It’s weed. A whole cohort of people and kids are no longer drinking alcohol (like they did) or never really started because THC and/or CBD is now legal in vapes, gummies, drinks.
I visited Charleston and was surprised they’ve only legalized THC insofar as THC drinks are available at bars. But a lot of the young people were drinking cans of it instead of spiked seltzer, which was the only alcohol anyone was holding. No beer, no wine.
Similarly: they all were smoking computers—not a single analog cigarette in sight. Tobacco farmers in shambles?
It's also the economy. Everything is expensive. Young people are less successful than ever before (at no fault of their own). When it costs $10 a beer with tax and tip, most young people simply can't afford to do that with any regularity.
It's also also competition. In 1970, your option was to stay home and watch one of three TV channels and that's it. Now, your options are literally to watch any movie ever made, watch any TV show ever made, or play any game ever made... all connected with your friends online.
It is a part of it, but it's not just weed. I would argue the economy is the most impactful factor here.
Alcohol is just in a structural decline. From my experiences in Switzerland:
1. 10-15 years ago it was expected you would have 1-2 glasses of wine at lunch as a front office guy / banker while talking shop. Now you will get a trip to HR unless meeting a client or in a place that still allows it. I imagine similar things in other areas. I still see construction workers drinking a can at 6:30pm however.
2. For good reason, "we were both drunk and X happened" doesn't work as an explanation anymore. Turns out that was a big a part of it.
The only real place people are still "expected" to drink is the army (cos there is nothing else to do) or meeting some boomer client. Younger people just do other drugs/stimulants.
Same observation from Finland. Additionally, being even slightly drunk in front of children has become very no-no. I recently had a small gathering of other families with children at my home and I made the mistake of offering them some beers. Everyone declined and the looks I got were the same as if I had offered them crack cocaine.
I don't think it's all good, though, since a lot of social events that were previously facilitated by alcohol just disappear. Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two? Turns out people suck at socialising without alcohol, and if alcohol disappears, people just stay at home and play video games or something.
This is going to sound like I'm over generalizing and maybe even a bit... racist? and I already apologize for it, it's not my intention. I hope I can pass the actual message I'm trying to pass. So, let's go.
Doesn't Finland, like the other Nordic countries, have a long history of alcohol abuse and pushing against it (like, with draconian prices)? Isn't maybe just that policy "winning"? Also, couldn't this be yet another case where the Nordic are seen as "one step beyond" the rest like it was the case when fully digitalizing schools, only then to backpedal realizing it's not all so good and there are drawbacks that were not considered?
I say this to connect with the second part of your post, to which I fully agree: alcohol is not generally good for health and it can be abused but also small quantities here and there won't probably hurt you in a serious way and will give some social benefits like the ones you mentioned. (and the same applied to other light drugs as well!)
> Doesn't Finland, like the other Nordic countries, have a long history of alcohol abuse and pushing against it (like, with draconian prices)? Isn't maybe just that policy "winning"?
Yes and no; all the Nordic / Lutheran countries have some mildly prohibitionist policies like the Norwegian wine monopoly, and yes it gets very dark and depressing up there which led to alcohol abuse becoming a social problem in the early 20th century, but that situation was stable for years and the decline in alcohol consumption is a global phenomenon.
Finland's alcoholism-curbing policies date from the early twentieth century and the kind of abuse they were meant to curb was especially the drinking of spirits. Then, nothing changed for decades until, quite recently, beer sales have actually become more liberalized and you can buy higher-strength stuff in supermarkets.
Finland definitely has a history of binge drinking and straight up alcoholism. However, I don't think the state can take credit for consumption going down, since the decline in drinking among younger generations seems pretty much global at this point.
My impression is that decline can mostly be attributed to gen Z. They grew up with social media that made a better point to emphasis how dangerous alcohol is. Previous dominant media, at most, had very sterile disclaimers that alcohol is bad for you.
