There are three, three! — new TV shows about wine, all set in California. This is a big deal for wine people like me, considering the last time we had a major TV series was in 1981 when “Falcon Crest” premiered.
It’s also a big deal because all three shows feature non-white casts. “Grand Crew,” which premiered last month on NBC, follows a group of young black professionals who hang out at a Los Angeles wine bar; “Kings of Napa,” which began airing last week on OWN, follows a black family that owns a major estate in Napa Valley. On January 24, “Promised Land” will premiere on ABC, a portrayal of a Latino family that owns a large winery in Sonoma.
The importance of these representations is enormous, so great, in fact, that I have written a separate story about it.
I want to be clear: I love that these shows are here, because it’s exciting to see examples of wine drinkers and winemakers in pop culture that aren’t exclusively privileged white, and also because I think it’s great that there are three new shows. about the wine, period.
The panoramic footage of lush green vineyards is delightful, making the Bay Area wine country seem like a heavenly place to visit or live (even if much of that footage was shot elsewhere, like Niagra, Canada, in the case of “Kings of Napa”).
That said, I need a short tirade. Why, why, why is it so hard for movies and TV shows about wine to get the facts straight?
Many details about the wine in each of the shows ring false. Perhaps the most notorious is in “Kings of Napa,” in which August King, who has just become president of her family’s winery, devises a plan to catapult the family brand into stardom. That plan is to throw, drum roll, please, a dessert wine.
It’s hard to imagine anyone with real wine industry experience backing that strategy, as US dessert wine sales have been declining for years, falling 3.9% in 2021, according to Nielsen data. .
But what’s even harder to imagine is how any wine, let alone the port-style wine the Kings have in mind, could be ready in the six-month turnaround period they envision. Port requires several years of aging before it is ready to drink; in Portugal, in fact, it is illegal to sell it before two years. August seems mostly focused on executing her marketing plan within this time, but she doesn’t seem to realize that she couldn’t possibly have any wine on the market.
Like the Kings, the Sandovals of “Promised Land” have ambitions to rise to the top of the wine industry. One character blurts out that the Sandovals’ Heritage House Vineyard is already the third-largest wine producer in the country, which isn’t good enough; wants to be No. 1. This is hard to believe: The country’s third-largest winemaker, Constellation Brands, produced 28 million cases of wine in 2020, according to Wine Business Monthly, a volume that could not be conceived. we meet in the very average sized facility of Heritage House.
Possibly the cutest bugs belong to the “Grand Crew.” The titular group of friends sit at their wine bar exchanging quips like, “This is a great Cab Franc! It’s bold, medium bodied, I think I have notes of blackberry, maybe a little cocoa.” Comments like that sound like what someone who has never hung out with serious wine drinkers might imagine what those wine drinkers would say. Of course, in real life no one talks like that.
However, there is one detail that both “Promised Land” and “Kings of Napa” get right: the wine industry’s desperate need to attract younger customers.
Key plot points in both series revolve around wineries’ attempts to appeal to Millennial and Gen Z drinkers, who have failed to become faithful wine drinkers like previous generations did.
In “Promised Land”, one of the Sandoval children proposes a new wine label “for people in their 20s”. His sister, Veronica, the new CEO, replies, “But people in their 20s are beer and liquor drinkers. A lot of companies have tried to sell to that demo, and none have worked.”
Those words are closely echoed by Rose in “Kings of Napa,” during a family business discussion. “Millennials don’t drink wine,” she says. “They drink craft IPAs and vaporize organic marijuana strains.”
Rose and Veronica are right: Millennials’ declining wine habits could see total wine consumption drop 20% by volume over the next decade, according to new research my colleague Jess Lander covered this week. Drastic change is needed, the research warned, if American wineries are to survive into a new generation.
Who knows, by showing younger, more diverse audiences a younger, more diverse view of California’s wine industry, maybe the new crop of wine TV shows can help with that.