Is storytelling in wine overrated?
- Lulie Halstead
- May 1
- 3 min read
Wine has more stories than pretty much any other consumer category on the planet. Ancient vineyards, heroic winemakers and centuries of tradition. And yet, for all of this narrative richness, most wine brands remain stubbornly invisible to most consumers most of the time. So what is actually going on?
The case for storytelling is older than marketing itself. Anthropologists have long argued that humans developed language not merely to share information, but to gossip, build trust, and make sense of the world around them. Research published in Nature Communications found that communities with a skilled storyteller showed higher levels of cooperative behaviour — and that the storytellers themselves enjoyed considerably better reproductive success. Whatever storytelling is doing, it clearly does something.
More recently, researchers Green and Brock identified what they called narrative transportation — the phenomenon by which a person absorbed in a story reduces their critical resistance to the ideas embedded within it. Psychologist Jerome Bruner went further, arguing that narrative thought is simply easier for the brain to process and retain than logical argument. If you embed your message in a story, it sticks. This is not a soft, fluffy claim. It is neuroscience.
The structure of the story matters enormously, however. 19th-century playwright Gustav Freytag identified that successful narratives share a common architecture: an inciting incident, escalating stakes, a dramatic reversal, and a resolution. The University of Vermont, after feeding thousands of books and stories through computers, concluded there are essentially six story shapes in the world — all variations on rise, fall, and rise again. Deviate from these templates and the story loses its stickiness. The brain simply does not hold onto it.
This is precisely where wine storytelling falls apart. Map the brand narratives of most European wineries and you find the same straight line: founding, early success, a medal at some 19th-century exhibition, decades of quietly accumulating excellence, and arrival at the present day. No conflict. No reversal. No stakes. The very events that might have made for a compelling story — Phylloxera, two world wars, the collapse of export markets — are conspicuously absent. Bad things, it turns out, are difficult to talk about. Particularly in countries that emerged from dictatorship within living memory.
The brands that wine storytelling advocates most often cite as successes — Penfolds and 19 Crimes are instructive, but perhaps not in the way intended. Penfolds does have a genuinely Freytag-shaped origin: a winemaker secretly defying management to pursue a vision, vindicated only when the wines were finally tasted. 19 Crimes built an entire brand around the faces and backstories of convicted felons, complete with augmented reality labels. Both are excellent. But their success rests on something more fundamental than narrative: a clear, consistent positioning expressed through distinctive brand assets that consumers can recognise in less than a second.
This is the core tension. Most purchasing decisions are made quickly, automatically, and with minimal cognitive effort. Daniel Kahneman's framework of system-one and system-two thinking is useful here. System one is fast, effortless, instinctive. System two is slow, deliberate, and expensive in terms of mental energy. Standing in a supermarket aisle, with the day's anxieties already consuming most of their available bandwidth, consumers are operating almost entirely on system one. A paragraph about your fifth-generation family vineyard is asking them to switch modes. They will not. Not because they are incurious, but because their brains are conserving energy for things that feel more urgent.
Storytelling, done properly and in the right context — a winemaker dinner, a short-form social video built around genuine tension, an importer pitch — is a genuinely powerful tool. But it is a tool for communicating a position, not a substitute for having one. Most wine brands do not have a storytelling problem. They have a salience problem, and quite possibly a positioning problem sitting underneath that.
You cannot story your way out of invisibility.
This topic is explored in Lulie’s podcast, co-hosted with Felicity Carter ‘A Question of Drinks’
