Josh Wine Was Viral Long Before the Memes

Josh is thriving. I’m not talking about your middle school crush who now works as an accountant for a real estate firm, but the ubiquitous wine brand, Josh Cellars, which you’ve definitely seen online this week after a single post on X spawned a deluge of memes. It’s a simple joke: The name Josh, scrawled in a self-serious cursive font on a parchment-esque label, is funny in the same way a goofy-looking pug called Kevin is funny. You just don’t expect to see a normie dude name in the wine aisles.

But for years now, Josh has quietly been going viral offline—at art openings, parent-teacher nights, and your friend’s friend’s dinner party. It’s the biggest US wine brand that costs more than $10 a bottle, one of the fastest-growing labels in the country, and it reportedly sells more than 6 million cases (72 million bottles) annually. Josh is at nearly every national chain: Target, Walmart, Costco, Kroger, Trader Joe’s, even Best Buy. Via online retailers BevMo! and GoPuff, Josh’s Cabernet Sauvignon sold 30% better last year than in 2022, according to Brian O’Neill, a store associate.

“Josh just appears,” says Amanda Mull, a staff writer for The Atlantic who frequently covers consumer trends and first tasted one of the brand’s red wines at a work happy hour in 2018-ish. Due to a combination of market trends, excellent national distribution, a broadly appealing flavor profile, and a delightfully common name, Josh has become the everyman wine brand that somehow just shows up at your house.

Founded in 2005 by Joseph Carr as an earnest tribute to his dad, a vet and firefighter called Josh, the company’s first vintage, a Cabernet Sauvignon, hit shelves in 2007. “My wife Dee and I took out two mortgages to begin production, and I sold the first vintage out of my truck,” Carr says. In 2011, Josh Cellars partnered with Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits, which took over sales, marketing, and winemaking. It propelled the brand to 150,000 cases in its first year and eventually scaled to 1 million cases by 2015. Today, the brand sells 11 wines—including a Chardonnay, rosé, and Pinot Noir—and a reserve collection, all made with grapes mostly grown in California’s North Coast and Paso Robles.

Josh’s target audience is everyone who drinks wine. Though the bottles sell slightly better with Gen X’ers and Boomers, says BevMo!’s O’Neill, they’re comparably popular in both rural and urban areas. It’s the type of neutral-good success that comes from a combination of smart decisions and a bit of luck, says Leire Bascaran, the cofounder and chief of strategy at Helen + Gertrude, a digital marketing agency with a slew of beverage clients.

The omnipresent availability plays a large part in Josh’s success. “The distribution was really strong, and that probably helped the most with label recognition,” says Bascaran. The price point has also followed wine buying trends in the last two decades. Since around 2007, sales of slightly higher-priced wines have been growing faster than cheaper wines, according to Esther Mobley, a wine critic at the San Francisco Chronicle who also recently wrote about Josh. Other ubiquitous wines, such as Barefoot, Cupcake, and Yellow Tail, cost under $10, while Josh typically caps out at nearly twice the price. Most of its bottles sell for $15–$20.

“When we’re talking about this mass-market tier, $20 is not cheap,” Mobley says. The wine world considers bottles that cost over $10 more premium, and casual wine drinkers who started on cheaper, critter-esque wines may be graduating to Josh’s price point now. Mobley says, “It’s the era for Josh, not the era for Barefoot.”

The memeable name was a lucky coincidence. Anecdotally, people tell me they gift bottles to friends and family named Josh. It’s a boon for the brand: Josh was the fourth most popular baby name in the ’80s and ’90s, and now all of those grown-up Joshes are naturally fueling sales. (My husband’s name is Josh, and after we got married, I ended up with a bottle.) Beyond that, it’s monosyllabic and memorable in its simplicity, Mobley says. Compared with similarly priced bottles from Zaccagnini and Louis Jadot, Josh isn’t a label you need to photograph for future reference. “There’s nothing inscrutable about it,” says Mobley. “It’s just Josh.”

Plus, Josh wines have a slew of legit winemaking awards, signaling to customers that it may actually taste good. Josh Cellars was named American Winery of the Year by Wine Enthusiast in 2021 and 2022, and a number of its bottles have 90+ scores—an out-of-100 rating system assigned by critics across the industry. “We’ve learned from marketing wines that if you have awards and points, people are more likely to pick you up,” says Bascaran, the digital marketer. Like seeing a novel with a Pulitzer Prize sticker, credentialed wines instill confidence in buyers.

In other words, it’s affordable enough—and at least presents as tasty enough—to buy for a crowd you might not know well. “Josh is the most mid of wines,” says Mull. “People use mid as an insult but I think it actually describes a tier of things that is useful in a lot of scenarios.” It’s a sentiment basically everyone I surveyed reiterated, with opinions ranging from “unmemorable but totally serviceable” to “it’s very good.” Like any nice dude, Josh makes you feel safe. It’s not the flashiest wine on the shelf, and it’s also probably not going to offend anyone.

That’s exactly the brand’s sweet spot, says Mobley. She sipped Josh’s Merlot and Legacy Red Blend over the weekend and reported back on Monday: “They both tasted like stewed fruit,” she tells me, “what some people would call jammy.” It’s a flavor profile the influential wine critic Robert Parker would’ve called a “hedonistic fruit bomb,” and it just so happens to be a favorite in the US. “Josh fits the most widely found American palate,” says Mobley. Though she wouldn’t personally seek it out, Josh “assaults you with its big flavor, and there’s no shame in liking it.”

Because of its persistent presence at functions and dinner parties, many people have been able to try a glass of Josh for free. “Someone brought it over to my house once, I think,” says one friend. Another says, “It was at a dinner party…and open.” It’s the kind of organic, word-of-mouth marketing that brands absolutely froth over. And in a market saturated with options that are barely differentiated from each other, it’s easy to see how customers exhausted with choice might default to Josh.

All of this has fueled the online fervor. Nothing kindles the meme fires quite like mass familiarity, and that the wine was already known and loved made its recent moment in the sun feel like one big inside joke. It’s the kind of happenstance, commercial virality that’s largely missing from the internet these days, especially as “brands try to force themselves into online discourse,” says Mull.

Josh’s marketing team expects the resulting uptick in social media followers to translate to sales, though there’s no data yet. “We’re happily surprised with the online attention,” says Dan Kleinman, the chief brand officer. “So, our point of view is to let the memes flow.”

Naturally, a bunch of other dude-named wineries, like Justin and Bradley, have since entered the chat. “But they’re just pretenders to the throne,” says Mull. Josh is our king; long live Josh.