Romania has seen a similar decline in consumption (though still in top 3 across EU in consumption), such as that nowadays we have articles from media outlets (as a voice for the industry) that complain of the downward trend. While in reality we should be celebrating this change in culture!
Genuinely feels like we're optimising for a less human way to interact with each other in pursuit of some nicer statistics (hooray people live two tenths of a year longer). Why even have children if everything surrounding them has to be miserable these days.
In the US the reverse happened. Although people drink less, you do get offered alcohol everywhere. I don't remember it being present at places like zoos, kids indoor playgrounds, state fairs, etc. I was even at a birthday at a public park at 10am Sunday morning and saw some White Claws being passed around.
People drink less but there is less stigma around alcohol and obvious other once illegal drugs.
I think it very much depends on what groups. Because taboos on alcohol in formerly kosher environments are new (~2016+?), there's uneven adherence.
You saw the same thing with smoking in the 90s in the US. Kids nowadays wouldn't believe the amount of bitching there was that you couldn't smoke inside restaurants, etc.
And I get it -- cultural assumptions changing is messy and can feel confusing to people.
PS: Also alcohol sold in public spaces has relatively high margins, so that explains that.
I do have a feeling that the social structures, and perhaps even biology, have evolved over centuries with alcohol present to grease the wheels. It can allow a higher baseline of introversion / neuroticism (which facilitates higher performance in some areas but worse socialising), with the ability to drink to boost the social aspect when needed. Chesterton's beer, in other words.
> Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two?
That is a fair point, but personally I enjoy the time during which my child is playing with their peers and not trying to have me as a substitute for these kinds of interactions.
In Eastern Europe it's still quite usual to have a few drinks at parties but we don't have it at lunch because one would most likely drive to work, so then it's a big no-no. Bulgaria and Greece have 0.5‰ tolerance for alcohol while driving and also allow public drinking (except where explicitly prohibited), but I would still not do it because it's easy to exceed the limit or get involved in an accident and then it's your fault regardless. Thus one might end up having a glass or two in the evening, after work hours. I'd possibly have a beer or two in the evening during dog walks or some wine in the evening with my wife. When we walk by the pub, my dog almost always pulls me towards the terrace.
In France they still drink a glass or two during lunch break. I've seen office workers in La Défense, where one would normally commute using Paris Métro Line 1.
> Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two?
You have a reason to go there, which is socialising with the parents presumably. If you can't have fun with people without drinking and then blame it on the lack of alcohol... that's no good.
The reason you go to kids' birthday parties because your child was invited and they're too young to go alone.
You can socialize and you kind of have to, but they've probably invited every classmate from preschool or whatever, so there's 20 people you probably haven't met before, have nothing in common except having kids the same age, and will probably never see again (except maybe at the next birthday party). And often the parties are held in a McDonalds or something, so catering is chicken nuggets and shitty cake with a Paw Patrol motif.
I get the sentiment, but it seems to me like a crutch that should be worked on getting rid of. It can't be that painful to be with other people, if it is, we need to work on ourselves and the culture. The jump from "I'm bored/uncomfortable" -> "might as well get drunk" seems wrong and a slippery slide to boot.
Human beings have been complaining about other people at social events being bores since antiquity. There is no work on oneself and the culture that will, at a societal level, make all such interactions pleasant.
I heard a comedian make the point that HR only began to exist once women became more prevalent in the workforce. And at that point you do need much more oversight. And having women in the workforce is positive since they're ~50% of the population and offer distinct experiences.
But I wonder the unseen downsides of having HR so powerful in an organization. From useless screening of candidates, to overly corrective actions by everyone terrified HR will essentially fire them. Maybe it would be better to have 1-2 glasses of wine during lunch occasionally. They're extra-judicial, easily the most powerful group in an organization with little oversight.
My guess is that you're in the US. Here in the Netherlands, while there's plenty to criticize or laugh about, HR is also responsible for pensions, benefits, workplace safety, reintegration from sickness, ensuring that staff is well trained for their role, etc.
