By: Evgeny Bazhutov, Founder & CEO / WineSpot AI

Declining sales, rising costs, lower traffic, and younger consumers showing less interest in the product the industry has sold for years—sometimes for decades. Sound familiar?

In recent years, that same set of concerns has been voiced not only by wineries, but across the U.S. restaurant industry as well. That is not surprising. Wine and restaurants are deeply connected by a shared consumption model. In both cases, people are not buying only a product. They are buying emotion, atmosphere, convenience, and the overall feeling they get from interacting with a brand.

I decided to write this article because my background in the restaurant business feels highly relevant to what is happening in the U.S. wine industry today, and in hospitality more broadly. Perhaps that perspective can help answer the question many operators are asking right now: what do we do next?

Before 2022, I spent more than 20 years as an owner and operator in the restaurant business, launching projects from the ground up and building concepts, service models, and digital tools around the guest experience. One of those projects, which I will come back to later, was fully repositioned and ultimately recognized among Russia’s top 100 new restaurant concepts by the Palm Branch restaurant award, a respected industry honor that highlights standout new concepts each year.

That experience taught me something important: when the market changes, it is not enough to simply improve the product. You have to rethink the entire customer experience.

The real problem is not the product. It is a mismatch with customer expectations.

There is a lot of discussion right now about a slowing economy, higher prices, tariffs, and more cautious consumer behavior. All of that clearly affects sales. But if you look deeper, the core issue is often something else: the market offering no longer matches what the customer expects.

This used to be described simply as changing tastes. Today, it is more accurate to call it a shift in consumer behavior.

Restaurants respond by changing menus. Wineries think about new product lines, new packaging formats, label design, and flavor profiles. Sometimes that helps. More often, it does not solve the real problem.

Because what is changing is not only what people want to buy. It is also how they want to buy, how they want to be served, how they make decisions, what they expect from a brand, and how much effort they are willing to put into the interaction.

Rethinking the winery

To solve the problem, you first have to name it correctly.

What we are seeing today is not just a fluctuation in taste. We are seeing a generational shift in the market.

The American wine industry was built largely around Baby Boomers. Then Gen X came fully into the market—a generation that still buys wine, but already expects a different level of service, convenience, and communication. And now millennials and Gen Z are becoming the groups that will shape demand over the next 10 to 20 years.

For them, what is inside the bottle is only part of the equation. The broader context matters too: how the brand looks, how modern it feels, how easy it is to interact with, and whether it aligns with their idea of good service. They expect fast, intuitive, digital-first interactions with businesses, without unnecessary calls, waiting, or friction.

I am late Gen X myself, and I understand that mindset completely. I choose businesses where the website makes things clear, where I can get answers while I am still on the site instead of hours later by email, and where I can manage a subscription, an order, or my account without needing to call someone or explain myself.

That, in my view, is where the real issue lies. The problem is not that younger consumers “do not want to drink wine.” That is the result, not the cause. The problem is that too often the experience around wine is not built for the expectations of newer generations—from the atmosphere of the tasting room and restaurant to the customer service people encounter after joining the club.

Where the customer journey is already breaking down

We live in Temecula, California, surrounded by wineries. My wife and I spend a lot of time visiting local restaurants and tasting rooms, and sometimes it feels as though the restaurant exists as an afterthought—an add-on to the core business rather than an integrated part of the brand.

That is often where operators begin losing the customer.

Many wineries still close at 6 p.m., even on Fridays and weekends. That may work for a retired audience. It does not work nearly as well for younger consumers. If the industry wants to build wine habits with younger generations, it has to take their lifestyle, schedule, and patterns of leisure seriously.

Another common example: the hours listed on the website do not match what appears on Google. You have to call to confirm. It seems minor, but that is exactly how the customer journey begins. Google, the website, and social media are often the first touchpoints a customer has with a brand. If the experience is already confusing or inconvenient at that stage, the customer is starting off with friction before ever arriving.

Another familiar scenario: online, everything looks compelling. The branding is polished, the visuals are strong, the positioning is clear, and the menu suggests a fine dining experience. But once you get there, the experience does not match the promise. The space lacks atmosphere, the furniture and layout feel generic, the food and presentation fall short, and the service does nothing to support wine club conversion. No one asks questions. No one tries to understand the guest’s impression. No one uses the moment to build a relationship.

And then, just down the road, there is another winery that is full on a Friday night, with real energy, multiple well-developed concepts, and the sense that something is happening there. That is where younger guests show up. Not necessarily because the wine is better, but because the experience is.

