From less predictable wine lists to kombucha, from being more adventurous about wines by the glass to a new awareness of what we choose to drink: Claudia Piras has a privileged vantage point from which to observe Sardinia’s restaurant scene every day, and from where she stands, the changes seem to extend far beyond wine.

Claudia Piras started out washing and drying glasses more than fifteen years ago. At the time, she knew very little about wine. She had found her way into the dining room almost by chance, during a summer season, while studying engineering and architecture after having imagined a life for herself in design. But she had one quality that, fifteen years on, seems to explain what she does today better than any CV could: she asked a lot of questions.

That is how she learned: first about the cellar of the restaurant where she worked, then service, sales, courses, tastings and natural wine. At a certain point, university fell by the wayside and wine took up all the space.

Today she is a sales agent, but defining her simply as a wine salesperson tells only part of the story. She selects producers, puts together wine lists, tastes, and trains front-of-house staff. Above all, she listens, because, she tells me, when she walks into a restaurant, she tries to understand what that place wants to be before even thinking about what she might be able to sell it. If the right bottle is distributed by a colleague, she may recommend that one instead. “Why would I give them something else and leave them dissatisfied?”

Claudia Piras drives all across Sardinia, meeting restaurateurs, sommeliers, chefs and waiters, seeing what makes it onto wine lists and what stops working, and what she sees today is different from what she saw when she first started.

“There is much more awareness, much more research. It’s happening at a slower pace than with food, but wine is evolving too.”

For a long time, wine lists were easy to recognize: just a few labels, all reassuringly familiar, often the same ones, because they were what customers asked for and what restaurateurs knew how to sell. Today, at least in the more curious places, the request Piras hears is almost the opposite: “Don’t give me the usual labels; let me discover something I don’t know.”

This change means accepting that a wine list is no longer simply an inventory of bottles, but part of a restaurant’s identity. It also means taking the risk that if you choose a little-known grape variety or decide to offer by the glass a bottle that, until a few years ago, would have prudently remained unopened, someone needs to be able to tell its story.

This is where wine inevitably finds its way back to the dining room. “If I put an unfamiliar label or grape variety in your hands, how can you sell it if you don’t know it?” Her work, therefore, does not end with the order. It can mean driving across the island to a restaurant because two bottles aren’t working, sitting down with the front-of-house team, tasting them together and explaining what’s inside. It is perhaps one of the least visible aspects of the gastronomic transformation of recent years: we can fill cellars with craft wines, forgotten grape varieties and small producers, but without someone capable of turning that research into a story, they remain bottles sitting on a shelf.

This is also why she is wary of lengthy wine lists that are automatically regarded as a synonym for quality. “I like leafing through them, but sometimes they mainly serve to indulge the owner’s ego. In some restaurants, I’d rather not even open the wine list and simply trust the people on the floor.”
Quality, then, may not lie in the abundance of choice, but in the quality of the guidance.

Meanwhile, wine is going through a more challenging phase. In 2025, global wine consumption fell to around 208 million hectolitres, a further 2.7% decline from 2024, when it had already reached its lowest level since 1961. Inflation and economic uncertainty have played a role, but the international organisation also points to changes in lifestyles, social habits and generational behaviour.

It would be easy to turn all this into the story of a generation that no longer wants to drink, but research into drinking outside the home paints a more nuanced picture. In Europe, almost one in three Gen Z consumers says they drink less alcohol than they used to, but 57% prefer to spend their budget on one or two quality drinks rather than on a larger quantity of cheaper products. At the same time, cocktails, experimentation and new beverages are taking up an increasingly important space.

IWSR observes something similar on a broader scale: moderation does not necessarily mean abstinence. More consumers are drinking less frequently or less intensively, while others are alternating between different periods or occasions. The point is not that we are drinking less, but that it has become less automatic to always drink in the same way and choose the same old options.

Claudia Piras encountered this change almost by accident while on holiday, in the heat, when she tried a kombucha. She liked it so much that she started looking for others, and then came fermented drinks, botanical drinks, ciders and products with very low or no alcohol. So it did not begin with a crusade against alcohol, but with taste. “I thought: wow, I can pair it with a dish, I can actually eat with it.”

