Tag Archives: neo-Prohibitionists

Winebits 728: Wine snobs, wine and health, French wine

wine snobs
“Of course, I don’t know anything about wine. But why should that stop me from faking it?”

This week’s wine news: Wine drinkers are notorious snobs, plus we’re drinking less (honest) and why there will always be a French wine industry

• Bring on the snobs! About one-half of Britons think discussing wine while you’re drinking it is pretentious, and about one-quarter say they have pretended to know more about wine than they do. And we wonder why wine has the reputation that it does? The survey, given that it was done by a company that makes celebrity wine, may not be the most reliable. Still, the results reinforce what non-wine drinkers think about those of us who drink wine. And what does it say about wine drinkers that the survey noted that one-quarter of respondents said screwcaps are still used to judge the quality of a wine?

• Less wine drinking? Almost 40 percent of regular wine drinkers are actively moderating their consumption, particularly younger consumers, according to a study from the Wine Intelligence consultancy. This should only be staggering news (yes, bad pun fully intended) to the neo-Prohibitionists, who have insisted for some two years that we’re all passed out on the sofa each night after dinner – if we bother to eat dinner at all. The report noted that moderation could be “drinking less alcohol at certain occasions, or reducing the strength, or choosing not to drink at all at some occasions.” In the U.S., this included drinking lower alcohol wines and participating in things like Dry January.

• Only in France: The Wine Curmudgeon did a Zoom tasting last week featuring wineries in Bordeaux that make dessert-style wines. The tasting, given how rarely I get to sample these kinds of wines anymore because of higher prices and limited availability, was especially worthwhile. But the other thing that stuck out: The description of Chateau du Cros, one of the wineries. Only in France would someone describe their family as newcomers to the wine business, since they’ve only owned the winery since the World War I. Which is not just more than 100 years ago, but coincides with the beginning of Prohibition in the U.S.

Stop the presses! The U.S. is not falling down in a drunken stupor

wine and health
What do you mean, we’re not all passed out drunk? But a bunch of studies say so.

Remember all that neo-Prohibitionist foolishness about increased pandemic drinking? The latest Gallup poll offers more evidence that the Drys were wrong

Fewer U.S. adults are drinking, and those who are are drinking less. That’s the finding from the most recent Gallup poll about alcohol use in the U.S. – and it directly contradicts every scare story, fear-mongering headline, and panic-stricken Internet alert that we’ve seen during the pandemic.

Gallup’s survey, generally regarded as the most accurate overview of U.S. alcohol consumption, found that 60 percent of U.S. adults reported drinking wine or beer in 2020 – down from 65 percent in 2019. In addition, our average weekly number of drinks fell to 3.6 from 4.0

So I guess we’re not all passed out on the couch, are we?

In fact, says Gallup, the number of Americans who drink may be at a 20-year low. As recently as 2010, two-thirds of us said we drank alcohol. And, says the study, the average number of weekly drinks is the lowest since 2001 ”and is more in line with reported alcohol consumption in the late 1990s and early 2000s than with more recent readings.”

In other words, almost every single story warning about pandemic drinking, including the scare piece in my beloved New York Times, may have been wrong. Or, as one analyst told me when I wrote about pandemic drinking earlier this year, it would have been almost impossible for us to drink more, given that bars and restaurants were closed for the first part of 2020 and that hardly anyone went to a party.

Once again, this is not to discount the horrors of alcoholism or to infer that’s it’s OK to drink to excess. As noted here many times, I know the ruin alcoholism produces. Rather, it’s to remind everyone that drinking is not cigarette smoking, and that wine with dinner does not lead to death, ruin, and destruction like some 21st century version of “Reefer Madness.”

More about the Neo-Prohibitionists and drinking
• Binge drinking during the pandemic — or not
• Has wine with dinner been turned into binge drinking?
• Are the neo-Prohibitionists winning the debate about drinking?

Winebits 699: Wild boars, pandemic drinking, liquor lawsuit

This week’s wine news: Wild boars attack supermarket wine shopper, plus a historical look at pandemic drinking and another liquor lawsuit

• Attack of the wild boars: The U.S. has neo-Prohibitionists; Italy has wild boars. England’s Guardian newspaper reported that “a herd” of wild boars ambushed a woman who had just come out of a supermarket near Rome. The “four adults and two young boars” pursued the woman and stole her groceries (which I assume included wine, because it’s Italy and not the U.S.). The video at the top of the page shows what happened. Apparently, boar attacks like this are not uncommon in Italian cities; the country may have as many as 2 million wild boars.

