Even as wine consumption is slumping worldwide, wine education is enjoying a healthy surge. Whether it’s full-blown certification courses or more casual learning sessions, more and more people are taking their drink with a side of “think.”
As a wine blogger, I keep tabs on wine activities in my community with a monthly post of event listings. Here in Dallas-Fort Worth, educational events are among the most in-demand experiences that a bar or wine shop can offer.
Oddly enough, skill-oriented classes can generate just as much interest as conventional wine dinners and tastings. To give one example, this month’s wine-and-chocolate pairing class at Total Wine ran for 20 local class sessions–about 800 total seats–and most tickets were snapped up well before Valentine’s Day. (This is an event that has loads of chocolate, true. But it also has a workbook and slideshow…so we’ll allow it in the broad category of “wine education.”)
It’s not just “Wine 101”-type classes and date-night tastings that are surging. A leading global provider of beverage credentials, Wine & Spirit Education Trust, continues to report a pattern of year-over-year increases in the number of people registering for qualifications. They enrolled 134,000 individual candidates in the 2023-2024 academic year (compared to 108,529 in 2018-2019).
What is going on here? At a cultural moment when drinking and buying wine is passé, why do so many people want to learn and talk about wine?
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately for…reasons. (Yes, I had to wait 13 weeks for the logjam at WSET to clear so I could have my freakin’ Level 3 exam results. But I’m over the stress of that experience now–promise!) I also recently returned from Wine Paris, a large trade show where many of the educational sessions were standing room only.
I wanted to explore why the demand for wine education is so much hotter than the demand for wine itself. After mulling it over and asking around, I decided to float a couple of theories–one that is mostly economic and one that is mostly demographic.
First:
Wine Education as Job Security
When people are worried about their employment prospects–or suddenly have free time to study because their job went bye-bye–it often results in an upswing in the demand for education. This is observable in other industries (health, technology), and it’s logical that it would apply to wine, too.
For the past several years, the wine industry has been in a state of disruption and adjustment–or an uncontrolled slide into chaos and decay, depending on who you ask. The more people that are moving in and out of wine jobs, the more people will tend to evaluate their credentials and shore up weak spots on their resume. (We can debate about whether earning wine certifications meaningfully increases your employment prospects or not…but right now it’s enough to say that many people believe that they do.)
To break it down further, there are at least two labor-market factors that have contributed to higher-than-usual turnover in wine jobs in the last few years (and thus a spike in interest in vocational training):
• Factor #1: The Post-Covid Rebound
The Covid-19 pandemic began impacting U.S. restaurants and bars in 2020 with voluntary and state-mandated closures. Those core 2-3 years of lockdowns and dining restrictions sucked. They were especially hard for the “lifers”–the people who work in hospitality not as a stepping stone, but as a chosen career. It was a time of unprecedented fear, frustration, and uncertainty.
Shuttered businesses meant that their hard-won skills and connections became nearly worthless overnight. The nature of the service industry meant that many workers went without paid leave, unemployment benefits, or any indication of when they might be able to return to work. Those who held on to their restaurant jobs encountered a hellish combination of safety risks and supply-chain challenges, as well as a rash of truly appalling customer behavior.
As a result, a lot of passionate, experienced service pros left their food and beverage careers for other work. Not necessarily because they wanted to–but so they could stay sane and pay the bills.
Now, some of those people are finding their way back to the service industry as it slowly convalesces. For some of them–for the best of them–that leads to a desire to brush up on their abilities and update their knowledge.
As of 2026, many restaurant balance sheets are still dragging from the effect of the pandemic. (“We’re at about 80% recovery,” one wine bar manager in California told me recently. “We’ve been at 80% for a very long time.”) There have been widely observed shifts in dining behavior that may turn out to be permanent: More delivery and to-go, more drinking at home among the shrinking number of customers who drink alcohol at all.
These new consumer habits are neither good nor bad, but they erode restaurants’ historic ability to turn a profit from alcohol. That translates into fewer jobs for sommeliers and beverage managers, and more competition for the wine-related jobs that remain.
• Factor #2: A Wine-Biz Slump
Another factor in employment churn is the unprecedented downturn in alcohol consumption (generally) and wine/beer (specifically).
It’s impossible to open the trade newsletters and magazines without seeing bitter news: Winery and bar closures, layoffs, distributors that are relocating or re-organizing to try to make the numbers work.
And yet, people keep spending money on wine classes. What?
While it seems counter-intuitive that a lack of consumer interest in wine would correlate with more demand for wine education, there’s a perverse logic to it.
When the industry is booming, qualifications are less necessary for job-seekers. Your experience and/or willingness to learn on the job are enough to entice an employer to take a chance on you.
Now that the industry is in a waning cycle, talented wine pros are left hanging like unharvested grapes. Employers are downsizing. Three front-of-house positions get combined into one, making bar work less fun and far less glamorous. For those who want to stick it out, it’s a time of re-evaluating and re-credentialing.
