Even if you happen to haven’t seen the current discourse, you most likely know Josh. Josh can reliably be discovered at your grocery store, your native Costco, your nook bottle store. Josh additionally tends to frequent such institutions as Dave & Buster’s, Buffalo Wild Wings and novice ax-throwing ranges.
Josh is a wine—or, extra precisely, a spread of wines from Josh Cellars in Napa Valley. Josh’s declare to fame just isn’t its high quality, or uniqueness—as an alternative, its ubiquity is the purpose. Just lately, X consumer @zujabes put it in automobile phrases: Ingesting Josh is like driving a Hyundai, which is ok, however not price feeling superior about. The publish instantly took off.
For non wine drinkers, that is like somebody driving a Hyundai making enjoyable of a Kia driver https://t.co/OZ0WazDv9p
— husky supreme (@Zujabes) January 7, 2024
Quickly, there have been jokes about Josh being known as Josh, inserting Josh into tune lyrics (“earlier than I depart brush my tooth with a bottle of Josh”; “too many bottles of this Josh we will’t pronounce”) and poking enjoyable at those that are die-hard followers by pretending to be one (strategies to tattoo one’s personal knuckles with letters spelling out JOSH WINE, or construct an elaborate tunnel system to get to Josh at a celebration). The sudden recognition of the wine additionally unearthed Dave and Justin and Joe, however none of those had the identical stickiness as Josh.
Your entire dialog harked again to an older web (one consumer known as it “probably the most 2017 meme we’ve had shortly”), the bottom hanging fruit of an concept to riff on. However for wine folks, this was new: Josh turned the uncommon subject to penetrate the bubble of Wine Twitter and discover a wider viewers. “The web has managed to do what me and each different wine professional up to now 20 to 25 years haven’t, which is to make folks take into consideration the worth of wine and what low cost wine is absolutely like in a nutshell,” says wine author, writer and Punch contributor Jon Bonné. For the primary time, many Josh drinkers have been realizing simply how mass their favourite wine is. Extra crucially, although, it was maybe the primary time they realized it could even be mid. “Is it Chugey???” one blissfully offline mother requested.
In 2023, Josh was the top-selling “premium desk wine” within the U.S. In response to the unique tweet, just a few followers got here to Josh’s protection, describing it as a very good “starter wine.” Like its friends—Barefoot, Yellow Tail, Franzia, Ménage à Trois—the model exists as a counter to the prevailing concept that wine, with all its terminology and bravado, is complicated and elitist. They aren’t mistaken; a colonialist legacy and years of gatekeeping will do this to any business. In a grocery store aisle, Josh, which doesn’t function an appendage or allude to threesomes, looks like a relatively good, critical place to begin. However Bonné provides one other analogy: “It’s the Zara of wine, in comparison with H&M.” They’re all quick vogue, simply in several fonts.
Should you ask a Wine Particular person for a “starter wine,” they’ll most likely say this: Go to your native bottle store, discuss to the folks there and inform them what you want. We, nonetheless, are a era that texts as an alternative of ringing doorbells, and booze will be ordered from an app. It’s no surprise that Josh was Drizly’s third hottest wine general. You don’t must have a dialog to get pleasure from it. All you must know is whether or not you establish with its massive, swooping J and the modest prospers in its typeface greater than the kangaroo on a bottle of Yellow Tail. (Working example: As a birthday current in faculty, somebody gave me Cupcake, a wine they described not as a prosecco or no matter it was, however Cupcake, chosen as a result of birthday.)
After all, there are penalties to dealing with questions of sophistication and social anxiousness with the benefit of a one-click wine. Bonné has spent loads of time fascinated by the methods wherein wines have lagged behind, say, meals, in conversations round sustainability and ethics. In his guide The New California Wine, he described it as “the Entire Meals Drawback”: The identical buyers selecting up natural meats and produce could discover themselves grabbing a bottle of Josh with out questioning the way it was grown. This viral second isn’t about fixing any of wine’s issues, but it surely does provide a peek into all of the issues we make—or don’t—when deciding on a bottle off the shelf. As Bonné places it: “In a method, I believe Josh is a Rorschach blot. Individuals see it how they wish to see it.”
