White Wine Is The New Black

I’m seated at a high-top by the bar at Hillstone on Park Avenue South in New York City. Hillstone is a national chain, although not all the restaurants are called “Hillstone” — some are called “Houston’s” or “East Hampton Grill” to avoid the downmarket stain of chaindom. They serve upscale American food, sort of steakhouse adjacent: burgers, Caesars, shrimp cocktail. Between the inoffensively rich clientele, the decor I’ll describe as “Pacific modern,” and enough egress between the open kitchen and bar to haul one’s carry-on with ease, it feels like I’m at the nicest restaurant at the Dallas airport. The DFW quality is not a product of placelessness, or a sense of liminal sadness; it’s not a demerit. Its evocation of a transit hub is, rather, Hillstone’s greatest strength. This is the sure thing, the place you would go if you had three hours to kill before your flight and you wanted to be absolutely positive you were getting the coldest martini in the terminal.

On Friday night, it’s packed. There are men in suits, men in white sneakers, men in fedoras, gays in tight knit black polos. There are lots of women drinking lots of martinis and wine. The wine is white. If white wine is “back,” a somewhat dubious assertion I have come here to investigate, I don’t think it ever went away for the people in this room. Because these people know something that the rest of us are just starting to realize: Sometimes, the best bet is the sure thing.

I know what you’re thinking. I, too, have glanced at the headline of a trend story and thought “Wow, that is a wildly broad conclusion to draw from a few threadbare anecdotes the writer extracted from his insular coterie of downwardly mobile coastal elites.” I would conceivably have this reaction now if I were you. That is, until this radically reductive thesis spurted across my desk like so much juice from a grape, and swirling it in my glass, inspecting the legs, seeing the sinews of truth trailing down the side, I had to reckon with its credibility. Because white wine seems to be, if not back, then certainly present, having a moment, vividly so, more than ever actually, suggesting an ache within the global drinking community for something both golden and cold. A brimming glass of the sun, fresh from the fridge.

In the fall of last year, The Wine Economist, a charmingly low-rent oenophilic blog, asked with apparent urgency, “Is White The New Red?” And while it noted overall global wine production was down, white appeared undeterred, outpacing red by some 20 million hectoliters per year. (Did you know that global wine production is measured in millions of hectoliters? You do now.) Also last year, The Wine Enthusiast, a trade publication, in an article titled “The Astronomical Rise of White Wine Isn’t Just a Fad,” put it more bluntly: “Recently, consumers seem to have been craving one thing: crisp white wines.” Just this spring, our friendly industry insiders over at Wine Business also noted that overall wine consumption was down a bit, yet white was stemming the tide. Sales for U.S. reds declined more than 5% in 2024. White wine, less than 2%. She’s resilient. She’s bouncy. Heavy lumbering red wants to put down roots on your tongue, but we’ve had it with commitment! We want our mouths slick, wet, easy, cold.

What is white wine? There is the literal color of the grapes; reds have more pigment and are typically blended with the skin and seeds of the grapes, giving them a deeper hue. With white wines, they skin lighter grapes like a serial killer might, unless you’re doing it au naturale, aka “orange” wine, aka macerated white. Orange wine is for creative directors. Red wine is for old rich men. White wine is for young girls. Dumb girls, smart girls, interns, legal professionals, blond girls, brunettes, divorcées (West Coast and South only). It’s light; it’s the color of summer; it’s a floral-print dress from the RealReal. If white is outpacing red, maybe the rumors were true: Society really is feminizing.

Last summer, that same article in Wine Enthusiast ran a quote from an importer of vinho verde who suggested demographic change was indeed to credit (or blame): “In the past, high-end steakhouses, the country club dining room, and the private collector’s cellars encouraged a focus on reds that pair with steak. Now, this generation drinks wine at music festivals, camping trips and pools — white wines lend themselves better to these activities.” Surely we can thank the estrogenic plastics leaching into our food chain for sending men to Coachella armed with canned pinot gris instead of off to war.

But the thing is, it’s also fun to be dumb. My friend J Lee, the semi-anonymous food critic and recently named food editor for Interview, is a natty fanatic who’s been drinking heartburn-inducing cloudy oranges for years. These days? Not so much. “I would’ve ordered orange wine before, but now I really love a sauvignon blanc,” he admits. “My favorite wine is the wine they have at [Brooklyn restaurant] Noodle Pudding. It’s an Italian chardonnay. It’s $15 for the whole bottle. I asked the waiter if it’s good, and he’s like, ‘It’s not good, but it’s fine.’ It doesn’t taste like much. It’s just, like, cold.” Which may be just what the doctor ordered to soothe and refresh our collective beleaguered soul.