What we learned from the market

Before launching WineSpot.AI, we spent about six months researching the market and conducting more than 100 interviews with industry operators. We have continued those conversations ever since. We also spoke with wineries whose DTC sales are still growing, in some cases by double digits year over year.

What do they have in common?

They know exactly who their customer is. They are not trying to appeal to everyone. They build atmosphere, service, communication, and digital touchpoints around a clearly defined audience. In other words, they put not just the product, but the customer experience of both guests and club members at the center of the business.

If you are growing in this environment, there is a good chance you are doing many things right. If you are not, the market may simply have moved on while your offering stayed rooted in an earlier set of assumptions.

What to do if you are not growing

If your winery is not among those growing against the odds, that does not automatically mean your product is weak. More often, it means something else: the market has changed, but the business is still operating with yesterday’s logic.

That is why the answer is not another release, another label redesign, or a cosmetic website refresh. The starting point is much more fundamental: who are you as a brand today, who are you serving, and what experience are you actually selling?

Step one: get honest about who your customer is today

Start by defining your current customer honestly. How old are they? How often do they buy? Why do they choose you? What do they truly value about the brand: the wine itself, the atmosphere, the status, the location, the restaurant, the club, the events, or the convenience of the service?

But the more important question is this: is the customer driving revenue today the same customer you can build the business around five or ten years from now?

It helps to look at your audience through a generational lens. If you map your customer base against a generation timeline, it becomes much easier to see which groups are aging out of peak consumption, which are in it now, and which will shape demand over the next 10 to 20 years. That shift in perspective forces you to stop thinking only about current revenue and start thinking about the next stable customer base for your business.

After that, define not just your current customer, but your desired customer. Not in abstract terms, but in practical ones: how they live, where they spend time, what they consider good service, what frustrates them, how they make buying decisions, what convenience means to them, and why they would want to join your wine club specifically.

There is also one question businesses rarely ask themselves directly: are you happy with the quality of your customer base? Not just whether they are satisfied with you, but whether they are the right audience for the future you are trying to build. Sometimes a company continues serving the audience it inherited, even when that audience no longer aligns with its long-term goals, positioning, or economics.

Step two: understand what you are really selling

Here I want to return to that restaurant project I mentioned earlier—the one that was fully repositioned and later recognized among the top 100 new restaurant concepts in Russia. It was during that strategic reset that we looked closely at the numbers, and they changed the way we thought about the business.

What became clear was this: compared with the massive food production market, the full-service restaurant segment is simply too small to compete on basic utility alone. The broader food market feeds people. Full-service restaurants sell something else entirely: a reason to leave the house, an atmosphere, a way to spend an evening, an emotion, a sense of occasion. That is why a restaurant cannot win by doing only one thing well—feeding people. It has to sell an experience.

The same is true for wineries.

If you are not a large-scale producer, then you are no longer selling only a beverage. You are selling a reason to visit, a sense of place, an aesthetic, a story, a pace of interaction with the brand, a leisure experience, and the feeling people take home with them along with the bottle. In that sense, a modern winery has to think beyond the product category itself. It has to think like a hospitality brand.

This, in my view, is where many of the industry’s current problems begin. Too often, declining interest in the category gets reduced to a simple statement: “young people do not drink wine.” But that is an oversimplification. A more accurate way to put it is this: younger generations are not willing to buy wine within the same customer experience framework the industry built for earlier generations.

Millennials and Gen Z operate with a different set of expectations, and that is why many familiar service models no longer work. If it is hard to find information, frustrating to use the website, unclear how to manage a club membership, or necessary to send an email and wait for a reply to solve a simple issue, customers do not see that as a minor inconvenience. They see it as a signal that the brand is not providing the level of convenience and service that is now expected by default.

Step three: audit the entire customer journey

That is why wineries that are not growing need to look beyond the product and examine the entire path to purchase. Very often, the problem is not the bottle. It is everything surrounding it.

It starts long before a guest reaches the tasting room. A customer finds you on Google, on your website, on social media. That is where the first impression is formed. Do your hours match across channels? Is it immediately clear what kind of place you are? Does it make someone want to visit? Is booking easy? Does the mobile experience feel current? Can guests get answers quickly? If there is confusion or unnecessary effort at that stage, the experience is already off track before the visit begins.

Then the physical experience takes over. Does the space live up to the brand promise? Does the online image match reality? Is there atmosphere? Does it make people want to stay? Is it clear who the place is designed for? Does service help build a relationship, or does it simply process a table? This is where many wineries underestimate the importance of detail. A space can be beautiful, the wine can be strong, the food can be good—but if those pieces do not come together as one coherent impression, the guest does not experience the brand the way the operator intended.

