Tag Archives: wine trends

Why are young people drinking less?

Man lecturing to college class
If these college students had asked, the WC would have been happy to explain how wine fits into a healthier lifestyle.

New insights focus on “healthy lifestyles” and what that means

The great question facing wine — as well as the rest of the booze business — is not so much that younger consumers are drinking less, but why they are.

A recent article in the Cleveland Clinic’s “Health Essentials” sheds light on the latter, offering insight into the catchall called “healthier lifestyles” that gets the credit (or blame) for the change. In this, it offers ways wine can tap into the healthier lifestyles mantra — if, of course, it’s really interested in doing so. Because wine, in moderation, can be part of a healthier lifestyle.

The story focuses on Gen Z, the demographic after the Millennials (whose older members are approaching their 30s). It quotes Cleveland Clinic addiction psychologist Akhil Anand, MD, and though some of what he says seems to be the usual “anyone who drinks will die” stuff, some of it does make sense.

First, younger people are more likely to talk about their problems instead of drowning them in a six-pack, as their parents or grandparents might have done. “Alcohol is a depressant and never the answer to a bad day,” says Dr. Anand. “Gen Z seems to understand that concept and they’ve moved in a different direction.”

Second, education. The Gen Zs have been taught since their earliest school days that alcohol is dangerous. “The message may be getting through,” says Dr. Anand.

And no, that’s not a bad thing.

Two other items worth noting: The story reports that concert alcohol sales among Gen Zs have been declining “significantly,” which hasn’t been the case for older concert-goers. At first glance, this makes perfect sense given “healthier lifestyles,” but it misses another possibility. Older people have more money and can more easily afford inflated concert booze prices.

The other? That Gen Z is choosing marijuana instead of alcohol, something that has been repeated so much that it’s accepted as fact — even though I haven’t seen any sort of definitive study that backs up the assertion. It also overlooks that legal weed has mostly been a financial failure, thanks to its high prices.

And, as the WC must note, do we see a common thread here with pricing?

Survey: Wine’s biggest competition is soft drinks

group of young people drinking hard seltzer
That’s not hard seltzer; it’s soft drinks.

Price still matters, but green? Not so much

A new survey finds that wine’s biggest competition among younger consumers is not craft beer, hard seltzer or cocktails, but soft drinks.

Yes, soft drinks.

The report, a joint venture between the Business of Drinks podcast and Research & Marketing Strategies, found that both Gen Z and Millennials prefer sodas and colas more than anything else. Three-quarters of those surveyed said they preferred the flavor of soft drinks and two-thirds said they were easy to find (availability, yet again). Finally, soft drinks were the “most versatile” of the beverages surveyed, since they could enjoy them at just about every social occasion.

Frankly, this is stunning news, and offers insights not seen in the hodgepodge of other studies I’ve suffered through over the past several years. It’s especially fascinating that the age groups that are supposedly drinking less booze for health reasons are drinking sugar-laden, calorie-busting sodas instead.

Which, says the man who conducted the survey, was the whole point. The questions purposely asked about more beverages, more occasions for drinking, and more reasons for drinking.

“For example, for wine, much of the previous research I’ve seen discusses wine in the more limited context of beer (especially craft beer) and spirits,” says Roger Brooks of Research & Marketing Strategies. “Sometimes, hard seltzer is examined and, more recently, non-alcoholic beverages. Much of the information is sales data, however, and survey data is fragmented without this breadth and depth.”

Among the other findings:

• Not surprisingly – to me, anyway – is that price was one of the most important reasons for choosing what to drink. So was flavor, which should come as a shocker to a wine industry focused on making bland, sort of sweet plonk to appeal to the widest possible audience.

• Yes, availability matters. If the product is difficult to buy, consumers say they tend to look for something else. Thank you, three-tier system.

• Younger drinkers make decisions about what to buy based on advice from social media, friends, and family. Wine apps, wine publications, and critic scores? Hardly at all.

• Factors like “eco-friendly and organic” as well “low or no calories” were not important in making purchase decisions, For wine, less than 1 in 10 said “low or no calorie,” “non-alcoholic,” “orange wines”, and “eco-friendly” were “liked best.”

A caveat: I’ve worked for the people who do the “Business of Drinks” podcast, so take that for what you will. The methodology: The survey queried 1,300 drinking age U.S.-based Gen Z and Millennial consumers.

Wine’s glass bottle dilemma

glass wine bottle and cork
No, the glass wine bottle — and cork — isn’t going away, if a consumer survey is to be believed.