It’s ugly out there. Plenty of experienced somms and sales reps who never needed formal education are finding themselves on the job market. People facing layoffs and increased competition are searching for any advantage that might give them an edge in a crowded field.
Some wine pros–if they’re paying attention to what type of product is really in demand–are even pivoting away from wine service and sales and toward the education sector. (You have to have certs to teach certs.) All of these factors are likely driving the increase in enrollment that WSET has described in their press release.
Education as a Millennial Pastime
That accounts for the industry folks, but what about the civilians?
Anecdote time: At each of my recent wine certification classes, I took a look around the room and listened closely to the other student’s introductions–and their reasons for pursuing wine certs. (Bear in mind that these classes are not very easy and not very cheap.)
In each case, about half of the candidates worked in wine in some capacity. There were sales reps, wine bar managers, winery employees, and career bartenders at high-end restaurants. They were there for all the reasons just described: For career advancement and to reinforce existing knowledge. To buff up a resume, to secure a promotion, or to satisfy an employer’s expectations.
But the other (roughly) half of the class confessed to signing up for the purpose of personal enrichment. That is, for learning and fun. (It’s fun to take a two-hour wine test? Are y’all feeling alright?)
I’m poking fun–and to be perfectly honest, I’m somewhere in between the two categories–but I saw a piece of myself in those earnest, over-achieving hobbyists.
It’s a certain kind of gastro-urbanite that gravitates to wine study. The same people haunt craft breweries, cultural food tours, cooking classes, and pub quizzes. We are a type: We are educated, curious, and well-traveled. We are neurotic about low-stakes academic feats but also fun-loving. There are glaring similarities in our age, values, and cultural backgrounds.
So my other theory about the wine education boom is demographic: It’s millennials.
For people who were children in the 1980s and 1990s, education is central to our identity and deeply entangled with every type of pleasurable activity. We are the adults whose childhoods were shaped by myths like the “permanent record” and “college or bust.” We didn’t have mobile apps to soothe us out of boredom–we had library cards and Wikipedia and Tetris instaĺled on our TI graphing calculators.
As a group, millennial adults love edutainment. We helplessly internalized the idea that we should always be learning, even when we’re supposed to be having fun.
Our food and drink choices were colored by Food Network, Anthony Bourdain, and Good Eats–and the market responded with an overwhelming array of global options to sate our curious palates. Our teachers, parents, and media environment raised us to be not just good consumers, but good students of the art of consumption.
Now it’s 2026, and millennials are aged 30 to 45. Not only are we the most (over)educated generation ever, we’re also hitting our spending prime.
Throughout the 2010s, the financial media portrayed us as the under-employed, couch-surfing victims of the Great Recession. But that was then. The oldest millennials have had two whole decades to build their careers and personal wealth, and some have successfully leveraged their strengths of education and responsible habits. Those who own their own homes, who have vanquished their student loans, and who didn’t have children often have plenty of disposable cash to spend as they choose.
But consumption looks different for millennials than it did for our parents. We’re more exploratory, less brand-loyal. And younger generations’ oft-noted preference for spending on experiences over merchandise applies to our drinking habits, too.
Why buy a $40 bottle of bourbon to share with your five best friends, when you can each pay double that amount for a guided whiskey “masterclass”? A $400 WSET Level 1 course isn’t just a very expensive wine tasting–it’s an investment in your future pleasure! One that also feeds your never-satisfied appetite for validation and achievement! (I say this with only a hint of ruefulness…both activities sound pretty worthwhile to me.)
For our cohort, understanding the “where,” “how” and “why” is intrinsic to the enjoyment of food and beverage. We’re not content to select a product just because it’s cheap and good, or because it’s what our family and friends have always chosen.
WSET and other education programs are appealing because they expand the act of purchasing wine into a deeper engagement with wine’s science, history, and culture. (And sometimes you even get a pin…millennials love pins.)
Making sense of the education binge
An optimist might say that the boom in wine education isn’t a reaction to wine’s decline—it’s wine culture evolving. When alcohol is under social, economic, and health scrutiny, education offers a way to stay engaged without excess.
Viewed through this lens, wine education isn’t incompatible with sobriety-curious culture. Instead, it’s a sort of friendly compromise: Knowledge replaces volume. Curiosity replaces habit.
Wine education is validating in a way that wine consumption and wine spending used to be. When you have a wall full of certs, you don’t need to have a legendary cellar to be recognized as a connoisseur. You don’t have to drink more wine to love it more deeply.
For industry professionals, education is a hedge against instability. For enthusiasts, it’s an experience that feels purposeful as well as pleasurable. And for millennials in particular, it scratches a familiar itch: The need to turn enjoyment into understanding, leisure into self-improvement, and fun into something that looks suspiciously like homework.
In 2026, when fewer people are drinking but more people are thinking about what they drink, the hunger for wine education makes sense. We may be buying fewer bottles, but we’re savoring them ravenously–armed with flashcards, maps, and the comforting belief that learning can still count as a good time.
What do you think of the business of wine education? Does learning more about wine always enhance enjoyment, or can it distract from the experience? Add your thoughts in the comments!
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