Tag Archives: neo-Prohibitionists

Once more — with emphasis – we’re not all passed out drunk

man passed out on bench
That looks like drinking more than every 4 1/2 days to the WC.

Recent study finds Americans drink significantly less than the rest of the world

Once more, hard evidence that we’re not all passed out on the sofa every night, despite what the neo-Prohibitionists are shrieking at us.

David Morrison, writing on the Wine Gourd blog, parses the numbers from one of the leading surveys of worldwide alcohol consumption and finds that the typical American drinks wine, beer, or spirits once every 4 ½ days. According to the Global Drug Survey 2021 Key Findings Report, that puts us well below the global average of drinking every 3 ½ days or so.

In other words, it’s damned hard to be as drunk as often as the scare-mongers tell us.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has been paying attention and isn’t getting a large cash grant to show that wine with dinner is the equivalent of binge drinking. There have been any number of legitimate scientific studies, as well as the last couple of annual Gallup alcohol surveys, that say the exact same thing. We don’t drink all that much in the U.S., and the number of people who do drink is declining.

But wait, say the neo-Prohibitonists. We have another study that says you are wrong, wrong, wrong!!!! Drinking will kill you, and you had better stop now!!!!!

In fact, the above study probably comes closer to describing what’s actually going on with alcohol consumption in the U.S. than the anti-booze crowd realizes – or wants to admit. It’s a look of “drinking-related” deaths, including auto accidents, heart attacks, and the like. So, in one respect, it’s accurate – as long as we’re talking about people who drink and drive, drink so much it affects their heart, and so forth. Which, as any other number of studies show, is also declining (thank you, Mothers Against Drunk Driving).

That means that a small proportion of people who do drink to excess may be causing the numbers in the aforementioned study. The Wine Gourd post also notes the U.S. rates fourth worldwide in the number of people who get seriously drunk. So, given how few of us do drink, combined with the high drunk rating, there seems to be evidence that a minority is causing the “drinking-related” health reported in that study.

Which should also mean it’s OK to drink with dinner.

More about wine and health:
• Follow-up: Gallup alcohol survey 2022
• WC health alert: Beware the Pumpkin Spice Latte
• One more reason to be wary of alcohol health studies

Japan: Nuts to this abstinence business

Churro at laptop
Churro, a Millennial himself, has a variety of thoughts about increasing drinking among Japan’s youngest adults.

Japanese tax agency is paying for ideas to boost drinking in the wake of slumping revenue

No, this is not one of these.

Rather, it’s another sign Japan has not found a way to cope with a host of demographic problems that includes too low birth rates.

Reports the BBC: Japan’s tax agency has launched a national competition called “Sake Viva!” that hopes to come up with a plan to make drinking more attractive for 20- to 39-year-olds. It’s asking the age group for ways – marketing, promotions, or whatever — to increase demand among its peers for sake, shochu, whiskey, beer, and wine. There’s even a website.

Sound desperate, given the health problems – and cost to society — associated with increased drinking? Indeed. But the numbers show how desperate the government is to boost alcohol tax revenue, which has crashed as Japan ages and as its younger adults drink less.

Booze consumption among the young fell one-quarter between 1995 and 2020; by comparison, U.S. consumption for that demographic remained more or less steady during the same period. Booze taxes, meanwhile, accounted for about 5 percent of total revenue in 1990, but just 1.7% in 2020.

The Wine Curmudgeon is not eligible for the contest – too old and not Japanese. But the blog does have an unofficial Japanese bureau, and Churro (the blog’s associate editor) and I will be touch with our colleagues to offer a solution.

Quality $10 rose solves most problems, yes?

Winebits 761: The “It’s all about liquor laws” edition

dry january sign
The sign says it all, yes?

This week’s wine news: Jason Wilson deconstructs the neo-Prohibitionists, plus carding underage drinkers and Brexit may be worse than three-tier

• No booze for you: Jason Wilson, writing in the Washington Post, offers a long and detailed look at neo-Prohibitionism, Dry January, and all the rest. A couple of caveats (as well as a shameless plug): The WC shows up in the story (though I didn’t know that until it was published), and Wilson subscribes to the blog. His point, though, is all his own: We spend so much time arguing about whether drinking is good or bad that we know almost nothing about what Wilson calls “drinking literacy;” that is, serving sizes and alcohol by volume. In other words, how much actual booze is in what we drink, so we can better figure out how much to drink.

