How Wine Educator Deborah Parker Wong Found Gen Z’s Wine Sweet Spot

The wine business has spent the last few years wondering aloud about Gen Z, often in anxious terms. Younger adults are drinking differently, drinking less often or approaching alcohol with more caution than previous generations. From within the industry, that anxiety often translates into a simpler, less useful conclusion: Young people just aren’t interested in wine.

Deborah Parker Wong doesn’t buy that.

A longtime journalist, educator and now sensory-science researcher, Wong teaches wine studies at San Jose State University, Cabrillo College, Santa Rosa Junior College and through her own Wine & Spirit Education Trust program. At San Jose State, where she began teaching a wine-appreciation course in spring 2024, she found a room full of students who were curious, bright and open-minded—but not especially interested in the classic first lesson of wine culture: dry, acidic, tannic wines.

What Deborah Parker Wong Sees In Gen Z

“All it took was one training session with two dry wines for me to understand that dry wines were going to be a no-go for these people,” Wong said. “I can’t use my standard curriculum. I have to adapt, or they are going to be miserable all semester.”

Rather than forcing students to fit the standard wine education model, Wong reworked her curriculum around what actually engages them, seeking out sweet and off-dry wines that can open the door to deeper learning. Her curriculum still begins rigorously, with physiology of smell and taste, followed by the WSET systematic approach to tasting, food pairing, and regional study.

But when it comes to what goes in the glass, she stopped assuming that dry wine should be the starting line. What she realized was not that Gen Z rejects wine, but that many young drinkers reject being made to feel wrong before they have even begun.

“I am busting down the gate,” she said. “I am saying, look, we have to start these folks on a journey, on a path. We need to find a gateway wine for them, we need to celebrate their enjoyment, we need to make enjoyment part of our discussion, and this whole curriculum is based on enjoyment.”

She calls it “decelerating the rush to dry.” Pleasure, in her view, is not the enemy of learning. It may be what makes learning possible in the first place.

Gen Z Prioritizes Wine Pleasure

Prioritizing enjoyment does not mean that Wong is lowering standards. Quite the opposite. “I show them only fine wine, made from a grape, from a place, by a person with intention,” she said. “No Frankenstein wines in this class.”

She also teaches something the broader trade often forgets: thresholds vary. Students arrive with different sensitivities to sugar, acid, tannin and salt, shaped by biology, diet and habit. Food pairing becomes a breakthrough because it connects wine not to abstract prestige but to the meals people actually eat and enjoy.

“When you can connect a wine they enjoy with the foods that they love,” she said, “it automatically lays a foundation for wine suddenly becoming part of the dialogue, or part of the table.”

In practice, that means starting with wines that offer immediate pleasure without sacrificing seriousness. Among the wines she uses are fine wines with residual sugar, as well as bottles with history, structure and place.

Brachetto d’Acqui has become one of her most effective entry points. German wines, particularly those with intentional sweetness and lower alcohol levels, also play an important role. “I love sweet wines of the world,” Wong said.

Long before the modern New World fixation on dry wine, sweetness was often associated with rarity, ageability, and status. Many of the most prized historic styles, from Sauternes and Tokaji to German Riesling, Recioto, Port, and sweet Muscats, are still revered precisely because sweetness can carry place and craftsmanship so vividly.

The point is not sugar for sugar’s sake, but balance. In the best sweet wines, sweetness is carried by acidity, structure and a strong sense of place.

Yet for a category with such a long and noble history, sweet wine is sometimes treated with surprising condescension. That bias may keep new drinkers at a distance.

Wong’s method shows what happens when that bias is set aside, pleasure comes first and confidence follows. Her classroom is not just an academic setting. It is a kind of field lab for the future of wine education. Her experience suggests that if the industry wants to understand Gen Z consumers, it may need fewer doomsday pronouncements and more educators paying attention.