That day, Larry just gave me that look, you know, the orphan raised eyebrow accompanied by a “fhumph” breeze noise from his hairy nostrils. Translation: “go back to the tasting room and sell some fricking wine”. It made me think of words, since Larry doesn’t use many.

Language is a beautiful thing and I am so happy I live in a time when I can say : ” May I pour you a sip of our thoughtfully-balanced Meant To Bee Vineyard Pinot Noir”? rather than just spitting out “Arrgh” followed by by energetic hand gestures. But words are funny things, aren’t they? They start out meaning something real, something you could clearly see in your mind or feel in your hand, and then, slowly, they change.

Take the word “Reserve” for example: You know, it used to mean PREMIUM. It meant someone lost sleep over it. It meant a conscious decision was made to put an effort and dedicate resources to a wine because the easy formula wasn’t good enough. Now it means a $5.99 Chardonnay that never saw a barrel and has 24.9% Thompson Seedless juice in it, trucked in from somewhere south of Bakersfield.

Or “Authentic.” It used to mean the thing in front of you matched the story behind it. That’s it. A winemaker was someone who got up at 5am and walked the vineyard with the dog before heading in to process grapes. Now it just as often means the daughter of a hedge-fund guy with an ag tax shelter, launching a custom label named after her cat.

It’s like the fast-food burger commercial, you know the one. You’ve seen it. The poster behind the counter screams “Freshly Made for You”. Sesame bun, toasted just so perfectly it glistens like a galaxy of diamonds. Lettuce so green it looks like it just got off the first class flight from Costa Rica. The patty, oh man, it looks thick and juicy, not a millimeter of gray, stacked with pickles you’d swear your grandma grew in her garden. Tomato slices arranged in geometric precision that would make Euclid shed a tear. It’s so beautiful. It’s practically art. Then your order slides across the counter in a paper bag and what you’ve got is... a compressed disc of Khaki sadness in a bun that’s so soggy you’d think it was prepared in a steam sauna. You question your sanity as you wonder if you should have asked for a side of Prozac instead of fries.

And here’s the part that haunts me: we just keep ordering it.

Not because we don’t notice. We notice. We’ve noticed for decades. We just decided somewhere along the way that pointing it out was more trouble than it was worth. Maybe we just want to be polite, who knows. Maybe we just want to download the app on our dumbphone and the get the points.

This is how words die. Not dramatically. Just quietly, by general agreement, because the alternative requires everyone to hold the line, and it turns out holding lines is hard. Turns out honesty and humility are a high bar. Too high, apparently, for most of us to maintain when there’s money on the table. So we lowered the bar. Then we lowered it again. Then we put the bar on the floor and held an organic Kombucha Kumbaya workshop over it and called the whole thing a “brand experience.”

Larry doesn’t say much. The other day, looking at a bag of “Artisan” Tostitos Black Bean chips as he was wiping WD-40 off a wrench, he looked up and said: “Feels like a lot of things these days are just imitation leather.”

I was tempted to continue posting in the same voice, even developed the character of Larry The Mechanic a bit more, wrote a few paragraphs and and giggled while doing it. Then things got a bit weird. I was on the road doing some fancy winemaker dinners in the Midwest while getting texts from family and friends spending nights in bomb shelters and safe rooms around my birthplace. Surreal is an understatement.

I just thought I’d let you know my silence is not for lack of things I want to say; it is more a gestational silence. When the fog clears and the baby has a heartbeat. I’ll send something over. I am considering producing this T-Shirt though….

.

You must all know how bad the current times are for small wineries. Not only are we losing older customers to normal attrition and Ozempic, we have a hard time getting Millennials to try wines that are not Orange or Pink. I am here to let you know that because of this, we decided here at Longboard Vineyards to do NOTHING about it.

That’s right. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

While our neighbors are rebranding as “regenerative biodynamic stewards of the earth” and installing Instagram walls in their tasting rooms, we’re over here doing the same thing we’ve done since 1998: growing grapes, making wine, and occasionally remembering to update our website.

We have a Strategic Inaction Plan (SIP):

We’ve watched the consultant parade march through Sonoma Wine Country. They arrive in Teslas with a bumper sticker claiming “I didn’t know Elon was crazy”, clutching PowerPoints about “activating the Gen Z love for authentic wine experiences” and “leveraging sustainability narratives for brand differentiation.” They leave wineries $15,000 poorer and convinced that what we really need is a podcast, a wine club called “The Coven,” and packaging that looks like it was designed by the same person who does oat milk cartons.

We considered their advice carefully. Then we went back to farming.

