Tag Archives: underage drinking

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 703: Underage drinking, restaurant wine, “cult wines”

How will the restaurant business lure wary consumers, happy drinking at home, back to their tables?

This week’s wine news: Underage drinkers prefer beer and spirits to wine. Plus, getting consumers back to restaurants may not be easy and a lawsuit about “cult” wines.

• Finishing third: Underaged drinkers much prefer beer and spirits to wine, according to a in the Journal of Alcohol and Drugs (via Wine Industry Insight). This tends to confirm something many of us have suspected over the years, that teenagers who drink illegally find it easier to get beer and whiskey. If nothing else, those two are much less expensive than wine. The study reports that more than 60 percent of those aged 12-20 preferred beer, about one-third chose spirits, and just 5 percent wanted wine. Interestingly, the study reports that the world’s drinks companies get about 10 percent of their income from underage drinking.

• Luring us back: A British study says it’s not going to be easy to lure consumers – and especially “the switched on, digitally driven, happy at home consumer” – back to restaurants as the pandemic ends. The report, detailed in a British trade magazine, says it will be “much harder” to entice people to go out at all, since we’ve become so much more comfortable at home. It cites the growth in sales of home meal kits and the increase in subscriptions services like Netflix and video gaming. Yes, the study not about U.S. consumers, but the parallels are there – and the same old, same old restaurant wine service may not cut it any more.

• Cult wine lawsuit: This story, from Wine-Searcher.com, features two of the WC’s favorite bits of wine foolishness: Lawsuits and wine snobs. A company that says it owns the phrase “cult wine” is suing another company that says it owns the phrase. The dispute is apparently over a $15 wine, which every wine snob will tell you is in no way a cult wine. True cult wines, like this one and this one, cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars – if not thousands. The story is quite complicated; so complicated, in fact, that it’s not clear if either company can actually win.

Winebits 498: Cheap wine, underage drinking, wine for royalty

cheap wineThis week’s wine news: Another consumer website joins the cheap wine fight, plus a decline in underage drinking and how to drink like European monarchs

• Welcome to the fight: Moneyish, a website that bills itself as “a new way of talking about money” and is owned by the venerable Dow Jones Co., has joined the cheap wine bandwagon with an article called “Why you never have to spend more than $10 on wine again.” It joins Forbes’ Cathy Hughey, another big-time mainstream business type, in acknowledging what many of us have know for years, that quality and value exists at $10. How well did Moneyish figure this out? One of the wines on its list – the Bogle chardonnay, which is not only an original member of the $10 Hall of Fame but a winner of the annual best cheap wine contest.

• Less underage drinking: Note to the neo-Prohibitionists: Underage drinking has continued its steady decline, without any help from you. The 2016 Monitoring the Future survey, conducted by the University of Michigan for the National Institutes of Health, found that alcohol use dropped by at least one-third among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders since 2011. In fact, the percentage of high school students who reported ever using alcohol dropped by as much as 60 percent compared to peak years. In this, it’s one more example that we don’t need any help from groups that want to bring back Prohibition-era laws to regulate alcohol sales to protect children.

• Drink like a king: Want to enjoy the same wines served at the British state banquet with Queen Elizabeth, Prince Phillip and Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia? Scotland’s Herald newspaper reports that a couple are available at UK retailers, and has suggestions for those that aren’t. All are nice wines, and it’s telling that two of the four are available and aren’t ridiculously expensive. The Henriques and Henriques madeira, at about $35, is a value for quality madeira. In addition, this is fine reporting by the Herald, demystifying what the royals are drinking.

Winebits 355: Underage drinking, lawsuits, drunks

wine news underage drinking ? You can’t learn from me: A study reported at the Partnership for Drug Free Kids found parents can’t teach their children responsible drinking. The catch? One definition of teaching responsible drinking is parents buying the booze for a beer bash. Sigh. How about parents letting their children have wine with dinner, to show them it’s not something unusual or forbidden? The study’s approach, to demonize booze, reminds me of the way we tried to demonize sex for teenagers, substituting abstinence for education. Which didn’t work very well. As I wrote when I was writing that sort of thing: “Teach kids to make intelligent decisions, and they ?ll make intelligent decisions. Tell kids what not to do, and they ?ll do what they ?re not supposed to do every time. Isn ?t that one of the first rules of being a good parent?”