And even that is not the end of the journey. In DTC and wine club businesses, the customer experience often truly begins after the purchase. That is when it becomes clear whether your service actually matches modern expectations. How easy is it to join the club? How flexible is shipment management? Can a member change an address, skip a release, get a quick answer, and resolve simple issues without going through a string of emails and delays? That is the layer of friction modern consumers feel most acutely, especially millennials, Gen Z, and a large share of active Gen X.

Step four: turn the wine club into a modern service platform

A wine club can no longer be treated as a recurring shipment program and nothing more. It is a service platform, and it needs to be designed that way.

Customers want transparency, flexibility, and control. They want to understand what they are getting, have influence over the shipment, and feel that the structure can adapt to them. The ability to make changes easily—or even cancel easily—does not weaken loyalty. In many cases, it builds trust. People return to brands that treat them honestly and do not rely on friction to keep them in place.

Step five: give club members real self-service

From there, the need for self-service becomes obvious.

The best customer experience is one in which a club member can resolve in a few minutes what used to require an email, a phone call, and a wait for a response. Swap wines in a shipment, update an address, move a delivery, skip a release, check an order status—those actions should happen quickly and without friction.

For a winery, this is not just a convenience feature. It is a way to remove the largest layer of repetitive requests, especially during club release periods when teams are overloaded. That gives staff more time to focus on the work that actually requires human attention: retention, complex cases, and building stronger customer relationships.

And it aligns directly with what customers already expect. According to HubSpot, 78% of customers prefer a self-service option when possible, while McKinsey reports that customers using digital channels for service transactions are about one-third more satisfied on average than those using traditional channels.

This is exactly where WineSpot.AI can help. It gives wineries a way to shift routine requests into a practical self-service model, reduce operational strain on the team, and maintain a high-quality customer experience at the same time.

Finally: do not start with marketing

One more lesson from my restaurant background: meaningful change almost never starts with marketing.

You cannot compensate for systemic problems indefinitely with good packaging. If the brand promises one thing and the in-person experience delivers another, trust erodes. If the website looks modern but support takes too long to respond, trust erodes. If the restaurant at the winery feels like an afterthought, guests notice. If the club technically exists but is frustrating to manage, customers quickly see that the polished surface is not backed by a well-designed experience.

Growth starts with operational honesty. It starts with asking yourself a few uncomfortable but necessary questions. Does the real experience match the positioning? Does the positioning match the customer you are trying to attract? And does the service match the expectations of the generations you are counting on for future growth?

If the answer to even one of those questions is no, then the problem probably is not just the market. It may be that the business is no longer truly in step with the market, even if the product itself is still strong.

That is why the most important question is no longer, “How do we sell more wine?” A more useful question is: “What experience are we creating around that wine—and who is it truly for?”

That question is what turns diagnosis into action. Because once a winery starts thinking of itself not only as a producer, but as a builder of a complete customer experience, many decisions become clearer: who the business is for, what should change in the physical space, what should change in service, what should change digitally, and what should change in the way the wine club itself works.

Seen through that lens, the conclusion is simple: the winners in the years ahead will not be only the wineries making good wine. They will be the ones building a modern, cohesive, and genuinely convenient experience for the audience they want to serve.

Final thought

The market is changing. Not just in taste, but in expectations around service, communication, and the overall format of the relationship between brand and customer.

So the question today is not only what kind of wine you make. It is what kind of experience surrounds that wine.

If that experience matches the expectations of your audience, you can still grow—even in a difficult market. If it does not, the market will eventually move on without you.

That is why wineries today need to rethink themselves not just as producers of a product, but as builders of a complete customer experience.

And if you are thinking about how to modernize club service, reduce pressure on your team, and create a digital experience that actually feels convenient to your members, that is exactly where WineSpot.AI can help.

Visit WineSpot AI’s booth at Wine Sales Symposium 2026 on May 13.

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Evgeny Bazhutov is the Founder and CEO of WineSpot AI, where he leads product vision, platform architecture, and AI innovation for winery operations. With over 20 years of experience in restaurant industry management and software development, Evgeny focuses on applying practical AI solutions to improve customer experience and operational efficiency in the wine industry.

He specializes in intelligent automation, AI-powered customer communication systems, and deep integrations with leading DTC platforms including Commerce7 and RedChirp. Under his leadership, WineSpot AI has developed tools such as the Email Bot, Smart Help Center, and Voice AI Concierge — designed to reduce workload while enhancing guest engagement.

Evgeny is passionate about building scalable technology that empowers winery teams, increases operational clarity, and elevates every stage of the direct-to-consumer journey.