At my org they also organize the Thursday evening drinks session :)
HR is a powerful organization for a reason. Companies everywhere operate in a legal environment, and 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued.
I believe this is the legal team. There are a lot of self imposed restrictions HR puts on companies, like the can't have a drink during lunch, but I don't understand how ignoring such rules leads to getting sued.
For sex stuff, sure, which was my point about women. A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed, etc. And I guess having everyone jump through hoops with training about all the various isms can provide plausible deniability when something illegal happens. But I think you're overstating the role HR plays here.
I'd be very surprised if a full review didn't reveal that early HR more often existed to protect high position males against females in the workplace.
Behaviors and cultural norms don't change overnight, and HR is ultimately subordinate to leadership, especially in private companies with partnership structures, etc.
Modern HR feels like a better balance, with the caveat that it will usually protect the company from any employee.
The only problems with that reasoning is that women have been in the workplace for hundreds of years (domestic service, textiles, etc), and human resources started appearing in about 1900, approximately 50 years before mixed workplaces were common.
Loads of women in the workforce in WWII. Was there anything like HR? (Not counting the recruiting departments, which were focused on finding & retaining workers in a very tight labor market.)
Instead of "women in the workforce", I'd say it was changing society and social norms. A century-ish ago, in quite a few sorts of places, workspace disputes might well be settled with fists. (Yes, there were many norms and unwritten rules about that.) Post-WWII, there was a long trend of gentrifying social mores, which discouraged such things. New laws and legal norms encouraged lawsuits over things previously tolerated, or settled informally. And more than just women, civil rights laws and norms pushed into the workplace. Bring in the lawyers, reporters, new public ideals - and a business really needed an HR Dept., to prevent disasters.
I don't think we can blame this one on HR, people just aren't drinking as much alcohol, all over the developed world.
The US isn't even an outlier. I'm not sure why, I don't buy the health reason argument, since I don't think people pay attention to health studies. And they have been smoking (marijuana) which is terrible for the lungs and has other health issues. And there are problems with obesity.
It's not because of health consciousness.
Overall, people aren't drinking or having sex or going out as much, these are all in decline.
That is over the top. HR on the whole protects the employees and the organization. The experience you reference is not my experience at all and sounds disingenuous. We don't get to do whatever we want in the workplace, there are social structures that need to be adhered to. Like with any power structure there are people who will maximize their control for its own sake which is unfortunate but not an excuse to dismiss the whole concept.
College students have basically stopped drinking. I had a recent Berkeley college grad tell me no one drinks at Berkeley anymore because they're afraid it will shrink their brain. Things are just so competitive that having fun in college is a complete afterthought. It's constantly chasing grades, internships, side projects, networking, job interviews etc.
Not in the UK from what I can see, there's stories about it in the news but try actually going to hackney on a saturday - it's full of 22 year olds drinking (and also often smashing loads of bag...).
Maybe that's not a representative sample but young people still want to socialise and at that age you can get away with it so why not.
Having said that, the UK is absolutely a nation of pissheads, the US has always has that puritanical streak
According to the book "Drunk", the reason you drink with people is it's more likely their true self comes out and you can more easily find out if they are trustworthy and worth doing business with. Not saying that therefore you should drink, nor do I know if it can actually be backed up.
Lol I would love to see how he argues that alcohol increases creativity. This is one of those things that sound plausible but very debatable if true or not.
I think it's more likely that it reduces your tendency to discard ideas that on the surface seem bad. Some of those seemingly bad ideas will turn out to be good, so if you take them seriously you'll look more creative, even though you didn't actually come up with any additional ideas.
Yes even that framing is a bit extreme. It increases your risk tolerance.
So you're more open to new creative ideas, they don't even have to be that crazy, merely not the status quo.
In my own case it does (or at least the first one does) because it reduces inhibition from creative impostor syndrome.
