Winebits 690: Liquor laws, Millennials, wine lawsuits

This week’s wine news: The liquor industry hopes to continue to ease three-tier in the wake of the pandemic, plus why Millennials don’t drink more wine and a Pythonesque French wine lawsuit

• After the pandemic: How much liquor law change came during the pandemic? The Hill, which covers the Congress and government, reports that 33 states and the District of Columbia now allow to-go sales of alcoholic beverages at restaurants and bars. Before the pandemic, no state allowed to-go sales. And some of you doubted three-tier was easing up. In fact, says The Hill, the pandemic “did more to liberalize alcohol regulations than anything since the end of Prohibition.” The piece is worth reading, especially for its almost shocking disbelief in how alcohol is regulated in the U.S. It’s worth noting that The Hill’s readers are congressional staffers who may not know or understand three-tier, and will likely be stunned to find out buying wine isn’t like buying a computer on Amazon.

• Health and younger consumers: There’s a lot of jargon in this article from the Wine Intelligence consultancy, but wade through it and you’ll discover that younger consumers are interested in lower- and no-alcohol wines because they want to be socially responsible and because they don’t want extra calories. Which leads the Wine Curmudgeon to wonder: How many younger consumers know that a glass of wine has just 125 calories, about the same as a bottle of light beer? Oh, that’s right — they can’t know. Wine doesn’t have ingredient and nutritional labeling the way beer does.

• French wine lawsuit: The French rate wine quality in many regions through an agency called the National Institute for Origin and Quality, which administers the various grand cru and premier grand cru designations. In St. Emilion in Bordeaux, lawsuits by disgruntled wineries unhappy about how they were ranked have increased so sharply that the application fee to be ranked has risen 10-fold since 2006. That’s because the application fees need to cover the cost of defending lawsuits. So more lawsuits, higher fees. Which, no doubt, adds to the number of lawsuits (“I’m not paying that much money not to be ranked!”), which leads to higher fees.