Winebits 768: Wine consumption, back labels, Pix.wine
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
This week’s wine news: U.S. wine consumption compared to the world, plus the language of wine back labels, and Pix.wine folds
• About one bottle a month: David Morrison, writing on the Wine Gourd blog, details how little American care about wine – or, as he puts it, “For most Americans, wine is not a big deal.” The post looks at per capita consumption, where the U.S. ranks 18th, between Canada and South Africa, at 12 liters a year. That works out to 16 bottles annually, or about 1.3 bottles a month – more or less the average over the past 20 years despite the total increase in U.S. wine consumption. In other words, the increase in consumption has not been bigger than the population increase. Or, writes Morrison: “No-one should conclude that wine is in any way a staple product in the lives of US citizens.” His analysis, in the wake of the past two Gallup alcohol use surveys, is well worth contemplating.
• What’s on the back label? The South African wine writer who uses the non de plume Cape of Good Wine takes a look at wine back labels, a subject we’ve gone into quite a bit on the blog. His take: There is more to back labels than bad winespeak (and he goes into detail on that, too), and especially in his native country. He is particularly impressed with the way some producers do the right thing on the back, listing sustainability and fair trade efforts. Maybe, he writes, producers should use the back label as their main selling point: “And I hope there’ll come a day where we will all rotate each bottle in eager anticipation of seeing how the winery is more environmentally and socially responsible.”
• Pix.wine: I wasn’t going to write about the wine site Pix.wine closing this month; call it more bad news for those of us who write about wine, and leave it at that. But 1 Wine Dude Joe Roberts, a long-time pal of the blog, points out that Pix’s demise is just one more sign of wine’s problems. Its failure, writes Joe, is another sign that the wine business has no idea how to adjust to the digital age. A few caveats here: I wrote for Pix and my editor, Felicity Carter, is one of the best I’ve worked with, wine or otherwise. Plus, Pix impresario Paul Mabray has done a hell of lot for wine and wine writing. So I may not be especially impartial when I say Joe makes some fine points (though in language we don’t use on the blog) about the wine business’ woes. Would that someone besides Joe and I – and a handful of others – cared.