The Consumer Who Changed
8/13/2026
During the coffee break at the Luxury Spain Congress, between sessions, I met two women who work in high-end inbound tourism. They had just hosted a group that had come to Madrid for a Bad Bunny concert -- VIP tickets, top-tier hotel -- and who at no point had asked for the most expensive restaurants in the city. They had asked for the ones that made the most sense. The ones that had something to say. The ones offering an experience they couldn't find anywhere else in the world.
That phrase stayed with me. The ones that make the most sense.
Later, over lunch, I sat next to a historian working with a restaurant attached to a small hotel in Ribera del Duero. Her project revolves around the Sephardic route: high-end tourism anchored in roots, in history, in the experience of inhabiting a territory with depth. Not as a backdrop. As a reason for being.
Two conversations in the same day. Two versions of the same consumer that the luxury industry has spent years trying to define -- and that this congress, with its data and panels, finally illuminated from different angles.
Spain's Luxury Barometer, presented that day by Pandersen Consulting and Llorente & Cuenca based on more than 1,200 surveys, confirmed something many of us had sensed but few had measured with this clarity: younger luxury consumers do not reject spending. They reject accumulation without purpose. They value experiences, seek compelling narratives, and are willing to pay premium prices when the story behind the price is coherent. Older consumers prefer discretion. But both groups agree on something the study calls 'quiet luxury': what doesn't shout, what is felt.
Bain & Company and Altagamma measured this at a global scale in November 2025: luxury experiences continued to outpace the broader market, driven by spending on wellbeing, self-reward, and social connection. Claudia D'Arpizio, senior partner at Bain, put it with the precision the industry needed to hear: the shopping spree era is over; today experiences and emotions are the true engine of luxury growth. Euromonitor found that 55% of high-income consumers prefer spending on experiences over things. And market research in 2026 shows that 88% of high-income consumers now define status not through possessions, but through knowledge.
This is not a generational trend. It is a structural shift in the relationship between the consumer and value.
At the panel on luxury evolution, partnerships, and authenticity, Blanca Panzano of LVMH Watches & Jewellery said something that cut through the entire debate: time will be the most precious commodity. Not the watch. Time itself. And Monica de Tomas made an equally precise observation: audiences want to see the process, the craftsmanship, the story behind the object. Not the object alone. The savoir-faire that made it possible.
This radically transforms what a wine brand must be capable of offering.
The group that came to Madrid for Bad Bunny did not ask for wines with the highest scores. They asked for wines that had something to say. They were asking for exactly what the historian from Ribera del Duero is building from the opposite end of the cultural spectrum: an experience that connects territory, history, and the table. The Sephardic route is not a tourism product. It is a case for belonging. And the wine served in that context does not need famous surnames: it needs coherence with everything surrounding the glass.
Asian tourism, according to the Barometer, perceives Spanish gastronomy as a stronger entry point than fashion or jewellery shopping. It is the segment that knows Spain least but holds the greatest spending potential. And its point of entry is not the shop window. It is the table. In that context, wine is not a beverage category: it is the language through which a territory speaks about itself to someone who has travelled from afar to listen.
The panel on wellbeing and experience left another phrase that is not rhetorical but diagnostic: true luxury is feeling better. Shiseido, LVMH, Estee Lauder, and Zen Wellness Clinic all agreed that the contemporary consumer has shifted the axis from looking good to feeling well. From appearance to balance. From product to the protocol that surrounds it.
For wine, this has concrete implications. A winery that offers only liquid in a bottle competes in a market where price is the only argument. A winery that offers an experience -- the story of the soil, the moment of harvest, a conversation with the person who made the wine -- is operating in a different category entirely. Not necessarily more expensive. Different. With a kind of loyalty that discounts cannot buy and scores cannot guarantee.
What changed is not the luxury consumer. What changed is their criterion for value. Previously, value resided in the object: the recognisable label, the visible price, the unmistakeable social signal. Today value resides in the lived experience and in the story that experience makes possible. Paloma Cutillas, Head of Commerce at TikTok Spain, showed at the congress that 47% of luxury buyers on that platform do so not for status but for self-expression, and 59% treat it as a gift to themselves. Not to show. To feel.
The Bad Bunny group asking for restaurants that made sense was not a niche segment. It was the clearest signal I had heard in a long time that the consumer many wine producers still imagine -- the one seeking scores, reading back labels, collecting vintages -- now coexists with another who doesn't replace them but expands the category. One who arrives at wine through experience, chooses it through story, and remembers it through feeling.
And that consumer no longer waits for wine to explain itself. They expect someone to give them a reason for that wine to be in that glass, in that moment, in that place.
The historian from Ribera del Duero understood this without needing a barometer. She built a case for territory so solid that the wine ceased to be the main product and became the natural consequence of everything else. That is what the consumer who changed is looking for: not the best wine on the list, but the wine that could not exist anywhere else in the world.