? Even more lawyers: One of the first things I wrote here discussed fake wine terms; that is, those that appear on the bottle to describe wine but have no legal meaning and are used to confuse consumers. Now, it looks like we’re going to see some definition, with lawsuits filed against spirits producers who used the terms handmade and local, both of which have no legal standing but are used all the time. Even though the Wine Curmudgeon is not a lawyer, he has some advice for the producers they should listen to: Settle. You know, as well as I do, what’s going on here. And you don’t want to put that in front of a jury,

? No more, please, I’m a drunk: This item probably deserved its own post, complete with interview, picture, and my incredibly erudite comments in praise of the writer. But given that I’ve already written something like this and I don’t want to bore you, this will have to suffice: Janet Street-Porter, writing in London’s Daily Mail, has had her fill of government agencies telling her she is an alcoholic. “Two glasses of wine a night doesn’t mean I’m a drunk.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Direct shipping and underage drinking

Rebecca Williams may have taken on Big Tobacco, but that experience didn’t prepare her for her recent adventure in the wine business. Williams is the lead author of the May study that looked at whether minors could buy alcohol on line. It found, not surprisingly, that they could, and Williams found herself on the receiving end of some less than complimentary comments.

As one Winestream Media stalwart described her: Someone who did the study for no other reason than to burnish her resume.

“It’s not the same kind of backlash when we did tobacco studies,” says Williams, “and I don’t know that I’ve seen a lot of it. What was surprising were all the questions about where the money came from to fund the study. I was surprised that people thought the study was paid for by wine distributors, that we would do that.”

Ah, the naivety of the academic (who got her money from a legitimate public health foundation). Williams, who thought she was doing public health research, walked right into the biggest controversy in the wine business today — the debate over the future of the three-tier system.

She wanted to find out if it was easy for minors to buy booze over the Internet, and instead found herself in the middle of the fight between the distributors and wholesalers who want to strengthen three-tier and those who want to reform it. How this happened and what it means, after the jump:

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Winebits 208: Winery sales, old bottles, underage drinking

? Recession forcing winery sales? That's the question the Wine Spectator looks at, and the answer is yes, kind of. "It ?s far from a fire sale, but wineries in California are changing hands while others are quietly taking on new partners. The surge of deals follows two years of slow business activity ?the struggling economy meant plenty of wineries were struggling but no one wanted to rise to their financial rescue." Now that the wine business can see an end to the slowdown, the story says, deep-pocket investors — the story cites Fiji Water and Boissett Family Estates — are buying brands that the investors thinks are good values. Also going on, but with much less publicity: Well-known wineries are taking on partners to shore up the books after four years of slow business.

? Oldest Charles Krug bottle: A search for the oldest Charles Krug-Peter Mondavi Winery bottle of wine in existence hasn't found much yet. Krug, which is owned by the Peter Mondavi family, was founded in 1861, and the winery is looking for a really old bottle as part of its 150th birthday celebration. So far, though, no bottle much older than the 1940s has turned up. To complicate matters, there don't appear to be any records existing from before the 1950s, making it harder to track old wine.

? The French failure? NPR ran a story that said underage drinking in France was increasing, despite the country's long history of alcohol use. This is not supposed to happen in countries like France, according to people like me, where drinking is accepted and not taboo, like it is in the U.S. Then, in practically the next sentence, the story explains that the French have recently tightened their drinking laws, as well as setting a new minimum age. Is this how bad journalism has become, that a cranky ex-newspaperman has to lecture a media outlet like NPR on a wine blog? If the French have changed their laws and made drinking more difficult, like here in the U.S., why should we be surprised that binge drinking and underage drinking are going on? And it's a crappy headline, too. Harrumph.