It also helped occasionally in severe OCD crises when no other strategy would break a cycle of compulsion: literally a single shot of alcohol will.
And it can help if I am stuck in self-defeating ADHD loops.
None of these things are advisable or worth the health damage even small amounts of alcohol could be causing. The only thing that is worth say a dozen units per year is reducing social anxiety. There are people I only know because I had a rare drink.
The same phenomenon holds for both wine and baijiu — young people are drinking less of either one. In China, over the past years, even Moutai, the country's most famous liquor brand, has seen its sales decline. This really does seem to be a global trend.
> I still see construction workers drinking a can at 6:30pm however.
At least here in Germany, this is all but gone. Our version of OSHA cracked down on that hard simply because of all the accidents that happen when you combine alcohol, a lot of intake of alcohol due to the reality of physical labor (aka, sweating) and heavy machinery.
And on top of that the police in rural areas also enforces alcohol limits these days.
My dad spent a lot of time in Spain back in the day and was a regular at a local cafe, where he'd get a coffee and a tortilla (Spanish omelette) for breakfast. The cafe was popular with construction workers too and they would order the same, only they would top it off with a shot of Carlos Tercero, the cheapest brandy.
That's very unusual for 20 years ago. I remember this from my childhood, 60 years ago, where this was common. But even in the 90s that had stopped almost completely.
Seem so on the whole in Europe in higher-income countries. But the decline seems to be slowing.
(It is surprisingly difficult to find annual alcohol consumption statistics on google. It feels like swimming upstream. It keeps giving me data on alcohol-associated deaths, or total alcohol+tobacco spending!)
WHO dataset, alcohol pure litres total per capita annual [0]
Switzerland (4th biggest decrease):
2020: 11.4 litres
2024: 8.8 litres
UK:
2000: 12.3 litres
2024: 10.4 litres
Ireland:
2000: 14.78 litres
2024: 10.27 litres
There are some countries which have seen an increase over that time period:
> surprisingly difficult to find annual alcohol consumption statistics on google. It feels like swimming upstream.
Seems like the WHO might not have generated a per country per capita alcohol consumption dataset after 2020? Imagine COVID + US defunding in 2025 (~20% of budget) caused a lot of turmoil in lower priorities. :(
Average person drinks 9 litres of alcohol per year factoid actualy just statistical error. average person drinks 3 litres per year. Wendt Georg aka "Norm", who spends the majority of his life in a bar in Boston is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Personally I microdose THC via an extraction I make myself(somewhat ironically using alcohol). Can’t do it in the mornings as I wish though, society still hasn’t caught up with a more heterogeneous drug use, only caffeine and tobacco are erlaubt…
I wish I could do anything with THC. It's not illegal under Ohio (where I live) law anymore.
But my job involves chemical plants and oil refineries, and they use DISA, and DISA drug tests everyone thoroughly.
I can count on getting a test that involves hair, urine, and breath samples at least twice per year. (It's supposed to be annual and random, but "random" seems to be rather heavily-weighted.)
THC hangs out way too long for that.
It's stupid: A person can be completely ripped on booze every night and cocaine occasionally, or live entirely in a world of psychedelic drugs like LSD or mescaline and that's... fine, I guess?
I struggle with ADHD, have been for years, and no pharmaceutical drug helps, while they all have severe side effects. Meanwhile every time I take a single drag of my friend’s joint, I feel most relaxed and have most coherent thoughts, while able to pull the exact words from memory I need. A single drag, mind you.
I have not heard a single doctor talk about microdosing THC as a cure for ADHD and I wonder if my experience is coincidental or there’s really something there?
I still enjoy drinking a bit but agree with your take in principal. I'd rather smoke a joint, take an edible, or drink a thc drink most nights than go for alcohol, and it strikes me as odd that although it's been fully legal in my country for years, it would still be wildly more taboo than alcohol in the workplace, even though nearly everyone probably does something outside of work.