What We’re NOT Doing

We are not putting our wine in cans. Our wine comes in bottles. Glass ones. With corks and sometimes either a foil or a wax dip. I know, positively Paleolithic. But here’s the thing: we already bought a shared bottling line in 2005, and Larry from maintenance says it’s got another 30 years in it. Larry has never been wrong about machinery. He was wrong about his daughter’s boyfriend, but never about machinery.

We are not making orange wine. We make red wine and white wine and sparkling wine. The red wine is red. The white wine is white, sometimes with a golden hue. The sparkling wine goes through second fermentation in the bottle. We’re farmers, not Crayola.

We are not carbon neutral. We’re also not carbon positive, carbon negative, or carbon agnostic. We drive a 1967 Ford tractor that runs on spite and stubbornness, and we know how to file the points on the distributor rotor. Could we replace it with an electric self-driving tractor? Sure. Will we? Ask Larry. (See above re: machinery.)

We are not hosting sound baths, goat yoga, or “sunset meditation experiences in the vineyard.” We do have a dog named Diesel who chases bungs in the barrel room. You can meditate near him if you want, but he’s not participating and neither are we.

Our Sustainability Story

Since everyone needs a sustainability story, here’s ours: We have slowly changed how we farm because we are cheap, it comes with he territory of doing something for love, not money. We’ve been dry-farming because, just like raising my kids, I want my vines to experience struggle, you want water? Grow deep roots. Not because we’re heroes of water conservation.

We compost because we’ve always composted. Farmers don’t like throwing stuff away. We have chickens because they eat the bad bugs and we love scrambled eggs with foraged mushrooms for breakfast. We don’t spray much because spraying costs money and requires expensive equipment. Our carbon footprint is low mainly because we can’t afford to fly anywhere.

Is this regenerative agriculture? Biodynamic? Organic? I don’t know. We never filled out the paperwork. The certification people want $5,000 a year and honestly, that’s a new bladder press membrane and six really nice lunches at that Taqueria Guadalajara.

What We’re Selling

Here’s what we have: less than 5,000 cases of wine that taste like where we live. Syrah that tastes like Syrah. Sauvignon Blanc that tastes like Sauvignon Blanc. Pinot Noir that looks and tastes like Pinot Noir. No apologies, no QR codes linking to our “brand journey,” no limited edition collaboration with a Pilates pants designer.

The Millennial Question

“But what about Millennials?” everyone asks, as if they’re a separate species requiring special pheromones and TikTok dances.

Here’s what we’ve noticed: Some Millennials like our wine. Some don’t. Exactly like Boomers. And Gen X. And soon Generation Alpha. And that one Gen Z kid who came through last month and bought two mixed cases because, and I quote, “It tastes good and isn’t trying to be my friend.”

We have a wine club. It’s called the Wine Club. Members get wine two or four times a year. We email them when it’s coming and give them time to change the selections to their palate and pocket book. That’s it. No gamification, no points system, no exclusive merch drops. Just wine showing up at your door like some kind of ancient prophesy fulfilled. Members come to parties and dinners and pig roasts in the vineyard. Sometimes they fly in from really far away. We know the names of our wine club member’s kids, sometimes we remember the names of heir pets.

The Future

Will we survive? Maybe. Maybe not. The wine industry has real problems, over-supply, consolidation, over regulation and taxation, three-tier distribution nightmares, changing consumer habits, climate change actually affecting our harvests. To name a few.

But we figure if we’re going down, we’re going down doing what we love and know how to do. Growing grapes. Making wine. Selling it to people who want it.

No pivots. No disruption. No growth hacking. No KPI’s to “Move The Needle”

Just farming.

If that’s not enough, well, at least we didn’t spend our last $50,000 on dealcoholizing a perfectly yummy wine just so we can add twelve other ingredients to it to make it quaffable.

Larry and the 1967 tractor will see you in the vineyard. Bring sunscreen. We’re not carbon neutral, but we’re definitely UV positive.

Longboard Vineyards: Still here. Still boring. Still making wine that tastes like wine.

Dear Colleagues,

Can we please stop blaming Millennials for not drinking enough wine?

You’d think this generation personally plotted to destroy per-capita consumption just to spite the legacy of Napa overpriced Cabernets. Twice or three times a week I get another invitation to a panel titled “How to Reach the Elusive Millennial Consumer.”

Spoiler: they’re not elusive. They just don’t like being condescended to while you pour them “liquid authenticity” at $375 a bottle. They also have tons of student loans to pay and no hope to ever afford a mortgage unless one of us croaks and leaves them some Mullah. Not a fun place to be in.

