Even should you haven’t seen the current discourse, you in all probability 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 shouldn’t be its high quality, or uniqueness—as a substitute, its ubiquity is the purpose. Just lately, X consumer @zujabes put it in automobile phrases: Consuming Josh is like driving a Hyundai, which is okay, however not value feeling superior about. The put up 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 go away 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 (options 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 reputation of the wine additionally unearthed Dave and Justin and Joe, however none of those had the identical stickiness as Josh.
All the 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 individuals, this was new: Josh grew to become the uncommon matter to penetrate the bubble of Wine Twitter and discover a wider viewers. “The web has managed to do what me and each different wine skilled previously 20 to 25 years haven’t, which is to make individuals take into consideration the value of wine and what low cost wine is de facto like in a nutshell,” says wine author, creator and Punch contributor Jon Bonné. For the primary time, many Josh drinkers had 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, a number of followers got here to Josh’s protection, describing it as a great “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 don’t seem to be flawed; a colonialist legacy and years of gatekeeping will try this to any trade. In a grocery store aisle, Josh, which doesn’t characteristic an appendage or allude to threesomes, seems like a relatively good, critical place to start out. However Bonné provides one other analogy: “It’s the Zara of wine, in comparison with H&M.” They’re all quick trend, simply in numerous fonts.
If you happen to ask a Wine Particular person for a “starter wine,” they’ll in all probability say this: Go to your native bottle store, speak to the individuals there and inform them what you want. We, nevertheless, are a technology that texts as a substitute of ringing doorbells, and booze might be ordered from an app. It’s no surprise that Josh was Drizly’s third hottest wine total. You don’t have to have a dialog to take pleasure in it. All that you must know is whether or not you establish with its huge, swooping J and the modest thrives in its typeface greater than the kangaroo on a bottle of Yellow Tail. (Living proof: 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.)
In fact, there are penalties to dealing with questions of sophistication and social nervousness with the benefit of a one-click wine. Bonné has spent loads of time serious about the methods through which 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 choosing 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, nevertheless it does supply a peek into all of the concerns 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. Folks see it how they wish to see it.”