I actually think lack of religion is one of the major reasons for a declining birth rate. The church was an important third space.
Even now in the Korean-American community, the running joke is that if one suddenly starts going to church in their 20s, it's only because they're looking for a romantic partner.
It's a shrinking market, but it surely doesn't help that people are simply boycotting US goods.
For example: Swedish sales for US wine was down around 20% in 2025. The overall decline was about 10%. In a shrinking market, you don't want to also have a shrinking market share.
I'm sure the figures are similar in other countries - and this year it's going to be very different in Canada as well. I imagine Canada was always a big importer of US wine seeing as it's close by and they don't have much domestic production.
Seeing many people comment that they drink less; I'm happy to report I still try to drink as often as I can (Which is still not as often as I want).
I think that trying to explain the reduced sales of California grape growers in terms of an international boycott of US products seems like highly motivated reasoning, not factual reasoning.
US exports have been growing every year since the pandemic low of 2020
We obviously do not have full data for 2026, but the first half is higher than the same time in 2025. But this is really driven by economic activity, so if there is a global recession, you can expect fewer people to buy US goods, just as you can expect Americans to buy fewer foreign goods. The 2020 low was not because of a boycott, but a general economic decline, and as far as I am aware, no boycott of US goods has ever been detected in the trade data, it's always been a media affair or hyperlocalized (e.g. some people boycotting Apple or Windows or Google seem to be the most common media stories).
And I think this is a pretty general situation, e.g. consumer boycotts rarely show up in trade data - to hit trade data you need government sanctions, nothing else moves the needle.
Noted elsewhere, Canada accounts for more than a third of US wine exports [1], so the trade-war with Canada in 2026 surely wasn't helpful either to keep export-volume at 2025-levels...
In a story explaining California wine growers pain, be aware that 98% of California wine is consumed in the US. Exports are negligible.
This is like when a story about housing costs was posted and the Canadians chimed in that the US housing woes are due to not having access to Canadian lumber, and the board had to explain to him that that 80% of lumber used in US production is sourced domestically.
The story is way more complicated and hides where the pain points are.
The real average is closer to 25% of lumber coming from Canada but if you look at specific types like SPF which is important for framing, it’s almost evenly split between US domestic and Canada-sourced. Douglas Fir is heavily sourced from Canada. But some lumber like SYP is almost all US domestic.
And in terms of particular states, tariffing Canada sourced lumber has outsized impact because Canadian lumber has a freight advantage so getting US sourced lumber is going to drive up prices even if Canadian is avoided.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the wine story was equally complicated.
I think comparing by tonnage would be more apt than comparing dollar figures which are subject to a lot of external factors, including currency exchange rates and inflation.
Also, the idea that California wine - of all products - is very sensitive to exports is a bit strange since although California wine sales account for more revenue than the entire wine industry of any other country -- 68 billion dollars worth of sales each year (https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/california...), the state exports relatively little, only about a billion dollars of California wine is sold abroad. So 98% of California wine is sold within the US. Only 2% is exported.
And yet there are so many people on this board that are convinced that Europe, of all places, is somehow responsible for driving California wine grower sales woes.
It's pretty funny if you think about it, you have some Bosnian dude and when you tell him that Ford is facing a sales slump he immediately shoots back -- it's because the Bosnians are no longer buying Fords! Truly an amazing example of economic narcissism.
Apart from the inflation mentioned above, there are a multitude of factors at play that cannot be determined by just looking at aggregated numbers. The price of some goods, for example, has skyrocketed due to general scarcity (electronics, oil...). Fx got worse for the dollar vs other currencies. And are numbers only for goods, or do they include services?
It is definitely a reality that certain goods have seen localized boycotts, like alcohol in Canada, and some services have had to change (data sovereignty in Europe got a lot of traction).
This is an incredibly disingenuous and specious argument.