• Pandemic drinking: An otherwise interesting piece about alcohol drinking during the Black Death has one fatal flaw (and yes, pun fully intended). The author, in recounting how pre-Modern Europe drank its way through the bubonic plague, wants to wag a finger at us for drinking so much during the current pandemic. But he omits one important fact: It wasn’t safe to drink water in most cities before the Industrial Revolution gave us modern sewerage systems. If you did, you likely died from something like typhoid, cholera, or dysentery. So when James Brown quotes Daniel Defoe saying an English grocer going into quarantine with his family had “12 hogsheads of beer; casks and rundlets containing four varieties of wine (canary, malmsey, sack and tent; 16 gallons of brandy; and “many sorts of distill’d waters” (spirits)” that’s because he had nothing else to drink. One has to watch those neo-Prohibitionists – they can be tricky.

• Peaky Blinders, indeed: The WC’s fascination with liquor trademark and intellectual property lawsuits dates to the blog’s early days and Cristal v. Cristalino. So I never pass up an opportunity to share another one. This time, the company that made the “Peaky Blinders” TV series is suing the company that makes “Peaky Blinder” liquor and beer. A U.S. federal court judge ruled for the liquor company, but not to worry – there will certainly lots of appeals and we can follow this story for much longer.

Once more, how not to report a wine and health story

wine and health
No, NPR, most Americans haven’t been passed out on the the sofa during the pandemic, despite what your story says.

This time, it’s NPR that doesn’t do the reporting and accepts the neo-Prohibitionist arguments that drinking will kill us sooner rather than later

Dear NPR:

Yes, I understand about budget cuts and the changing landscape for traditional media. But that’s still not an excuse for the sloppy reporting in this story, which ran on Friday. It recounted the arguments – most not necessarily true – that the neo-Prohibitionists use in their attempt to once again outlaw alcohol in the U.S.

Hence, I will reiterate my offer to serve as a sounding board the next time something like this comes up. Because, frankly, you missed a lot:

• What’s the bias of the people you’re interviewing? In this case, the story quoted several federal health officials warning us that we’ll kill ourselves if we keep drinking the way we have been during the pandemic. This is where you should have noted these are the same people who said drinking a bottle of wine is the same as smoking 10 cigarettes and that wine with dinner constitutes binge drinking.

• You also took at face value the claim that we’re drinking staggering sums of booze during the pandemic. Which isn’t true. Yes, the story in the link is a bit jargony, but the point is that overall wine sales are down because of restaurant closures. So, in fact, we’re drinking less wine during the pandemic (also borne out here).

• The story said more people die from alcohol-related diseases each year than from drug overdoses, which is damned scary – save for one thing. Drinking is legal and booze is easy to get. Drugs, if you need enough to overdose, usually aren’t legal or easy to get. It’s a lot more convenient to kill yourself with alcohol, since you don’t have to meet a guy in a parking lot to buy heroin or coke, or to forge an Oxycontin prescription and hope the pharmacist doesn’t notice.

• The story ignores the astonishing statistic that one-third of us don’t drink, which is among the highest abstention rates in the industrialized world. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. So, next time, you need to ask: How can we be drinking ourselves to death if so many of us don’t drink?

• The story overlooks the tremendous progress that has been made with legitimate drinking problems, like underage and binge drinking, alcoholism, and drunk driving. For example, alcohol-related crashes have declined by almost one-half since 1985. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, either.

Finally, a few words about one of my favorite neo-Prohibitionist flummoxes, something called “alcohol use disorder,” and which figures prominently in the story. Health officials claim that 15 million of us suffer from this, but the definition is so broad that it includes me, the Big Guy, and almost anyone who takes wine seriously. After all, don’t we spend a “great deal of time… in activities necessary to obtain, to use, or to recover from the effects of drinking”?

None of this is written to denigrate the serious problems caused by alcohol abuse. It’s something that I’ve been writing about for decades. Rather, it’s to give you the background you need the next time you have to write a story about how we’re drinking ourselves to death.

Yours in quality journalism,

The Wine Curmudgeon

 

Winebits 659: The “They want to bring back Prohibition” edition

Prohibition
“That’s too much wine — back up the paddy wagon.”