It is an important distinction because it probably points to the most interesting frontier of today’s no-alcohol world, which is not made up solely of products designed to imitate what is missing, but of drinks that can be desired for what they are. For years, anyone who did not drink at dinner, whether by choice or simply because they did not feel like it that evening, was faced with a rather depressing alternative: water, soft drinks or fruit juice. The rise of kombucha, fermented drinks, sparkling tea, botanical infusions and non-alcoholic pairings introduces a different possibility: to opt out of alcohol consumption without being excluded from the gastronomic experience of drinking. And this is where the issue stops being solely about beverages and starts becoming about hospitality.

Claudia Piras initially thought that the rise of no-alcohol drinks was mainly driven by the need to drive. Today, she sees much more varied motivations: sport, diet, wellbeing, curiosity. Even her own relationship with these products stems from the desire to have a worthwhile alternative on certain occasions.

Worthwhile is an important word, and I want to stress it, because the customer who chooses not to drink wine does not necessarily want to give up the pleasure, the ritual of holding a glass, pairing it with food or discovering something new; they may simply want to have a choice.

This does not mean that every fermented drink can replace a bottle of wine — she is the first to reject that idea. A non-alcoholic drink can work beautifully with one dish and much less so with the next. If you want to create a pairing, you have to think about each individual preparation just as you would with wine, and this is where the opposition between wine and no-alcohol drinks begins to lose its force.

The deeper change lies in the fact that today’s customer increasingly, and quite rightly, expects whatever they are drinking to have a reason for being in the glass. It may be wine, kombucha, cider or something else, but wine does not necessarily lose its value in this scenario. It may simply have to earn it in a different way.

If drinking becomes less automatic, the importance of choice, quality and storytelling potentially increases. It is no coincidence that the same studies documenting moderation among younger consumers also find a growing preference for a few better drinks rather than many cheaper ones.

It is a transformation she also recognizes on the other side of the table, among restaurateurs who travel, taste, frequently change their menus and seek out less predictable wines. “In most cases, the people who introduce no-alcohol labels or pairings are those who have travelled, who have seen what’s out there.” Curiosity, once again.

The same curiosity that has taken her from the first glasses she dried in the dining room to bottles, from natural wines to fermented drinks, and from the producers she represents to wine lists built partly around products she does not sell.

In the end, it feels natural to turn the perspective around after spending a conversation talking about other people’s restaurants, their wine lists and their bottles.

When I ask her where she likes to sit down at the table, her answer also reveals something about the way she sees this profession. She looks for people who study and taste, and for places where research is not an exercise in style, but something you can sense just as much on the plate as in the glass.

In Cagliari, she mentions Dario Torabi of Old Friend Bistrot as one of her favourite places, above all for his ability to keep pushing his cuisine a little further. Claudia Piras has followed him since the beginning, and what strikes her is precisely having witnessed its evolution, the research behind it, the combinations and the ability to never stand still. Then she talks about Aurea Osteria Contemporanea, a project she still considers young, with plenty of room to grow, but all the more interesting to follow for that very reason. We have also talked about it here.

Her tastes, however, do not necessarily lead towards an increasingly sophisticated kind of dining. “I love traditional, everyday food,” she says. She likes places that retain an almost homely sense of comfort, and those where she can taste a lot, as when she goes to CerchioRosso and appreciates the clever option of ordering half portions. Elsewhere on the island, she returns above all to the people: Ristorante Musciora da Danilo Delrio in Alghero is one of the places she feels most attached to, partly because she has worked with them professionally since she began and has watched the restaurant grow over the years. In Pula, she points to Mema Ristorante, a small project that she describes, in an expression that perfectly captures what she looks for, as immense within its own small world.

Her personal geography ultimately comes to resemble her ideal wine list: a series of very different places held together by the feeling that someone on the other side genuinely believes in what they are doing. And this is also why, when talking about wine, she continually comes back to people. Before the bottle comes the person who made it; before the wine list, the person who conceived it; before the sale, the relationship built with the person who will have to tell its story.

When asked what the purpose of her work is, her answer is that seeing one of her own bottles on a table and knowing that the person drinking it is happy is exactly why she does what she does. Receiving a call from a customer saying, “You were right, it was a great label,” or knowing that a producer has found its way into the right restaurant. Claudia Piras finds an even better way to put it: “My mission is to make sure everyone has something good to drink.”

I believe that sentence captures a large part of what is happening today, because giving everyone something good to drink no longer necessarily means giving everyone wine, but understanding who is sitting in front of us, what they want, how much they want to drink and what kind of experience they are looking for. It means knowing enough about wine to choose it well, and being curious enough to admit that, sometimes, the most interesting thing to pour into a glass might be something else.

Images by Matteo Pianta