Coffee Turned Craft Into a Daily Ritual. Why Hasn’t Wine?

Speciality coffee reached 48% of US adults in a day. What a cellar door can borrow, and what it cannot.

Speciality coffee has become a mainstream American habit, and for plenty of drinkers it has the feel of a daily ritual. In the National Coffee Association’s Fall 2026 survey, 48% of US adults said they’d had speciality coffee the day before, a record. Meanwhile, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) estimates that global wine consumption fell to 208 million hectolitres in 2025, which the OIV puts at 14% below 2018.

Nothing in those numbers proves a flat white replaced a glass of Chenin. But they raise a question I think about often. Coffee got millions of people to care about origin, craft, and flavour. Wine owned all three first, and it is struggling to keep its drinkers.

Some of that struggle comes from forces no tasting room controls, and I’ll name them later. This piece is about the part a producer can change. My position is that wine had the story and, in some of its tasting rooms, handed newcomers a poor first hour and an awkward second purchase. I’ll show you the evidence I have, admit how thin it is, and then suggest a test that could prove me wrong.

What the 48% measures

The NCA’s definition of speciality is generous. It covers lattes, cold brew, nitro, frozen blended coffee, and ordinary coffee the drinker believes was made from premium beans. A fair share of that 48% is milk, syrup, and a drive-through lane. Among past-week out-of-home buyers, 55% ordered at a drive-through and 40% through an app. The most popular flavours were chocolate, caramel, or brown sugar, and vanilla, with fruity notes trailing nutty ones.

I like that. Coffee grew by letting people start where they were comfortable, with the adventurous cups waiting a few steps along. Wine has its own vanilla latte, the soft, fruity, easy bottle, and much of the trade greets it with a raised eyebrow. Anyone who has apologised for liking a sweet wine knows how that eyebrow feels from the other side of the table.

The door

Coffee’s best operators built a door, so that is my governing image. Counter Culture Coffee runs free tastings called Tasting at Ten at its regional Training Centers, every Friday at 10 a.m., open to people with no experience. Guests taste selected coffees and hear where they come from and why the company loves them. Counter Culture has run the programme since its early days, nearly three decades ago. Stumptown, founded in Portland in 1999, put long-term producer relationships at the centre of its story. Blue Bottle turned pour-over into small theatre, with custom equipment, exact measurements, and specially trained baristas, so a customer can see the care without knowing a thing about extraction.

Each gave a newcomer a first step that needed no vocabulary. A tasting that asks for no prior knowledge is a door.

Where wine tends to hold the door

Last December my family visited from Italy, and my daughter, who never visits without making time for a tasting or a long lunch, booked us into a well-known estate in Durbanville. We had a tasting reservation and a lunch booking. The tasting room and outside areas were packed, as they always are at that time of year. The wines were great. The tasting took around 90 minutes, and most of that was spent waiting for the next glass while staff ran back and forth, trying to keep everybody happy and making nobody happy. It felt like a production line, and the one thing on display was hurry. We missed our lunch booking. To the estate’s credit, they found us another table, so no damage done, except to their reputation.

One visit proves nothing, and I know it. It is the reason I started asking the question, and the test at the end is how we find out whether I’m right. In my experience, 90 minutes is too long for many guests, who prefer a lively room and a quick pour. Nobody on that floor was failing, either. A peak-season rush overwhelms good people when the format sends every guest to the same counter at the same time. Counter Culture treats a first tasting as an event designed around the guest’s learning, and I’d argue peak season needs that design most.

Then there is the language. Wine’s education system was built to certify trade professionals, and consumers inherit its vocabulary: region, cultivar, block, oak regime. Used well, it deepens pleasure. Used as an entry requirement, it makes a guest confess what they don’t know before the first pour is finished. Counter Culture puts the cup in the guest’s hand and lets the explanation catch up.

The return visit is the last weak spot. Commercial market research names subscriptions, e-commerce and premium grocery distribution among the routes that carry speciality coffee from café to kitchen, so a guest who enjoys a cup in public has an easy way to repeat it at home. That Durbanville estate already had a second sale on the books, our lunch, and the tasting put it at risk. What is the easiest next purchase for a first-time guest, and how many steps stand between them and it? A case of six is a big ask of someone who arrived an hour ago.

The weird part

Coffee’s story has awkward corners. Commercial estimates value the global speciality market at roughly US$110 billion, though definitions vary widely and the category often includes large chains and packaged coffee. A big market says nothing about whether roasters or growers earn a decent living. And coffee holds one advantage no tasting room can copy. It contains no alcohol, so nobody has to moderate their coffee.

What positioning can and cannot do

Start with what it cannot do. The OIV lists changing lifestyles, generational shifts, pressure on purchasing power, and geopolitical disruption among the forces behind weaker wine demand, and it points to lower alcohol consumption among younger people in the US. Those forces set the size of the pool. Positioning cannot fix them, and it cannot fix a wine the guest doesn’t enjoy.

What it can do in the short term is shape the hour after a guest arrives. It decides whether they leave able to say what they liked, whether they know what to buy next, and whether your name comes to mind when a friend asks for a recommendation.

Over the long term, it gives a producer a reason to be chosen beyond price. Stumptown’s producer relationships and Blue Bottle’s craft rituals are two versions of that, and across years such a reason compounds into customers who know why you exist. In a shrinking pool, that reason decides which producers keep their drinkers.

A test for next season

If a producer compared this season with last, falling demand could make a good idea look like a failure, and a strong year could flatter a weak one. So run both formats in the same season, alternating sessions or days. Half the guests get the current tasting and half get the new one. The market is identical for both groups, so the size of the pool drops out of the comparison.

The new format has three parts. The first opens with the glass and holds the vocabulary until the guest asks for it. In peak season, book guests into timed groups with one host each, so nobody competes for a pour, and time the wait between glasses. The second borrows Blue Bottle’s trick and lets the guest see the care, with a barrel sample drawn in front of them or a visit to the sorting table at harvest. The third offers one easy second purchase, such as a single bottle or a small mixed pack, with a reorder that takes one message.

Then measure three things in both groups. Ask each guest at the end to say what they liked and why, in their own words. Record the wait between glasses. And count the share of guests who buy again within ninety days. If the new-format group buys again no more often than the old-format group, I am wrong about where the door sticks, and the producer finds out cheaply.

Wine has the story. What it can still build is the first step, and the second.