This week’s wine news: Reaction from the cyber-ether to proposed federal guidelines that take us closer to banning drinking in the U.S. – just one glass of wine a day for women and two for men

• The banker’s perspective: Rob McMillan of Silicon Valley Bank is one of the smartest people in the wine business, and he sees the threat clearly: “What science is behind the recommended change? The report cited only a single study that examined the difference between men consuming one or two drinks per day. My question is how can an unbiased group conclude that a single study should outweigh and counter the weight of decades of prior work?” McMillan also points out, yet again, how remiss the wine business has been in addressing the threat.

• The retail perspective: The National Association of Wine Retailers is blunt: “It appears to the NAWR that there is much more at work here than reasonable recommendations based on a solid body of evidence. It appears to the National Association of Wine Retailers that a significant anti-alcohol agenda is at work in devising the proposed new guidelines on alcohol consumption.”

• Even the Wine Institute: The Wine Institute, a trade group for the California wine business, is notorious for its refusal to have anything to do with wine and health. That it finally issued a statement criticizing the new guidelines – as milquetoast as it was – speaks volumes about how the wine business finally sees the Neo-Prohibitionist threat. For it is a threat, as I’ve noted many times — equating moderate drinking with cigarette smoking is past science and is about Prohibition.

Winebits 651: Walmart, Grocery Outlet, neo-Prohibitionists

WalmartThis week’s wine news: Walmart will appeal take Texas liquor store case to Supreme court, plus blog favorite Grocery Outlet wins award and the neo-Prohibitionists strike again

• Walmart appeal: Walmart, rebuffed twice by a federal appeals court, will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to be allowed to open liquor stores in Texas. We’ve followed this closely on the blog, since Walmart is trying to overturn a state law that forbids publicly-held or out of state companies from getting a retail liquor license (one of the WC’s favorite three-tier restrictions). Walmart won its case at the trial level, but was rebuffed twice by the the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. There’s no certainty the Supreme Court will take Walmart’s case. But if it does, expect some serious three-tier fireworks.

• Award-winner: The Wine Enthusiast has named blog favorite Grocery Outlet as one of its 50 best U.S. wine retailers. This is a big deal, if only because Grocery Outlet — best known for its cheap wine — is still mostly on the West Coast. The award puts Grocery Outlet in the same class as Costco, perhaps the U.S. leader in what the magazine calls “value-driven” wine.

• One glass of wine: An influential federal panel, reports Forbes, is recommending that men reduce alcohol intake to one drink per day, and that all Americans should cut back on added sugars. Who knew that a couple of glasses of wine were as deadly as that quart of vanilla ice cream? But that’s the finding from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which says that the extra glass of wine is associated with a “modest but meaningful increase” in death rates.

One more reason to be wary of alcohol health studies

alcohol health studiesFinnish researchers find – gasp – that people who abuse alcohol have higher health costs

The Wine Curmudgeon, long suspicious of alcohol health studies, is not surprised by one of the latest, which links alcoholism with higher health costs. What is surprising is the headline on the news release: “Researchers put a price tag on alcohol use” – which, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the study.

First and foremost, let me remind everyone I know first-hand the horrors of alcoholism and abuse. A friend died from them; two more are long-time members of abuse support groups. So I am not making light of alcoholism or saying it isn’t a problem.

Rather, it’s to note, once again, that there is a difference between alcohol abuse and moderate drinking, and which is something that has apparently been shunted aside in the rash of “all drinking is evil” studies we’ve seen over the past couple of years. Drinking is not cigarette smoking, no matter what one study claimed, and drinking wine in moderation is no worse, and may even be more healthy, than regularly eating nitrate-laced supermarket hot dogs. Which, of course, no one has yet done a study about.

This effort, on the other hand, was reaffirming the obvious. Finnish researchers, using what they called a “novel” methodology, say it costs an additional €26,000 (around US$30,000) over five years to treat patients with multiple alcohol abuse factors, such such as homelessness and drug abuse. It also recommends that people with alcohol use disorders should get better treatment for their non-alcohol related conditions.

Which is all well and good, but hardly unusual. So how did the release that ended up in my inbox carry that headline? After reading it, one expects to find the social and health costs of all drinking, moderate and abusive, listed. Which aren’t there and wasn’t the study’s intention.

Maybe the reason is as simple as the headline on the Finnish study being badly translated into English. Maybe it’s nothing more than more bad marketing and public relations work, each of which as gotten progressively worse over the past several years as agencies cut back on employees and training.

And maybe it’s part and parcel of positioning all such studies as being about drinking and doom, and working on the gullibility of newspapers, websites, and the like where the bosses are more concerned with their bonuses than with quality journalism.

I assume it’s one of the first two, and probably the second. I’m terrified it’s the third.