There is a theory going around that taste is the new money.
That when you cannot afford the house or the car or the bag, you compete on what you know instead. The obscure reference. The right smoothie. The grower nobody can pronounce. Knowing over owning. The internet is calling it a new currency and treating it like a discovery.
I want to welcome everyone to the economy I have worked in my entire adult life.
A sommelier is a professional trader of exactly this. My whole career is the conversion of what I know into where I can go. I get paid to know the farmer behind a bottle you have never heard of, and to carry that knowledge in a way that opens a door, a table, a tip, a job. Taste as currency is not a trend to me. It is my rent.
So when the culture announces that knowing is the new money, my honest reaction is: yes, obviously. And also, you have no idea how strange this currency gets once you actually have to live on it.
It is not new. The trigger is.
First, the part the videos skip. None of this is new.
Pierre Bourdieu spent the 1970s explaining that taste was never personal. He called it cultural capital, and his whole point was that what you know and how you carry it is a currency, one that quietly converts into the other kind, the kind with a dollar sign. Taste, he argued, is how a class keeps its shape. It was never really about the wine. It was about who gets to feel at home in the room.
So the concept is old. What is new is the trigger, and the trigger is economic, not cultural.
Look at why this is happening now. In the United States, first-time buyers have fallen to a record-low share of the market, and the median first-time buyer is now about 40. In 1981, the median first-time buyer was 29. Under-35 homeownership is still below its mid-2000s peak. Home prices sit around five times median household income. Baby boomers control tens of trillions more wealth than millennials, a generational balance sheet so absurd it starts to feel like climate.
The ladder did not get harder to climb. Somebody moved it into a private room.
Here is the rule underneath all of it. Status competition never stops. It migrates to wherever you can still compete. When you cannot win on wealth, you do not stop keeping score. You move the game to a board where you still have pieces: knowing, taste, references, access.
That is not a new aspiration. It is the old aspiration, rerouted around a wall.
The signal eats itself
And the moment a taste signal gets legible enough to sell, it dies.
Watch it happen in real time. A sub-hundred-dollar bag goes viral as a stand-in for a five-figure one, sells out, breaks the internet, and instantly means something different, because the entire value of the original was that you could not just buy it at Walmart. A twenty-two-dollar smoothie becomes the safest flex in the country, priced exactly at painful but possible, until everyone is holding one for the camera and it stops saying anything at all.
So this currency is trapped in an arms race it cannot win. Every signal that becomes readable becomes copyable, and every copy collapses the value. Which means the real money is always fleeing toward the thing that cannot be photographed or copied: the more obscure, the more ephemeral, the more you had to be there.
Scarcity left the object. It moved to the access.
That is why the flex is no longer the bottle. It is the text from the person who can get you the bottle.
I watch this every night
I do not have to theorize about this. I serve it.
Every service I wait on two kinds of people who order the same rare wine. One of them knows exactly what it is, why it is hard to find, who farmed it, and they order it quietly, almost privately, the way you say a name you love. The other read about it this week and orders it loudly, watching the table to see if it landed.
Same bottle. Two completely different currencies changing hands.
Part of my job is to serve both perfectly without ever letting either one know which one I think they are.
Wine is the purest version of this whole phenomenon, because wine already ran the entire arms race. It went from the famous label that announced your money, to the quiet bottle that announced your restraint, to the grower nobody has heard of that announces something rarer than money: that you know.
The most powerful wine on any list today is not always the most expensive one. It is the one only a few people at the table can even read. The allocation. The half case an importer texts about before it hits the floor. My version of the whisper network is a list of growers and a phone that rings first.
What it buys, and what it never will
Now the part the new currency people do not want to print. The part you only learn by living on this money instead of selling courses about it.
Cultural liquidity gets you into the cellar. It does not give you the deed.
I have written before about who actually owns Champagne. The farmers own and tend nearly all of the vineyard: the land, the risk, the truth of the place. The famous houses own barely a tenth of the dirt and almost all of the money.
Own the dirt, miss the mic.
Cultural liquidity is the grower’s kind of capital. It is the realest thing in the room, and it is not the thing that pays. You can know more about wine than every wealthy person you will ever pour for, and you will still be the one pouring.
That is the line the smoothie does not want you to read.
Context is a wonderful thing to have and a terrible thing to be handed as a substitute. “I cannot buy the house, but I can buy the smoothie” is not a new currency. It is precarity in a nice jacket, and someone is selling you the jacket.
The most honest thing about this entire moment is that the people teaching you to value knowing over owning are, almost always, trying to sell you something to know.
I trade in it and I do not even drink
Here is my strangest credential.
I trade in this currency and I do not consume the product. I taste, and I do not swallow. Dozens of wines a week, none of them down the hatch.
Which makes me about as pure a case of cultural liquidity as exists. Maximum knowing, zero owning, zero consuming. And from inside that, I can tell you the thing is real.
Knowing is genuine capital. It opened every door my career runs through. It is also not a deed, not a house, not security, and no amount of carrying it well will turn it into one.
Both of those are true at once, and anyone selling you only the first half is selling.
So is taste the new money
Partly.
It is real capital. It opens real doors. Mine were all opened with it.
But it is the grower’s money, not the house’s. More truth, less wealth. A way to be at home in rooms you cannot yet afford to own. That is not nothing. For a generation locked out of the old ladder, it might be the most alive part of the culture.
Just do not let anyone convince you that knowing the name of the thing is the same as owning it.
The somm knows every bottle in the cellar. The cellar still is not his.
Know everything. Carry it beautifully. And keep both eyes on the door the knowing is supposed to open, because the people selling you the currency are very much hoping you forget there was ever a door at all.
- Woody
What’s the thing you know that opened a door money couldn’t? And the door it never opened? Reply with both. I read everything.