The discussion is about US wine production and consumption. You present the aggregate total vale of all US exports in US dollars to 6 significant digits. Does the variance of the volume of wine exports in litres even show up in those 6 signifcant digits?
Consider: (1) is six significant digits of precision justified, or is it insignificant accurancy? (2) Do those aggregate numbers take into account inflation? (3) Do those aggregate numbers take into account the (not insignificant) devaluation of the US dollar? (4) Do those aggregate numbers include both goods and services?
No, if you were to make an honest argument by quoting US exports, you need to limit it to the volume of US wine exports in litres. Misdirection can be a great tool of propaganda but is not a useful contribution to interesting intellectual discourse.
I responded to the claim that this was due to a boycott of US goods writ large, not a specific boycott about wine.
What would be the reason to boycott wine only and not other US goods? What about the US wine industry is controversial that does not apply to the other industries?
So I wrote that there is no evidence of boycotts showing up in trade data, which is true.
Then, after doing some digging, so I pointed out that almost none of California wines are exported anyway. So obviously this cannot be the result of foreign boycotts.
So let's get back to the "incredibly disingenuous and specious argument", and start with the dictionary definition of those and go from there, because that accurately describes how I view your response.
> I responded to the claim that this was due to a boycott of US goods writ large, not a specific boycott about wine.
While boycotting iPhones might be difficult, taking the Cabernet one shelf over takes almost no effort or negative impact to the consumer. It's rarely more expensive to switch from a US wine e.g. French or Australian. It's sold in the same store.
For the specific example of Sweden, every single wine bottle in every store is sorted by country in the store. And it sits above a price sticker with the flag of the origin country on it.
That's wildly different from similar choices e.g. when you pick a can of Hellman's Mayonnaise, there's no US flag under it. But for wine in particular, the country of origin is almost always known to the buyer and involved in the process, even if Sweden stands out as an extreme due to the flag being under the bottle.
That's why I believe the boycott which isn't a boycott on US wine but on US products in general, is _most notable_ for wine or in some other case not notable at all because it's a small effect and consumers don't always know what is American and what isn't (Hellman's example). But for wine, everyone knows.
The difference between the general slump in wine sales (10%) and the decline in US sales (20%) could have more factors, such as price. But it's easy to assume - and polls suggest - that consumers really do avoid the US wine.
They can heat the grapes and sell the juice, it's fantastic - I just got a 3 l canister of fresh grape juice to drink on the weekend (since it's harvest time for vineyards, fresh from its producer, no additives, no preservatives, not even filtered). The taste is unlike anything
from this world - I'd compare it to liquid honey, which only goes to show what industrally processed stuff the shops are feeding us with.
Nah. They're smaller, usually sweeter and have big seeds. I actually prefer the taste of wine grapes, even though they're harder to eat. Just has a few over the weekend. Also the wines that retain the seed or grape skin aroma taste great.
Anyway, wine is about at least 3x more expensive than grape juice so it's better ROI to sell good wine. They could make alcohol free wines, but in my experience everything I've tried sucks, just like alcohol free beer.
Long time casual wine drinker (and occasional beer), I find myself drinking less and less. Two reasons: first drinking a glass of average wine for the sake of having a drink makes no sense anymore. I prefer to have a drink more seldom but pick a better wine, that I actually enjoy. Second, as I get older I see that even a modest amount of alcohol has negative effect on me: during the day I get groggy, during the night my sleep is worse (I know, counterfactual, but so it is).
It's long known that drinking alcohol disturbs your sleep. You're getting slumbery and probably will fall asleep easily but the sleep will not be as wholesome.
I think different types of alcohol have quite a different effect on me now (40yo) - wine will get me mellow and sleepy, beer would get me to be more social, whiskey will make me more energetic / risk taking.
Knowing that I can tune my level of enjoyment of whatever is happening.
Though there is an old saying from where I grew up - alcohol is stealing happiness from tomorrow to have it today.
