As a local (and another Millennial) I will bite my tongue on the winery…but assert that Scribe does a great job of bottling the ‘NorCal lifestyle’ that LA/SF tourists imagine as they book their vacation. It’s all good, Scribe’s patrons are the same bunch who are doing a fantastic job of driving the value of my house continually higher.
Let the fantasy continue! ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
We tasted there summer of '16. The wines were good though the skin-fermented Chard was a bit different. The venue and views were lovely, as were several cute lasses in attendance.
I think a rule of eschewing wines made by virtue of family (tech, etc) money - as opposed to decades of labor starting from zero - there won’t leave much to drink. What about all the chateaus run by scions?
But they wouldn’t be able to project this unsustainable millenneal need to be 20-30 somethings with carefree Sunset Magazine lifestyles of vineyard lunches and open concept country homes if they ahd to work for decades to obtain it. They’d end up enjoying it being old and tired like all of us boomers.
NorCal lifestyle… pfftt, get real.
Come on, this article is incredibly obnoxious. It reads like advertising copy, why is it a lengthy piece in the news section?
Sure, the wine world is full of super rich people and corporations making good wine, no need to be pious about that, but the whole slant of the article is wine as a lifestyle accoutrement to partying with good looking people. There are multiple assurances that everyone to be seen at the winery is young and good-looking, and then stuff like this:
What the Marianis have achieved at Scribe, however, transcends the wine. We might invoke the contemporary term “lifestyle brand”: Scribe is a place, a product, an experience, a community — an idea through which it might be possible to live your best life.
The appeal is as much the St. Laurent as it is the tasting appointments — during which a staff member might join you at your picnic table, just as likely to discuss Chance the Rapper’s new mixtape as the oak regime on the Syrah. It’s the privileges of wine club membership: rapturous farm dinners in which Cala restaurant’s Gabriela Camara cooks tamales; wine club pick-up parties at the Progress in San Francisco.
The appeal is Andrew and Adam themselves, and everyone who works at Scribe.“We have such an awesome team of smart young people who are into the culture of Northern California,” Andrew says. “Most of them have never worked in the wine industry before.”
Also things like this –
These young wine drinkers may not be purchasing $200 Cabernet in droves (yet), but they’re buying higher-priced wines than their parents did at the same age. “I like to call them frugal hedonists,” says Rob McMillan, founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s wine division. “They know what’s good.”
$45 Chardonnay and $58 Syrah could only be conceived of as “frugal” in the upper-class NorCal bubble. Kind of like spending just $1 million on your house is frugal.
Oooh, that was pretty intense. But the old guy in me kind of liked it a lot. Postcard from realville. Remember the old quote,
If you are 25 and not a liberal, you have no heart. If you are 45 and not a conservative, you have no brain…
Sigh, like me… zzzzzzz…
as a Sonoma Valley resident, and someone who has worked in a tasting room since 2009, i can say without a doubt visitors - and not just millennials - are absolutely more interested in “experience” versus “good wine”.
“The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.” Jean Giraudoux.
I haven’t had a Scribe wine, but I suspect their wines are far better than most wines these “millenials” might otherwise drink. There’s nothing at all wrong with wanting to marry wine with “experience”. I actually have little interest in wine without some kind of interesting or pleasant experience, whether that’s the environment, food, travel, interacting with the winemaker, etc.
People buy all sorts of experiences: luxury cars, country club memberships, season tickets to sporting and concert events. They look for VIP treatment and special perks. It’s not limited to millenials, people of all ages are “guilty” of that. Frankly, I think we should be celebrating young people doing something like this (whether as a customer, or proprietor). Striving for quality of life, and quality of product can’t be a bad thing.
Hear hear 
Don’t know much about Scribe and never tasted their wines, so I won’t comment on them.
That said, if sincerity and authenticity counts for a lot, California is full of small production wine makers that provide exactly that. Well-grown grapes going into well-made wines at reasonable prices. They just don’t have the marketing budget (and often don’t need to, given the small production) and as a consequence, the average wine drinker will not have heard of them.
In a very crowded space, Scribe has done an incredible job (probably the best job) at giving people a very different experience that makes them want to visit (again and again) buy wine, and bring friends… For direct sales, that is a grand slam…
They are proving that their experience is way more enjoyable to most visitors vs. standing at a big bar in a winery tasting room listening to the canned story about the winery owners past career in XYZ or tasting in a cold barrel room spitting in a bucket on the floor…
From stats I saw yesterday (SVB) Napa tasting room sales are down even though visitation is on the up… I doubt that is the case for Scribe*
*I know they are in Sonoma
Works for Malibu wines. Many people prefer the experience.
The wines are good, but the experience is great. Sitting on a grassy hill with young good looking people bringing you samples of wine and a cheese plate. Music is piped in through wireless speakers scattered throughout the lawn. You sit at picnic tables or on Adirondack chairs. They nailed it for the millennial crowd. The kids wear their best boho chic and instagram the shit out of the place. It feeds on itself. Is it authentic? I can’t answer that question, but they were very smart in how they set up…and very privileged to be able to do it.
Wow, it’s almost as if Mobley wanted to write an article which would make me NOT want to have anything to do with the winery.
Exactly. Not a lot of ‘salt of the earth’ types out on the West Coast, but they do exist.
I don’t see a problem marketing to a demographic, especially if that group loves it. At least they’re not plundering the oceans or polluting the land, right?
That’s a lovely post.
I think I started thinking about this too cynically at first.
I am all in favor of having experiences. I love Alpha Omega wines and they create great experiences when I go there. Same for Jarvis, Williams Selyem, Lynmar, Mending Wall, on and on! I guess they’re more baby boomer style ‘experiences.’
Anything that enhances someone’s enjoyment of wine and how it is framed in life is good by me.
If it isn’t authentic, then call it a pleasant simulacrum and party on.
Wow Scribe. I haven’t thought about them in a long time. Early on in my wine journey I visited them on a trip to Napa. This must have been 7-10 years ago. I am not in the millennial generation by birth year but at the time I visited, I would have been the age that would have placed me into that peer group had it existed then, if that makes sense (sort of?). I do recall enjoying the visit. Up to my experience level at the time it was very different from several of the more formal or corporate feeling tasting rooms I’d been in. We got there and did a tasting on a picnic table under the sun with one of the winemakers if memory serves. It was a good time. I had no idea if the wines were any good or not but I did buy a couple. Would I go back? Probably not top of my list no, but I can see why this formula works for them.
It’s wonderful to see how offended people get by a 1.5 year old article about a “millennial” winery! How dare they try to create an enjoyable environment where people enjoy life! WB fun police out in full force. What a bunch of crotchety BS.
Great quote, except that it was apparently invented by a publicist, and later ascribed to whomever could give it authenticity.