I spent a lot of time yesterday either on Zoom or on the phone, talking with suppliers, distributors, winemakers, distillers, and fellow salespeople about our industry. As a rather talkative person, I tend to spend the first five to ten minutes of any call discussing pure business, then the next twenty minutes talking life and philosophy. There were two subjects that came up repeatedly yesterday in numerous conversations, across a variety of topics:

• How the internet has replaced hands-on experience to the detriment of expertise

• How younger people are becoming more like older people with their buying habits

Let’s start with the first point.

This topic came up for the fifth time during my Zoom meeting with a winemaker who said to me: “I think consumers underestimate the amount of work that a wine collection takes.”

Bingo.

Buying high-end wine—like high-end cigars, like high-end cars, like high-end watches, like high-end houses—is not a single investment in the purchase itself. It requires a TON of other investments (time and money) once you’ve started putting bottles away. You’ll need temperature-controlled storage (if your house doesn’t stay at 70 degrees year-round), you’ll need to make sure the humidity levels are moist enough so that your corks don’t dry out, and you’ll have to eat the loss on any bad bottle that was flawed to begin with should you not open it until years later.

Let’s focus on that last line now.

There’s a multitude of invisible issues that can inflict a bottle of wine that are 100% UNDETECTABLE until you open the bottle and pour. If you buy a bottle of wine from a store like Mission and open it the next night, only to find the wine is flawed, you can easily put the cork back in the bottle and exchange it for a second bottle. But if you buy a $150 bottle of wine, throw it in your cellar for ten years, only to find that it’s corked a decade later, there’s nothing you can do at that point: you’re fucked.

The point is: if you can’t afford to take the loss on a $150 bottle of wine, you shouldn’t be buying $150 bottles of wine. Just like you shouldn’t buy a house if doing so means you have no money left over in case the roof caves in, or the plumbing gives out. Just like you shouldn’t buy a Porsche if you can’t afford to have it serviced.

What does this subject have to do with Google expertise? I’ll tell you.

I recently located a box of Cuban cigars from overseas and found a way to take possession of it here in California. While my 13+ years of wine retail experience have made me keenly aware of what can happen while shipping a bottle of wine, my inexperience with cigars had me guessing. I opened the box to find that a few of the cigars had some white mold specs, so—what did I do?—I Googled the subject and read the responses to get more information.

You wanna talk about a rabbit hole of misinformation…

I’ll spare you the gross detail, but to say that the subject of white mold vs. “plume” with cigars is controversial is an understatement. The more I read, the more I realized everything I was reading didn’t make sense and that most of the commentators were repeating things they had read elsewhere. No one had any actual expertise on the subject. In the end, I spoke with a friend who has been working with cigars for thirty years and he helped clarify my issue. Turns out white mold is no big deal if it’s not all over the foot. Just wipe it down and light up.

But there’s more…

Cigars also suffer from travel sickness due to the variant temperatures and climates they encounter on their journey. You need to let them sit in a properly controlled humidor for 10-14 days after they arrive in order to acclimate them and allow them to settle down. So guess what else I had to dig into? Setting up a humidor. Adjusting the humidity. Seasoning the wood. Etc. It’s not easy!

Now back to the point: to work customer service in wine retail is to listen all day long to consumers who have no idea what’s wrong with their wine. Or, it can mean listening to people who think something is wrong with their wine, when in reality there is nothing wrong. That’s part of the gig. You’re here to help them understand the realities, just like my friend helped me understand my cigars. The problem is that fewer and fewer people have actual hands-on experience dealing with these issues, and—simultaneously—fewer and fewer people actually pick up the phone to ask questions. Google is the #1 source of information for problem solving these issues and, unfortunately for consumers, Google is often dead wrong.