Millennials aren’t dumb. They grew up watching marketing evolve from “Just Do It” to “Just pretend you care about the planet.” When someone says: “I hate liars” any smart person knows to make a mental sticky-note saying “He/She/They lie habitually”. Similarly, when you say your wine is authentic, Millennials immediately assume it’s a focus-grouped fake. When you boast about being sustainable, they picture your V8 SUV idling next to the solar-powered Instagram backdrop. And when you call your experience “bespoke,” they hear “privileged adult summer camp for trust-fund babies.”

Let’s face it: they’re not rejecting wine—they’re rejecting our act.

We keep insisting they “just need more education.” Right. Because nothing says fun Friday night like a PowerPoint on malolactic fermentation or another WSET geek droning about the fog or the amazing minerality of Lodi clay-Loam soils. Maybe they don’t need a somm-certification; maybe they just need wine that doesn’t come with a lecture and a superiority complex.

Here’s a wild idea: maybe wine should go back to being enjoyable. Not performative. Not algorithm-optimized. Just… yummy.

Maybe we should stop charging $80 to stand on a crushed gravel path while someone explains “our journey.” Maybe we don’t post a TikTok reel about “regenerative farming” five minutes before spraying Roundup by the guest parking. Maybe, just maybe, we stop pretending to be farmers when you haven’t had dirt under your nails since college landscaping class.

Millennials aren’t killing wine. They’re killing the nonsense around it and they are not buying the “exclusivity” BS we have been selling for years.

So before we hold another symposium about “reconnecting with the next generation,” maybe we should try being worth connecting with.

Yours, still fermenting but fully self-aware,

Oded Shakked

Bespoke Vinegar Stopper

Longboard Vineyards

Healdsburg - California

And yes, AI helped me with some of this content

In wine circles, this has been debated for decades. Rather than having an international or, at least national voice that promotes wine as a part of a healthy lifestyle that brings families and communities together we all, ever so politely, step on cadavers in hopes of becoming taller. Wineries all attempt to steal customers from each other by selling a better story. This is stupid on so many levels; the most important one is that this type of self-aggrandizing is aimed at those who are already wine drinkers rather than using marketing resources to welcome non-wine drinkers into our sphere.

Who is to blame for this? Well, all of us, without exception. We are a collage of a million colors and shades and nuances. Among us there are salty farmers who’s handshake is stronger than titanium mixed with greedy nouveau-riche land-owners who bought a farm because their accountant told them they can reduce their taxable income. We are competent sales professionals wearing $2,400 Berluti shoes and second-generation immigrants and women who worked their ass off to create an opportunity for themselves in a Great White Male industry - and everything in between. We are a rainbow of non-conformists, nerdy science-geeks, corporate yes-sayers, passionate artists, ruthless snake-oil peddlers and so on.

According to a pretty famous old book, a guy named Noah was smart enough to take vine cuttings with him and preserve them (and millions of animals) from a cataclysmic event on this planet. The legend says that once the flood was over and a new deal was signed with the landlord (which oddly involved immediately sacrificing some of the animals saved from extinction). Noah planted a field of grapes and made wine and proceeded to indulge in extensive sampling of said wine. What a great story, what a significant tale. You’d think the wise men who chronicled the rebirth of the Human race would exalt water, or bread; maybe Vitamin C or Kombucha. But no, wine of all things, gets to forever be tied to our new covenant with our creator, whomever she might be.

You’d think the wine industry, as a whole, would jump on a story like that and find creative ways to warmly welcome people who were not lucky enough to grow up in a culture or a family where wine was a staple. We, in Sonoma and Napa, the Willamette Valley to name a few regions, are accustomed to folk who are already wine lovers. We forget that tens of millions of fellow Americans equate wine to just an expensive form of alcohol. No wonder they reach for a six-pack of beer or an RTD can instead of a bottle of wine they can’t open without a specialized tool and that goes by a name they can’t pronounce.

How about we stop boring good people with useless tidbits of important-sounding and often foreign words. How about we stop trying to sell them “bespoke” experiences that start at $200 per person. We need, instead, a national campaign that shares why we love what we do and the amazing quality of life you get when you use wine, in moderation, with meals, to create small and large communities of humans that communicate with each other.

As a farmer, winemaker and business owner I have to keep my finger on the pulse and even though I am not a trend follower, I need to listen to, observe and evaluate this new reality. Easier said than done in times when the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words”, a saying that was the solid truth all my life, is now meaningless. We all know how much fake and manipulated data is out there; Caveat Emptor.

