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Thanks to new shopalong research tools, an innovative, up-close-and-personal study of younger and multicultural wine buyers lets researchers and marketers go along on the buyer’s journey in store and online. The study of wine-curious consumers in their 20s and 30s offers revelations on the novice wine buyer’s motivations and mindset and provides insights on what wine marketers need to do to cultivate new customers.

Takeaways: Ethnic food traditions have a huge impact on wine buying, as marketers know, but how many are activating these consumers (new multicultural consumers who will have a huge impact on the industry’s future)?

Mike Lakusta runs a multicultural market research firm, EthniFacts, helping marketers better understand culturally diverse audiences. His firm worked with the Wine Market Council on a recent study titled “Attracting More Young Adults and Multicultural Consumers to Wine.” In a subsequent webinar with the research technology firm itracks, he revealed more details from the study and how it used a unique new technology to do shopalongs (recorded on video) with 27 different consumers who purchased wine both in store and online.

“As we all know,” Lakusta said, “focus groups may happen in one city, and you have eight people in a room that are influencing each other.” He praised the itracks software for its “ability to actually be at the location with the individual consumer directly at the point of purchase, in both retail and online.”

Why Demographic Data Matters to Wine Marketers
Lakusta said wineries need to recognize the future U.S. population will be more diverse. That’s because most non-Hispanic whites are moving beyond their childbearing years.

“They’re going to actually decline [as a percentage of the population],” he said. But that’s not all. There’s a compounding effect, he added, making the shifts even more essential for marketers to understand.

“What people don’t realize in the United States is that the compound effect of the growing population of multicultural consumers and the declining population of non-Hispanic whites is making all this happen much faster,” he said. “Only 10% of new wine drinkers of legal drinking age will be non-Hispanic white over the 10 years from 2018 to 2028.”

That means 90% of new wine drinkers will be from a variety of ethnicities and diverse food and wine cultures.

Layering On Lifetime Data
On top of the baseline shifts, generational buying power is also very important because, according to the Center for Disease Control, Asians and Hispanics in the United States tend to live significantly longer, and their current median age is much younger, Lakusta said.

“So when you compound those two things [demographic shifts and life expectancy]… if you get the loyalty of the Hispanic buyer in the U.S., you get about 14 more years of buying power out of that consumer once they become loyal to your product. And for an Asian consumer in the U.S., it’s about 12, and for an African American consumer, it’s more as well. So again, that compound effect, that ROI on the lifetime of that consumer, makes a multicultural study important.”

Study Overview
The latest study with itracks was designed to capture the wine-buying journey in a funnel from awareness to consideration, purchase retention and then advocacy, Lakusta said.
The itracks software leverages the technology most shoppers have today, shooting video and sharing it from their mobile phone, to see the buyer’s journey. The shopalong study included 27 shoppers monitoring their buyers’ journeys shopping both in store and online.

“We did about 20 minutes average on the online and then about an hour and 15 minutes at the point of purchase with these consumers. So the net was 54 engagements [with 27 buyers] and over 46 hours of buying video footage,” said Lakusta.

Buyers’ Journeys
Lakusta illustrated a recent webinar with four sample participants’ journeys (see second and third photos in article). Their motivations and wine choices varied greatly. (Though these examples show more men than women, in the overall study, the gender numbers were equal.)
Joey S.’s journey brings up two common themes: the idea of learning more about wine after he’s more settled in his life circumstances (i.e., married) and thinking wine is out of place at a sports event.

Amy L. is very occasional wine drinker, who doesn’t see wine as her first choice in the most common situations in her life: sporting events, bars, hanging out or barbecues. Her take? It’s best for girlfriend get-togethers and one-on-one conversations. A dinner party is also an occasion for wine. Like many of her age and many women, she likes fruit-flavored spritzes.

Like Joey S., Chris H. is buying wine to enjoy with his girlfriend. He drinks wine only every two to three months and prefers higher-alcohol beverages, but believes wine is healthier.

Brandon K. has varied tastes when it comes to alcoholic beverages, citing everything from spicy flavors to European imports he thinks are “fancy.” He and Joey S. drink wine one to three times per month, while Chris H. and Amy L. drink only every two to three months.

In addition to the qualitative research with itracks software, the study also included responses from 1,800 online participants.

The featured profiles in this story show only 20-somethings. But there’s more to the study (and the story) than this age group.

When consumers start to be more settled in their lives, the picture changes, Lakusta said.

“Millennials are the light at the end of the tunnel. When people get through their 20s and they get to their 30s… wow, there’s a light that goes on, ‘Permission to drink wine,’” he said.

Living a more settled lifestyle, often with children, 30-somethings typically up their wine drinking as they entertain friends at home.

“How can we speed up that process so that younger people can be hitting that earlier?” Lakusta said.

Wineries Try Solutions
Wine marketers seeking solutions are finding more 20- to 40-year-old customers in various venues, ranging from sporting events to TikTok food and drink influencers.

One bit of good news: Multicultural consumers live mostly in the states that already consume the most wine (California, Florida, New York and Texas).

Sports
Many of this survey’s participants noted they do not usually think of drinking wine at basketball, baseball or football sports events, but major wine companies hope to change this.

Gallo’s Barefoot Wines, the biggest-selling brand in the United States, inked a deal with the NFL to become the official wine of the NFL. Jackson Family signed deals with the NBA to promote its two biggest brands, Barefoot and Kendall-Jackson.

Smaller brands could try this strategy with local or regional team events.

Innovative Flavored Wines and Wine Cocktails
Riboli Family Wines’ Stella Rosa brand features sweet Moscato, imported from northern Italy, in a variety of conventional and unconventional styles. Among its offerings: blueberry, pineapple and chili, mango and chili, and lime and chili. It has also leaned into nonalcoholic wines and sparkling wines. It is the second-biggest U.S. wine import and is very affordably priced. It’s also known as a tailgate party wine. It says that a quarter of its consumers have never had wine before.

Its young consumers are engaged in social media. It has 235,000 followers on Instagram. (For the sake of comparison, Gallo’s Barefoot Wines, the No. 1 best-selling brand, has 70,000 followers.)

Wines as Mixers
The cocktail generation isn’t fussy about making drinks, and why not with wine? Instagram and TikTok videos feature wine cocktails. Some are made in the blender. Food and wine together is always a popular subject. For Hispanic Americans, wine cocktails might be another beverage to pair with ceviche.

On their recent tour in New York and San Francisco, even the Vins de Bordeaux marketing campaign featured wine cocktails, tailoring the cocktail ingredients to specific white blends. Offering recipes for wine cocktails is becoming increasingly popular.

Vintners in Napa have also successfully engaged younger wine consumers by launching popular music events, including BottleRock, which began in 2013 and in 2025 featured 80 performers on three stages. About 120,000 people attended, 40,000 a day.

Online Wine Buying: A New Horizon for Younger Wine Consumers
The best research unveils new discoveries and insights, as this EthniFacts study did.

Said Lakusta, “Many of these people had not actually shopped for wine online before, but they shopped for everything else online.

“So many of the females said, ‘Oh my gosh. This is just like Ulta Beauty and how I buy makeup. This is like Michaels and how I buy craft supplies.’ So they loved the opportunity to shop online for wine, and many had never done that before.

“The insights that come out of being with the consumer at the point of purchase are invaluable,” Lakusta added.