What do you do when you’ve convinced consumers that “real” wine comes in heavy glass bottles?

Two recent news stories outlined wine’s glass bottle dilemma – if you’ll pardon the following – with crystal clear clarity.

In the first, a group of retailers, including Whole Foods and Naked Wines in the U.S., agreed to try to make the bottles they sell much lighter, given that glass bottle weight is wine’s biggest contribution to climate change.

But in the second, a survey found that consumers cared little about the bottle’s earth-killing carbon footprint. In fact, they saw heavy bottles as a sign of wine quality.

Talk about – sorry again – the glass being half full.

None of this is surprising to any of us who have been paying attention (or who reads the blog). The wine business has worked its way through any number of alternatives to glass over the past 25 years, where each as been declared the next big thing and then quietly faded away – be they boxes, TetraPaks, or cans.

My take, of course, is that the wine business could care less about getting rid of glass bottles, and that the survey is not so much a take on consumer sentiment as it is on the success the wine business has had in convincing us that wine has to come in a bottle – the heavier the better, and with a cork for good measure. Because only cranky ex-newspaper reporters want to drink cheap wine from a light bottle with a screwcap – or, Bacchus forbid, from a box.

So getting rid of heavy bottles is left to retailers.

Yes, some of that is because the retailers want to do the right thing. But lighter bottles will also save them millions of dollars in supply chain costs, and that figures in to their decision as much as anything. And, in one of those ironies that I love so much, the wine business might even benefit because someone else did the work that it didn’t want to do.

The wine writer and physician dilemma

Patient Talking With Doctor
“Yes, the Mediterranean Diet. Good for you.”

What happened after the WC told his new doctor that he – gasp – drank wine with dinner?

The WC had his annual physical the other day, but this was my third doctor in four years (thank you, U.S. health care system). And I was scared to death.

Not because I thought I was dying or in bad health or anything like that. Rather, I was terrified I would have to fight with my new doctor about drinking wine.

Which, given what I’ve heard from other wine writers, is where we find ourselves in the 2020s. Many in the medical community, regardless of the evidence, have decided that drinking is as deadly as cigarette smoking, and they aren’t shy about sharing that with their patients. One colleague told me that her physician was devastated – no exaggeration, she insisted — when he couldn’t find anything wrong with her liver.

So the conversation with my new doctor almost as soon as we started talking (because, of course, the WC doesn’t believe in wasting time):

“I’m a wine writer. I drink wine with dinner.”

“How many glasses?”

“2 ½.”

“Well, the guidelines say two glasses a day, so I guess you’re OK. Do you know what the Mediterranean diet is?”

At this point, I was speechless (which doesn’t happen all that often). Not only did my doctor not threaten me about drinking wine with dinner, but he treated me like an adult who takes responsibility for his health. My answer was almost blubbering: “Yes, Mediterranean diet — less red meat, more greens, beans, and grains, and olive oil.”

So he and I are on the same page. I’ll continue to drink wine in moderation; keep walking Churro, the blog’s associate editor, every day; and watch my diet. No Starbucks death coffee for me, thank you.

Which, if more physicians thought this way, might make an end to this neo-Prohibition foolishness.

More about wine and health:
• Yes, all those wine and health studies are flawed
• Finally, some perspective about wine and health
• Once more, how not to report a wine and health story

Photo: “Patient Talking With Doctor” by NIHClinicalCenter is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The Wine Curmudgeon Bad News-o-Meter

Henry Fonda in "Grapes of Wrath" movie
“Ain’t no rose-colored glasses here, Ma.”

Worn out from all the negativity? The WC has the solution

If you think you’re tired of reading about all of wine’s bad news, imagine how worn out I am from writing about it. Hence, this solution — the Wine Curmudgeon Bad News-o-Meter. Occasionally, I’ll link to the latest and most depressing wine news and assign it a score from 1 to 10, where 1 is the worst news possible, the equivalent of the Joad family farm in “The Grapes of Wrath.” And 10 (not that we’ll see many)? That’s the best news possible, kind of the way wine was after the “60 Minutes” French paradox story.

And, because I am the WC, I’ll also offer a score, 1 to 10, about how many pairs of rose-colored glasses the writer is wearing when she or he describes the bad news. The more pairs of glasses, the more the author is trying to spin the story.

So no need to read any of the stories — just my ratings:

• How big is the slowdown in the US beverage alcohol market, and how long will it last? 3, 8 pairs of rose-colored glasses. The IWSR consulting group predicts “more subdued growth” even though two of the four categories it measures, including wine, are declining.

