If you search in Google  for “countries without a wine culture,” it returns an entry for “What countries are dry?”: “Pakistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Mauritania, Libya, the Maldives, Iran, Kuwait, Brunei, and Bangladesh […] have alcohol bans, as do some states in India.” This, of course, was not my question. My concern was places where the indigenous culture overwhelmingly favours consumption of other kinds of alcohol than wine. I do not expect the modern wine industry to have actively marketed in Brunei or Mauritania in the past.

In giant India with its growing middle class, though, yes. Where I live in Panama and the rest of Central America (population of over 185 million) too. Those are just two examples where I perceived a lack of appropriate industry attention to creating a “wine culture.” Historically, wine has unsurprisingly instilled itself in wine producing countries or their neighbours: South Africa, South America, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, North America.

In Asia writ large, much of Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, not so much. These areas consist of vast, alcohol consuming markets. The international wine trade has existed for centuries. Marketing and education skills are advanced. What happened?

No sustained effort has existed to engage these populations with wine, something that has also recently proved true of younger generations (known as the Millennials and Generation Z) even in countries with sophisticated wine cultures like the US, France, and Germany. I asked Rob McMillan, author of the annual Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Industry Report, about this. “Younger consumers aren’t adopting wine as older consumers did,” he affirmed. His 2023 Report concludes that “the wine industry isn’t working together to solve the obvious demand problem for the wine category.”

Panamanians drink plenty. A recent newspaper headline was “Panama, the King of Beer in Latin America,” including numerous artisanal breweries. But wine? There’s a disconnect with the majority of the population.

I pondered why, now that the wine industry’s “demand problem” has dawned, were these huge swaths of alcohol-consumers ever left off the wine train? I tentatively called these souls, defined here by geography and by generation, the wine “disenfranchised.”

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s first definition of the word is: “deprived of some right, privilege, or immunity.” The first example: “Tough, resourceful, and determined to help her disenfranchised and disenchanted students learn how to learn and love it, Johnson employs a barrage of techniques.” I would insert: “learn [wine] and love it.”

I hypothesized that the world has these two broad, overlapping disenfranchised groups — youth and denizens of countries lacking a wine culture — and that the cause was the same for both. I decided to inquire with a few experts about it. Regarding the former group, Rob McMillan told me, “The reasons are manifold but no matter how we slice the reasons, we have to accept the young consumer isn’t engaged with wine as a favoured beverage. And when I say, ‘we have to accept,’ I’m referring to a number of…

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