This isn’t just a wine or cigar issue, either. One of the books I read last summer while learning about mechanical watches was written by a watch servicer who spent the entire time lamenting this very problem: more and more consumers buying mechanical watches are completely unprepared for the responsibility and the expectations of ownership. While speaking with winemaker Jasmine Hirsch yesterday, I said to her: “You learned about wine from your dad, one of the most famous winemakers in California history, and a guy who has spent decades in both the vineyard and the cellar. I learned from the old-timers at K&L who spent every waking minute reading, talking, buying, and drinking wine. Neither of us ever had to navigate Google for our wine knowledge. We learned it first-hand from people who had experience.”

Let’s now tackle point number two: how the buying habits of young people are now like old people. Are these two things related? You betcha.

When I was learning about Bourbon, just like I’m now learning about cigars, I bought every bottle I could afford. I bought the cheap ones, the middle-tier ones, the pricier ones—the entire spectrum. I wanted to know first-hand what the best deals were, which bottles were special, and which brands were the stinkers. Everything I tasted added to my experience. If I spent $50 on a terrible bottle, that was $50 I invested in my education. That’s how I looked at it. Never once did I run a search on Google to find out if other people thought a whiskey was good or bad. I would only search for more information about the liquid, leaving the final judgement to my own taste buds. I’ve been doing the same thing over the last two months with cigars.

But that’s not what a large number of young drinkers today are doing.

Today, just like you check a restaurant’s Yelp review before dining out, more and more drinkers are Googling the quality level of a whiskey before buying it, crowdsourcing their expertise whenever possible. That means these more discerning consumers are generally spending less, waiting until they can find the one or two bottles they hope will deliver for the dollar. This isn’t a criticism by any means; in fact, I’ve been doing the same with some of my non-alcohol related purchasing during COVID. There are a number of new hobbies I’ve picked up that involve certain equipment, for which I must choose carefully. That being said, I’m only planning to buy one of these various items……ever. Wine and spirits are things you’re going to buy repeatedly, over and over again. If you buy the wrong one, just get a new one next time around.

Jasmine Hirsch said to me: “I buy a lot less wine than I used to because I already have too much, plus I’m drinking less now.” That’s something people our age say to each other. It’s not something that 25-30 year olds should be saying to each other. 25-30 year olds who are interested in wine and spirits should be buying and tasting as much different booze as they can get their hands on, learning from every experience and training their palates. But rarely do I see that at Mission. Instead, I communicate with young people who are afraid to make a mistake, who are waiting around for the perfect batch of cask strength Bourbon before pulling the trigger, and who rely almost entirely on the internet to tell them what to drink.

Again, not a criticism (as I, too, rely on the internet for advice); just an observation that makes me nervous. It makes me nervous because the only way to actually know anything about alcohol is to taste as much of it as you can. The less you taste, the less you know. The less you know, the fewer people there are in this world who actually know anything about what they’re talking about. The fewer people who actually know anything, the more time I have to spend reading through message boards and Reddit feeds about cigars in order to find the one experienced person who hasn’t become too frustrated to disengage entirely.

When too few people have hands-on experience, expectations can get completely out of whack. The only reason I know about the multitude of different flaws that a wine can display is because I buy and drink wine every single day. I can tell if a wine is reduced, corked, cooked, old, tired, or if it’s been stored improperly by the way it tastes. I can also tell if a wine is corked when it doesn’t taste corked, simply from previous experiences with that particular wine. But what if you didn’t know those things? What if you spent $150 on a bottle of wine, it tasted bad, and you immediately took to the internet to tell the world about how terrible that wine tastes, how it isn’t worth the money, and how every retailer who sells that wine should be ashamed?

Except you didn’t have the experience to know the wine was flawed, through no fault of anyone. The world actually didn’t conspire to screw you over; you just had bad luck.

When I read through cigar threads, packed with guys who have clearly spent hundreds of dollars on a box, venting like maniacs about common issues that are apparently easily solvable (or aren’t really issues at all), it’s yet another indicator of what’s happening across a number of genres: people are spending more money on things they don’t understand. They don’t understand them because they don’t have any experience. They don’t have any experience because they rely on the internet to tell them what’s what, rather than gather that experience on their own.

And when they do finally pull the trigger on something lavish, they’re incredibly sensitive to any potential mishap, no matter how common or how trivial.

-David Driscoll