• Card those kids! Lifehacker, the blog’s unofficial Mainstream Media site that sometimes writes about wine, tells us everything we need to know about how services like Drizly and Instacart avoid selling to the underage. Know two things here: First, this is not a new trend – I was writing trade stories about this a decade ago. Second, it’s going to be a very important story as delivery becomes more important over the next several years. Some services use electronic verification, while some are still in the “Let me see your driver’s license” stage. For what it’s worth, I am occasionally carded when I use these services, and I stopped looking underage a long time ago. The piece also notes that, failing delivery service access, “your kid may turn to the old-fashioned alcohol procurement method of hanging around outside a liquor store and asking skeezy looking reprobates to buy for them.”

• All that paperwork: British wine wholesaler Daniel Lambert is moving to France, where it will be easier for him to do business in Britain thanks to Brexit. Reports the Guardian newspaper: “His Twitter posts about the Brexit regulations have a brisk following among fellow businesses, as he was one of the earliest to come to terms with the 200 pages of paperwork per consignment.” So those of us who are unhappy with U.S. laws – three-tier! — now have someone else to feel sorry for.

Photo: “Sod dry January” by Matt From London is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Winebits 751: The “more about wine and health” edition, because everybody’s talkin’ at me

Harry Nilson playing guitar
“Everybody’s talk’ at me. …“

This week’s wine news: More from the cyber-ether about wine and health — with sound effects

• Scientific proof? Lifehacker’s wine content has often come in for criticism on the blog, so I was quite pleased to find this, in a post called “7 Things Science Hasn’t Actually Proven are Healthy or Unhealthy” – drinking wine. Writes Stephen Johnson: ”Ultimately, it seems most accurate to say that the effect of having a glass of wine with dinner on your heart probably will be drowned out by the millions of other things you do when you’re not eating dinner.” In other words, fast food and Starbucks! Which, of course, I wish the Neo-Prohibitionists understood.

• Prohibition in India: The Indian state of Bihar, fed up with alcoholism and domestic violence, turned to prohibition in 2016. The results have been predictable, reports the New York Times: Bihar’s “judiciary is clogged with alcohol cases. The state is losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year in alcohol taxes. And liquor is still available — smuggled in and sold at double or triple the price.” The point here is not to defend alcoholism and domestic violence, but to remind everyone that the solution is not outlawing alcohol. The solution is education, as Mothers Against Drunk Driving have so amply demonstrated.

• Diageo and health: Diageo, one of the world’s biggest alcohol producers, says it cares about responsible drinking – really. It’s the key to retaining consumer loyalty in the post-pandemic world, according to the company’s new Spirit of Progress 2030 business plan. We can argue whether there’s a bit of a wink and a nudge going on here; does a $17 billion company actually care about this, unless it’s as a smokescreen for increased government regulation? But what’s more important, as we have also noted often on the blog, is that Diageo is going to get credit for something almost no wine company does save for the warning label on the back of the bottle.

“Prohibition wasn’t a failure”

al capone
“Of course Prohibition was a success — I made millions.”

The neo-Prohibitionists are reframing history to convince us that Prohibition worked – so we can do it again

“For instance, the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which seven men were gunned down in a Chicago garage, may have been carried out to avenge an earlier killing and had no connection to Capone or to bootlegging.”

— Bill of Rights Institute

Welcome to the Alice in Wonderland inhabited by the neo-Prohibitionists in their attempt to convince us that Prohibition was a success and that we should – and can – do it again.

How anyone can argue that the Valentine’s Day Massacre had nothing do with bootlegging and illegal liquor is past astounding. It’s a rejection of almost 100 years of historical analysis – Al Capone and Dion O’Banion fought for control of the Chicago liquor business, and Capone won by murdering as many of O’Banion’s gang as possible (including O’Banion). The seven murders on Feb. 14, 1929, finished the job.

It’s also worth noting that Capone thought the 1932 film “Scarface” was about him, wrote screenwriter Ben Hecht. Any why not? Hecht’s script revolves around Italian gangster Tony Camonte, who blows away his Irish North Side enemies in a St. Valentine’s Day-style massacre.

Yet search Google for “Prohibition was a success” and the results are mind-boggling — a mix of facts and wishful thinking. Which, come to think of it, is not all that different from the infamous cigarette study: Drinking one bottle of wine a week is the equivalent of smoking 10 cigarettes a week for women and five cigarettes for men.

