Somebody asks me every few weeks now whether my job is going away.
They ask it kindly. It is the tone you use with a friend whose industry has been in the paper.
The premise is that drinking is collapsing, which it is, and that a profession built on wine therefore has a decade left, which it does not. Both halves get repeated so often that nobody checks them, so I went and checked them, because it is my job and my income and I would like to know.
The first half is true and worse than people say. The second half is wrong in a way that I find genuinely funny, and then, the more I sit with it, genuinely uncomfortable.
The kids did not do it
Americans are drinking at the lowest rate in ninety years of measurement. Fifty-four percent of adults. Under thirty-five fell from fifty-nine percent to fifty percent in two years, which is not a trend, that is a cliff.
Everyone has decided this is a generational story. Gen Z killed drinking, the way they killed napkins and doorbells and whatever else got written up last week.
Except the industry's own data says the opposite. Gen Z participation is up, from sixty-six percent three years ago to seventy-four percent now, which is nearly the seventy-six percent adult average. The generation with the lowest drinking rate is Boomers, at seventy-one percent, and falling.
The kids did not quit. Their parents did.
What actually collapsed is not who drinks. It is how often. Daily drinking among the young went from six percent to two percent. A third of what it was. And the share drinking nothing at all went from seventeen to twenty-four percent.
So the honest sentence is not "nobody is drinking." The honest sentence is: habitual drinking is dying, and occasional drinking is fine.
Which changes everything about the question, because habitual drinking was never my customer.
Nobody needed a sommelier when everybody drank
Think about who the daily drinker actually was. A glass with dinner, most nights, usually the same thing, chosen once years ago and never revisited. That person did not want advice. That person had a habit, and a habit is a decision you already made.
I could tell that man about a grower in the Northern Rhône who farms three hectares by hand and he would nod politely and order what he ordered last time, because he was not asking a question. He was performing a routine.
Now take the person the data actually describes. Drinks twice a month. Made it a choice rather than a reflex. Turned down four other opportunities to drink and picked this one.
That person has enormous stakes in getting it right, and no accumulated experience to draw on, because they stopped drinking often enough to build any.
That is the best customer a sommelier has ever had. That is a person who wants to be read.
The volume did not go to my competitors. It went to the part of the business that never needed me.
The part nobody in my trade will say out loud
Here is where it stops being funny.
Wine carries something like seventy percent margin in a business that runs on three to five. A restaurant does not keep a sommelier because the guests demand one. A restaurant keeps a sommelier because the wine number holds up the whole building.
Which means the honest description of my position, for most of its history, is this: I was a revenue instrument that also knew things.
Volume was not justifying the job. Volume was subsidizing it. And when the daily drinker disappears, the subsidy goes, and the restaurants that were carrying a somm on the strength of the beverage line start doing the arithmetic. That is not speculation. Fewer rooms are hiring for the position right now.
So when someone asks whether my job is dying, the accurate answer is: the *funding* is dying. The job is fine. Those have never been the same thing and my trade has spent a long time not noticing.
The parts I can do sitting down
There is a second pressure arriving at exactly the same moment, and everyone assumes it is the bigger one.
It is not. Nobody is automating twenty thousand steps. Nobody is building a machine that walks a room, clocks the table that has gone quiet, and gets there before the silence turns into a complaint. I am not worried about that and neither should anyone who actually does this work be.
But something did get taken, and I know precisely what, because I built the thing that took it.
Here is the test that has been sitting in my head for a year.
The parts of my job I can do sitting down are the parts that are going away.
Sitting down: inventory reconciliation, ordering, list construction, tasting notes, allergen sheets, training documents, pairing suggestions written for a website at midnight. All of it, gone or going, and I shipped a product that does a chunk of it on purpose.
Standing up: reading the four top, knowing when to say nothing, judging that the man ordering confidently is guessing and his guest is the one who actually cares. None of that moves.
I automated the half of my own job that could be automated. It did not make me smaller. It made the other half the entire job, which is a much more exposing place to stand.
Two knives, one direction
So there are two pressures, arriving together, from completely unrelated causes, and nobody has connected them because the AI people do not work floors and the wine people do not build software.
Declining drinking is stripping away the volume that paid for the position.
AI is stripping away the knowledge that justified the position.
They are cutting in the same direction. What is left after both is a body in a room exercising judgment, which is the only part that was ever actually hard and the only part anyone should ever have paid for.
The guest almost nobody can serve
And here is the thing that makes me think the profession is not dying at all, it is being handed its hardest exam.
Twenty-four percent of Gen Z drinks nothing. The non-alcoholic category is growing around nine percent a year while alcohol crawls in low single digits. That is not a smaller room. It is a different room.
Serving the guest who is not drinking, properly, with the same care and the same number of options and the same seriousness you would give a drinker, is the hardest thing on the floor and almost nobody can do it. It is pure judgment. There is no bottle to hide behind, no score to cite, no vintage to talk about. A guest says "I am not drinking tonight" and you have about two seconds to understand that they have made a statement, not asked a question, and that pushing anything at them now is the exact opposite of service.
When I built the product, that was the behaviour that took longest and broke most often. Not the wine knowledge. The restraint.
Most sommeliers never developed that skill because the room never required it. Everyone drank, so you could be excellent at your job and never once be tested on the guest who does not.
That room is emptying. The other one is filling.
What is actually happening
Nobody is going extinct.
The job is being concentrated into the part that was always hardest, and the part that was always hardest is now the whole thing, with the volume that used to pad the number gone and the knowledge that used to pad the credibility free to everyone.
Most of my colleagues will not survive that, and I want to be careful here, because it will be tempting to blame sober twenty-five-year-olds and language models. Neither did this.
The profession spent decades getting paid for the easy half. Two unrelated things arrived at once and took the easy half away.
That is not an extinction. That is a bill.