It doesn’t taste like much. It’s just, like, cold.

The emphasis on temperature over quality suggests a semi-ironic, intentional self-bimbo-ficiation. After so much pretense, so many years of trying to prove you know what you’re talking about, it can feel good to be a ditz. Why pretend we want more from wine than cretinous crushability? If the tannins in red wine are an anchor, it’s time to haul it up and set sail across the sea of lowered expectations.

Daryl Nuhn, owner of the cafe and wine bar Prima in Brooklyn and former managing partner of Peoples Wine Merchants at Essex Crossing in Manhattan, thinks we probably reached peak freak just after quarantine: “People would come into my store and and say ‘Give me the most f*cked-up wine you can think of.’” This invariably meant high in acid, orange if not brown in color. “Just vinegar,” she says. But now, people seem to care less about proving their adventurousness. “They’re like, ‘I want that glass of buttery chardonnay. I don’t care if it makes me uncool,’” Nuhn explains. “The pendulum is swinging the other way.”

Lee, whose fiancé is Australian, reveals that all her younger brother’s friends used to be hounds for natural wine, too. Co-ferments on the barbie, et cetera. Now, they have a new pastime: chardonnay. “And they like the oaky ones!” he insists. You heard it here first: Buttery, cask-aged divorce-mom wine is the new non-ironic leisure-class status symbol for Aussie zoomers. In typical Australian style, they’ve already christened it with a rhyme: “chardy and party.”

The regression in wine mirrors a recent “culinary regression,” according to Jason Stewart, of the podcast/masculinity compass How Long Gone. As we approach The End of History, “it’s just not worth it to take risks, because every meal’s gotta count,” Stewart tells me. “People only want to eat at restaurants where they feel safe and OK.” Those restaurants tend to be heavy on nostalgia and white Americana: Bernie’s, Corner Store, Frog Club (RIP). These are elevated Applebee’s, with the requisite burgers, fries, shrimp cocktails. Mostly unf*ckupable. Frozen in time.

If nostalgia comforts, then white wine is a hug from mom in her visor and capri pants. It’s High Boomer Culture. Parent wine. It’s the tidal wave of 1980s WASP revivalism, unavoidable in the past few years, part of a backlash against wokeism and the 2020 peak of DEI aesthetics. It’s especially rampant in fashion: from high-end preppy at Rowing Blazers and ALD, to H&M hoodies sporting the generic “The Hamptons Wellness Club & Spa.” Even at Blink, my $30-per-month Queens gym for the people (not to be confused with the $175-per-month fascist gay gym I go to in Manhattan — it’s important to play both sides of the horseshoe), they were selling marked-down sweatshirts emblazoned with “Blink Fitness Club — Health and Wellness For All, est. 2011,” in a mixture of script and refined serifs. When the semi-ironic country club aesthetic penetrates one of the least ironic, most proletariat spaces in American life, you know the goose is cooked.

And what’s tennis without the whites? A savvy blanc is crisp, clean — the antidote to dirt, sickness, even clutter. It’s the Windexed surface of the turnkey kitchen. White leaves no stains. “It just feels like it is less likely to have added ingredients that may or may not be good for our bodies,” suggests Stewart. A subliminal connection to wellness, beauty and youth. Aging is a Damocles sword; white wine keeps it suspended a tad longer.

If nostalgia comforts, then white wine is a hug from mom in her visor and capri pants.

Brat, indie sleaze, messy girl — these weren’t new altars, but rather subaltars, all leaning toward the ziggurat of Clean Girl. Minimalist beige, white sneakers, Hailey Bieber, gold stacked jewelry. The girlboss may not call herself that anymore, and she may recoil at “influencer,” but influence she has, influenced she is. Indie sleaze is just nostalgia, after all, not an embrace of chaos, but the opposite: a desire for more legible hierarchies, when being thin and blond was the point. For the smaller world we inhabited in the late aughts, when magazines like Teen Vogue could fit in the palm of your hand.

At Hillstone, I admire my gargantuan glass of French chardonnay. It’s a chalice, easily transposed to the suburban environs of Middle America. Much like a red wine needs to “stand up” to a steak, a glass of white needs to stand up to the windowed expanse of the vinyl-sided home, something large enough to nurse in front of the man-made pond on the composite decking while your husband grills portabellas from Vons. I text J a picture of it, noting its impressive scale.

“It’s to make women’s hands look smaller,” he says.

On the wall, there is a large, framed photograph of a Palm Springs house at night, because night is sexy and the desert is easy. Another wall is lined with dozens of bottles of red wine, a nod to steakhouse culture, but the bottles are all behind glass, safely locked away. The malbec-swilling CEOs will have to celebrate their earnings reports another time. Tonight is for the ladies.