producers! (Roberta’s opened in 2008.) Champagne and fried chicken! (Birds & Bubbles opened in 2014.) Seminars that paired wine and potato chips (Ray Isle, 2012, Austin Wine & Food Fest). Now, it doesn’t seem so odd, but back then?

Rise of the somm

One of the more unlikely trends in wine was the moment when sommeliers became cool. That an obsessive subgroup of specialists focused on its geekiest aspects become afforded cultural hipness might seem far-fetched — when will the moment come for cheesemongers? But the source point here is the 2012 movie Somm, a portrait of four (male) sommeliers who strive to pass the notoriously impossible Master Sommelier exam. It could be argued, in turn, that the moment passed around 2018–20, when the Court of Master sommeliers was buffeted by a cheating scandal, followed by a well-deserved (for some) Me Too moment.

Democratization of wine

Screw tops, wine in boxes, the profusion of information on the internet, the casualization of wine labels, critter wines, high-low pairings, killer wine lists in casual restaurants, the ever-increasing presence of women (and later, people of diverse backgrounds) in the once all-white-guy wine business, the list goes on. The process of making wine accessible, friendly, non-snobbish, and open to anyone is an ongoing project, but right around now, it feels like the barriers are dropping like dominoes.

Wine fridges aren’t just for obsessive collectors anymore

When did wine fridges shift from a luxury item only purchased by wine-collecting snobs to a de rigueur item for kitchens of the upper-middle-class professional set? We’d put it right at 2012.

Wine influencers start influencing

You could argue that the first “wine influencer” in the digital age was Gary Vaynerchuk, whose Wine Library TV launched in 2006. But he was somewhat a lone voice (and now a bona fide media mogul). Social media broadened the realm, and now, any number of wine influencers hawk themselves, and wine, on Insta, Tik Tok, and elsewhere.

The best have legitimate wine knowledge and serious social-media smarts, like Amanda McCrossin, aka @sommvivant, on IG and Tik Tok; Konstantin Baum on YouTube; Andre Mack on YouTube; and they’ve also added needed diversity to the wine realm. The worst are, as usual, good-looking idiots.

Good canned wine

Canned wine has been around since the 1930s, but to no one’s surprise, most of it was bottom-shelf plonk. But changes in technology (food-grade polymer linings for cans), awareness of sustainability (lightweight cans are much better than glass), and some of the creativity in labeling borrowed from the craft beer industry brought ambitious winemakers into the canned fold. Some early innovators were Colorado’s Infinite Monkey Theorem (2008) and Oregon’s Underwood (2013). By the founding of Napa’s Sans Wine Co. (2015), things had really gotten going.

Orange wines

It’s a little tough to denote the “arrival” of a winemaking method that dates 8,000 years, but what the hell. Orange wines, or skin-contact white wines, are those made by allowing the juice from white grapes to remain in contact with the skins during fermentation (basically, how red wine is made).

The modern era of this approach probably started with Josko Gravner in Italy’s Friuli in the mid-1990s, who was inspired by the qvevri wines of Georgia. It became a cool-kid somm interest in the mid-2000s, and it then spread as a technique to winemaking regions around the world in the early 2010s. By 2015, it was prevalent enough that seemingly every single wine and/or culinary publication had published an article entitled, “What is Orange Wine?”

Lightness is all

Once upon a time, power, ripeness and even oakiness were seen as signifiers of a great wine (think 2000 or so). It’s often referred to as the “Parkerization” of wine after the tasting (and scoring) preferences of one prevalent wine reviewer of the time.

But the pendulum swung, and really sped up, right around 2017, as not just restaurant buyers, but the general wine-drinking public, began to want lighter, crisper, fresher wines, usually at lower alcohol levels. A big glass of 15.5% superripe Cabernet? No, thank you. I believe I will have a zesty, flinty, super-sharp Loire Chenin instead.

Nerd winemaking goes mainstream

Not sure what carbonic maceration is? Whole-cluster fermentation? Didn’t know that powdery mildew can be combatted by diluted milk sprayed over your vines? Your handy local sommelier is here to tell you all about it.

Wineries start to lead on climate change awareness

Vintners have long been conscious of climate change issues. The nuanced nature of growing grapes for fine wine means, among other things, precise tracking of harvest dates, ripeness levels, and so on. But that collective knowledge, and the need to broaden awareness of it, reached a tipping point with the founding of wine-climate awareness groups like The Porto Protocol in 2018 and International Wineries for Climate Action, or IWCA, in 2019.

Chilled reds

Like the cup holder in the car, it’s unclear why the hell it took so long for people to figure out that red wine, (a.) can be chilled, and (b.) can be really, really refreshing that way, but figure it out they finally did. Of course, chilled reds are usually served at the same 55°F as classic cellar temperature — ​​plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — but not so many of us own rundown Scottish castles with underground stone cellars anymore.

The 100-point scale becomes obsolete

As many millennials have observed, “Why do I need some old guy to tell me what wine I’m supposed to like?” With a profusion of wine voices, a cultural reliance on social-media feeds for advice, and the demonization of the idea of expertise, wine critics are going the way of the dinosaur. Has it really happened yet? Well, not quite. But the heralds’ trumpets are blowing.