Mastering Wine: Is Frictionless Wine Costing Us Diversity?

One of my favourites was about a family with a robot that talked, did chores, made meals and hung out with the kids and, spoiler alert, things didn’t end well. I was transfixed by the idea of a robot that existed purely to make lives easier, tailored to one specific household. I never imagined I would be living in that world quite so soon.

These days, the world seems increasingly designed, mentally and physically, to be frictionless. We don’t have to walk very far, get up to change a channel or even to grate cheese if we don’t want to – small efforts once ubiquitous in life. Apps not only order whatever we want, they remember what we want before we even think. Our media algorithms are attuned to us with unsettling precision. And now, much like the family in my childhood book, we can have AI companions tailored entirely to our own liking – endlessly agreeable, always available, requiring nothing in return, willing even to do our thinking for us. But humans evolved with friction, it’s what our bodies and brains are built to work against. By increasingly massaging away the small daily resistances of life, we subtly lose to convenience what it means to live.

How does this relate to wine? As the global wine market grew, its diversity slowly shrank alongside it - consolidation and scale tend to require homogenisation. Regions that traditionally grew unruly arrays of varieties have in many places replanted with a shorter list of ‘international’ varieties with greater perceived global appeal – just 13 varieties now account for over a third of global plantings. Sometimes we don’t know what’s lost until it’s gone.

Of course, it’s never been easier to find the obscure and niche – one click and it’s on your doorstep. But that’s not really a counterargument, it’s the same dynamic wearing a different cloak. Globalising wine reduces friction for growers and merchants, while sourcing a rarity online reduces it for wine drinkers. Either way, it asks little of us - no travel, no stumbling on something unexpected, no earning it.

We might not all want to drink natural wines, or track down quirky varieties from far flung places, but it matters that some of us do. They challenge what we think wine is and give us new ways of thinking about the familiar. There are signs the new generation of drinkers senses this, increasingly reaching for friction rather than avoiding it, and we would do well to heed this as an industry. Effort, it turns out, is very often its own reward. The robot in my childhood book never once made anyone reach for anything. So pour the wine that makes you work for it.