So consider this, from a couple of studies in Scotland that looked at the results of alcohol minimum pricing. The idea was that raising the price of booze would cut crime, reduce drinking, and improve the public health. None of which seems to have happened.

Of course, the Iranians could have told the Scots that would be the case. Who knew AA would be so popular in Iran, a country where alcohol is illegal?

What do the neo-Prohibitionists want?

wine and health
This is the WC’s favorite “we’re all drunk and passed out because all drinking is evil” picture.

Yes, they want us to stop drinking, but is there more going on than that?

Consider the following, which a fellow wine writer received after a recent column:

“There’s no appropriate level of alcohol consumption given that even an infrequent glass of wine or beer will spike cancer and more than an infrequent glass will do lasting liver and brain damage. Fortunately, consumption is falling in America & the best thing would be for it to fall further, faster.”

Hard to read, yes? The absolutes. The certainty. The righteousness. But read it, and know that’s where we are when it comes to alcohol in the the U.S. As a blog reader noted in a comment the other day: “An otherwise trenchant writer in my field (psychotherapy) told his readers that anyone who drinks more than a glass of wine at Christmas dinner is an alcoholic.”

The neo-Prohibitionists have taken control of the discussion, and until the wine business – and its colleagues in beer and spirits – take it back, we’re going to see more and more of this. And yes, it could come to the point where – as one very smart wine writer told me not long ago – drinking will be as much anathema as cigarette smoking.

The irony is that Prohibition was perhaps the greatest social failure in U.S. history. Which, of course, doesn’t matter to the neo-Prohibitionists because they know absolutely and certainly of their righteousness. History won’t dare repeat itself with them.

Frankly, I don’t understand why so many in the wine business are so terrified to call out the neo-Prohibitionists. What are they going to do? Cast a spell and turn everyone into frogs?

Because there are reasons to call them out. A German nutritionist, reported a British trade magazine, said that those of us who drink in moderation are being “stigmatised” by flawed alcohol studies. Nicolai Worm, PhD (who also consults for wine trade groups) was especially critical of research used to show that any alcohol consumption was evil.

Hmm. Think we’ll see that in the mainstream news media? I doubt it.

Also note that I mentioned Worm consults for wine trade groups. This is called being objective, which is something that every peer-reviewed scientific study should aspire to and so few seem to care about these days.

So turn me into a frog if you want. I’ll continue to drink in moderation; walk Churro, the blog’s associate editor, every morning; watch how many eggs and how much red meat I eat; avoid fried foods; and fill out my diet with grains, beans, and vegetables. Which seems like a damned healthy lifestyle, yes?

More about wine and health:
• Once more, how not to report a wine and health story
• One more reason to be wary of alcohol health studies
• Health alert! Does the CDC know how dangerous Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte is?

Winebits 744: Winery lawsuits, Portuguese wine, neo-Prohibitonists

wine lawsuitsThis week’s wine news: Esther Mobley explains why wineries sue each other, plus Portuguese wine may be ready for the big time and we’ll all get fat if we drink wine

• Bring on the lawsuits: Esther Mobley, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, explains why there are so many winery lawsuits: “All the good [names] have been taken, basically. And don’t even think about coming up with a name that sounds similar to an existing wine. You’ll be fighting a court battle in no time.” Which, of course, is grist for the Wine Curmudgeon’s wine press; intellectual property, baby! The story describes what seems to be the never-ending glut of wineries suing each other, and her analysis seems to be spot on.

• Portuguese wine: The WC has long wondered why Portuguese wine isn’t more popular, given its quality, value and often stunningly low prices. Now, Oz Clarke, the British wine expert, says Portuguese wine’s time is here. He told a London wine tasting that “Portugal is a country that said, ‘we don’t need Cabernet to prove our worth. We don’t need Chardonnay and Sauvignon to try and squeeze our way into a crowded marketplace.’ ” A man after the WC’s heart, yes? The caveat here is that Clarke said these things at an event sponsored by the Portuguese wine trade group. Still, his point is well taken for those of us looking for wine that hasn’t been focus-grouped to death.

• Fat, fat, fat: Drink wine and gain 14 pounds — or even more. That’s the result of a study conducted by a group called DrugAbuse.com, which should tell us all we need to know about how legitimate the survey is. I mention it here, despite the blog’s usual ban on these stories, because it assumes that no one can drink wine in moderation and that drinking wine is as bad as stuffing your face with fast food. Note to the neos: I have not had anything from McDonald’s in decades. How does that survey?