As a winemaker, what drives me most is the joy of the creative process, it keeps me curious, busy and happy and made the past forty years go by in a flash. One of the things I discovered over time is that my winemaking has a “style” and that style is stronger than me. The best analogy I can come up with is that if you print a recipe for a dish and let two chefs prepare it using the same exact ingredients, you will taste two different dishes. And just like I have a style in wine, I have a “style” in thinking and how I approach life. I do not feel the need to define my way of thinking and analyzing it because the nature of “defining” something is to stretch a fence around it. I am comfortable not doing this, I know not everyone is. So as you read the rest of this, remember it comes from a person who decided long ago to just be himself; It is too much work to be someone else. Back to the Wine World. I asked myself to pause, look at where we are now and think of why and how we got here. Here come my thoughts:

THE No.1 reason we are here is because it is hard to find a shitty wine out there.

I know, you probably think I’m crazy. Hear me out. A mere forty something years ago, when I got bitten by the wine-bug I tried to taste every bottle I could fit into my budget, and often skipped meals so I can save for a special bottle, maybe something that cost $18 or $20! When I began my studies at UC Davis, I started a journal and in it I affixed the label of every wine I tasted (that was before pressure sensitive labels were used and you could neatly soak off any label, dry it and preserve it for future generations).

Every once in a while my entry would say something like: “While the rotten egg notes of this Cabernet transport me to the fun evening I had soaking in the Golan Sulfur Hot-Springs, it quickly progressed and punched me with a cacophony of three-day old sweaty socks interlaced with what fish bait wrapped in newspaper on a hot day smells like. On the other hand, the flavor was akin to munching on a fresh bicycle inner tube smeared with turpentine. Best to serve when your in-laws or an IRS agent come to visit”

We have come a long way in forty years. You may not think it is romantic but the painstaking and boring work of some serious science nerds transformed our understanding of what makes wine taste good and gave us tools to make it so. The most important tool, refrigeration, has revolutionized winemaking beyond anything else. In 1987, while doing a harvest internship at Chateau Lafite in Pauillac we fermented everything in wood tanks and cooled the fermentation (so the yeast don’t kill themselves with the heat produced) by draining fermenting wine into a plastic kiddy pool from which the must was pumped through a stainless steel serpentine contraption cooled by water spray, and back into tank. The next year, the cellar was replaced by shiny new stainless tanks with cooling and warming jackets. Other amazing technologies followed, I’ll only mention a few that had a significant impact: Sterile Filtration, Volatile Acid Removal, Sweet spot dealcoholizing methodology, understanding yeast nutrition, Electrodialysis for stabilizing tartrates, understanding phenolic development, rootstock and clonal development, and of course machine harvesting, sorting tables and other advances in the vineyard and cellar. So now, in 2025 you have to be an idiot to produce a flawed wine. There is no other excuse, even in times of catastrophe like serious smoke taint. Just give science a challenge and it will find a solution.

Thanks to these advances, coupled with amazing marketing that positioned wine as a status symbol, a way to announce to the world that you “Made It” and let’s not forget plain greed - we now have a world where grapevines are planted and flawless (notice I did not see tasty..) wine is produced EVERYWHERE. As of today, there are even four commercial wineries in Alaska!

I am thus not surprised that wine is now suffering a setback. It is transitioning from a unique regional product to a world-wide staple often fashioned by data analysts crunching databases of buying patterns. Be careful what you wish for, right? Small wineries and brands are now endangered species. A good analogy is the story of Hummus. I love a good hummus and I either make it from scratch or order in a deli or restaurant that makes it fresh. Hummus, along with other Mediterranean food, has taken off like a Rocketship worldwide. I can’t stand the crap folk buy in those plastic containers in grocery stores. It is not bad tasting, but in my world - it is as related to what real hummus should taste like as a processed turkey frank is to a real Kielbasa. Wine is not different. If you love wine and are willing to make an effort, you will stick to those that have a regional character and are not made by formula. Most people do not have that option, or they are just not that interested, they buy it at the supermarket together with their frozen meals, spongy “bread” and sugary soda.

An interesting thought to end this. Nature is a self-balancing system. It may take years or even eons to correct imbalances, but the universe has all the patience in the world (pun intended). Is this maybe why we now experience the fad of “Natural” wines?

I have nothing against wines with little or no intervention, I have been using science to do just that in my winery, without making any claims of superiority. But the name “Natural Wine” is both elitist and misleading. Moreover - the marketing lingo used by promoters relies on pointing fingers at others (my no.1 red flag BS marker) while making excuses for themselves (“sediment and murkiness are part of the process”). Let’s call these wines what they really are: garage wines with a short shelf life. Once in a while you’ll get lucky and have a fresh one that has not turned yet but most are better kept for when the in-laws come to visit.

Stay tuned for Episode 68 soon and reason No. 2