When Mass Market Dies, Value Accrues to the Grails

When mass market appeal dries up, it doesn’t immediately become a desert - it pools into puddles of value. 

Between GenZ drinking less, an increasing stockpile of unsold liquor, and reckoning with the longitudinal effects of ozempic, there have recently been an explosion of thought pieces on how the mass appeal of alcohol is over. 

Most people assume therefore the market cap of alcohol goes to zero. Most people are wrong - what happens is that as the mass market audience falls away, the value concentrates.

The value accrues to what we call the “grails” of the category. 

While the unsold plastic handle bottles of rum may become worthless, the overall market, while depreciating, will start to contract unevenly and pool towards these “grails”. 

What are grails? In collectibles, grails represent the pinnacle of the hobby. In Pokemon, that's the first edition Charizard. In Magic the gathering, it’s the Black Lotus. In baseball, the T206 Honus Wagner card. 

Alcohol is no different. In wine, we have the “Drops of God”. In whisky, Ichiro’s Hanyu Card Series. The 1975 bottle of Monte Bello. Alcohol grails are the rare scotches, the iconic vintages of wine. These items are tied to specific wineries and distilleries, connected to interpersonal moments and aspirational goals. These grails will only accrue value, even as the overall market size declines. 

Grail value is less tied to the total number of people in the market’s mass consumer ecosystem and more tied to the wealth and aspirational nature of those left in the hobby. Grails may still maintain their value given their desired status among the remaining members of the hobby, if said members are sufficiently affluent, motivated and competitive.. 

There’s no denying that losing mass appeal creates a lot of downsides to an industry. When the top of funnel user acquisition disappears, so too does the on-ramp into the mid-tier consumerism. For alcohol it's that consumption that has generated a lot of the value for most of today’s alcohol companies. 

But as that depreciation occurs, given the grail dynamic, it’s a pretty good bet that alcohol starts to look a lot like what the opera does today. 

In 2026, opera, a hobby that for centuries had broadband appeal, is no longer mass relevant. The last major “hit” in the opera world was released in the 1920s. 

But you can’t understate how popular opera was for hundreds of years. It was popular to the extent that my father-in-law, a Korean civil engineer in the 1970s in Saudi Arabia, carried a collection of opera cassettes as his most prized possessions. 

But today? The opera hobby has condensed into a neutron star. 

It’s a cultural product sustained by a smaller, older, wealthier audience that supports the hobby. 

Contrary to conventional wisdom, opera didn’t disappear. In fact, when you look at the economics of opera, it still generates comparable inflation adjusted revenues in 2025 as they had in 2005 despite a continually contracting audience (with their audience, as they say, “dying out”). The most prestigious opera houses and most famous operas of all time generate the vast majority of the revenues and sustain the hobby lucratively.

This is the way alcohol will go. As it becomes a culturally marginalized activity and demand dries up, the ocean of interest will maintain value in puddles of legendary whiskies. 

This may feel counter-intuitive. Alcohol will change from a mass market consumer economic valuation to a grail-based valuation. And the grail economy is one that's driven not by the number of long-tail consumers but by its exclusionary, almost aspirational nature. It's driven by not the ability for people to get in pretty quickly as a top of funnel user, but rather how fast they can jump into the shallow ponds of differentiated and dedicated interest.. 

We see this in wine already. We see this in whiskey already.  We see this in the increase in the number of CSET wine certification exams taken. We see this in the classes on appreciating high end whisky that are picking up steam among college educated people in coastal elite cities. 

The fluency of articulating different whiskey tasting notes is fairly exclusionary. The shared language signals a class effect, but in doing so, it also signals belonging and a differentiation from the rest. 

Needless to say, whisky and wine is not going to go the way of Beanie Babies. It's more likely to go the way of high end film festivals. There's a lot of complaining about  the entry price for Sundance and the Cannes Film Festival. Entire subreddits complain about buying passes only to realize there are no releases the tickets give you access to. At some point, you have to ask yourself, who are these festivals even for? And the answer seems to be the same as it will be for alcohol and opera before it –  It's for a small, wealthy audience sustaining, effectively, a cultural artifact that's slowly dying in the face of Netflix and long-form digital content. 

As mass market appeal evaporates, fragmentation and participation narrows and the pools of value that remain are the grails at the very top.