• Winejobs Index Falls Nearly 30% 5, 3 pairs of rose-colored glasses. Yes, the news is bad, but as the story points out, the index is “even with two years ago and remains at an historically high level for August.”

• Global Wine Glut: The Return of Crisis Distillation. 5, 2 pairs of glasses. Mike Veseth, the Wine Economist, offers some much needed perspective about Europe’s chronic oversupply of wine.

• No Signs of a Turning Point Yet for Wine. 2, 10 pairs of glasses. “The good news is that the contraction in wine sales does not appear to be steepening. The less good news is that there are no tangible signs of improvement either — the market seems to have settled into a state of steady decline.” A steady decline is good news?

The final wine availability post

Frustrated computer user
“No… not more about wine availability!”

Because it’s not going to get any better, so we just have to accept it the way it is

I got an email the other day from a wine marketer who wanted to send me a sample that was only available from the small winery that made it. No thanks, I said. If I ran a review of a wine that no one could buy save directly from a small winery, my readers would – to put it politely – offer a complaint or two.

In other words, nothing much has changed in wine availability since I wrote the blog’s first post almost 16 years ago. It’s as much of a pain today as it was then. There are only a handful of national brands available in much of the country, and most of those aren’t worth writing about on the blog.

Hence, my attempt at what I call “generally available” – that an independent retailer in a decent sized city can order it from a wholesaler if the retailer doesn’t carry it. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s not great, but it’s better than all of the others.

The irony here is that almost everyone, including me, expected availability to get better in those 16 years – the Internet and all of that. But it never did, for reasons we’ve covered before on the blog. And, unfortunately, it looks like availability isn’t going to get any better, no matter how much we want it to,

So consider this the final availability post, for the following reasons:

• Consolidation among wholesalers. The top two control about half the market and the top 10 control about two-thirds (the last time I looked – it might be more now). That means wines from small producers have less of a chance of getting distribution, and without a distributor they can’t be sold in the U.S. And the term “smaller producers” increasingly means a company that makes less than 300,000 cases. Which could well be about 90 percent of the wineries in the world.

• Retailers are less willing to take chances. This was one of the biggest surprises I found when I wrote the grape glut story. Retailers, for a variety of reasons, are more hesitant about stocking wine that doesn’t come with a best-seller pedigree. Which could also be about 90 percent of the wines in the world.

• No help from the courts. Many of us thought the three-tier system would die a well-deserved death sometime in the past 20 years, thanks to the various lawsuits filed against it. But the system has endured; almost every federal court decision has supported it. My friends who work to end three-tier may disagree with me, but I don;’t see that changing.

The history of the three-tier system

'U.S. Is Voted Dry." newspaper pager
Let’s not forget we brought all of this on ourselves.

How about the Klan, a book, and a Swedish model for regulating booze?

Want to know why the three-tier system, which regulates alcohol sales in the U.S., is so odd, convoluted, and bizarre?

Then check out this epic, 2,300-word story that I wrote for GuildSomm. Because the history is odd, convoluted, and bizarre. How else to explain a system whose origins include the Ku Klux Klan, John D. Rockefeller, liquor regulation in Sweden, and what one historian termed an abortive insurrection in South Carolina? Or that our current system is based on a 90-year-old book?

And, for those of you who just want the highlights:

• The Klan worked with the Progressives, perhaps the leading political reform group in U.S. history, as well as the suffragette Susan B. Anthony and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League to pass Prohibition. Which strikes me as about as odd as U.S. politics get.

• Don’t believe anyone who says Prohibition was a success. Rockefeller — who didn’t drink and who had supported Prohibition — wrote in 1932, “I earnestly hoped with a host of advocates of temperance, that it would be generally supported by public opinion. . . . This has not been the result, but rather . . . that a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale; that many of our best citizens, piqued at what they regarded as an infringement of their private rights, have openly and unabashedly disregarded the Eighteenth Amendment.”

• The three-tier system is based on a book, Toward Liquor Control — which is still read and used by state regulators almost a century later. (You can even buy it on Amazon.) In 1933, Rockefeller hired Raymond Fosdick and Albert Scott to write it, and it offers, more or less, the regulatory framework we have today. The authors recommended two approaches: control states, which own the retailers, or state regulation of retailers. In either case, they suggested setting up three tiers and highlighted the need to efficiently collect taxes and to allow local option to go wet or dry.

“‘U.S. Is Voted Dry.’” by Thomas Cizauskas is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.