And that has always stuck with me - whenever I drink I get a bit happier that instant and feel worse more tired the next day.
And that is ok if I am going to a social event and I want to get the most out of it, and I know next day will be chill anyway - who’ll can make the “chill” time even more chill.
> during the day I get groggy, during the night my sleep is worse (I know, counterfactual, but so it is)
Have you tried lighter wines or prosecco? I've had some summer wine from a grape variety called Inzolia in Sicily. Quite light in alcohol, tasted a bit like lime water.
My experience is that grogginess really depends on the wine that you drink, but it always ruins my sleep if I exceed two glasses (150 ml). For instance I would almost never drink high alcohol (>13.5%) or high sugar content Rieslings. They almost always give me headaches.
se here. i enjoy beer but annoyes me that they all have the same 5% alcohol content. its too much, I just like the taste, I don't want to be sleepy. non alcoholic beers taste terrible
Fortunately, this is not universally true anymore.
There are now beers brewed with extremely low-alc yeasts (which have a trait that makes them unable to digest maltose) that make <0,5% alc beers with good flavours. This combined with sour malts and good hops can give you great flavours. These low-alc yeasts remove the need to maltreat the beer for removing the alc. And it is often OK to have 0,5% alc -- maybe not during pregnancy, but to avoid the annoying 5% alc. It's most probably not the industry cheap shit though.
There's also the possibility to just stop the fermentation with normal yeasts at any point, e.g., at 1% alc. I've had a couple of very good beers like this, too.
There is a new method for 0,0% beer. I sometimes drink a 0,0 mixed with lemonade (called Radler in germany) after sport. There is also Fassbrause which is not a beer at all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fassbrause ) but tastes a bit malty
The ones in Japan are fantastic. I'm addicted to them. The Asahi 0% alc, 0% calorie beer is 70% as good as their regular beer in my opinion. Unfortunately it's around the same price.
Disclaimer: I lost my sense of smell due to a head injury, so that does muddle my ability to taste things. But I think with beer a sense of smell is less important
I swapped my daily beer for Heaps Normal XPA, which I felt was about 80% as good as regular beer. Then after a few months of that I realised I no-longer craved a beer, so swapped to sparkling water.
Now I only drink maybe once a month. It's great. Happy I kicked the mild habit.
In the US market, at least, the quality has improved dramatically over the past few years. Several established breweries now produce alcohol-removed versions of existing beers, with varying degrees of success - but in general my experience is that alcohol-free dark beers work better, the increased maltiness does a better job of hiding what's missing. IPAs and lagers can end up tasting somewhat thin compared to the normal version.
There's a few things I miss about the UK, and one of them is easy availability of beer that's less than 5%. Unfortunately that seems to have been creeping upwards - the shift to craft keg (rather than cask) beer seems to have been accompanied by moving more in the direction of US-style stronger beers. Several breweries do still produce milds that are in the <3% range, but it's increasingly hard to find them, even in pubs that used to be reliable suppliers. It's interesting how cultural this is.
Might be a market issue. I grew up along beer drinkers and over the past few years, so many good alcohol free beers have entered the German market, that a lot of them shifted almost fully to alcohol free beers.
Got any recommendations for good German ones? The market in the UK has been improving a lot but I do still think a lot of them taste like socks, I'd be interested in trying some more high-quality German options if I can find them over here (Aldi/Lidl probably my best bet).
Erdinger Alcoholfrei was a low alcohol German "health drink" before it was popular - has been around for about 25 years. It's fairly available in the UK.
I don’t know where you live but here in the UK and in Europe you can find all sorts of beer from 0 to 5% (and more of course), even in local supermarkets or draft in a pub. And yeah the 0% taste bad, but a 0.5 to 3% can be great, I’m sure you could find some online if you’re willing to, search for “table beer”, “small beer” or just low alcohol beer.
And in terms of non alcoholic beer, “lucky saint” tastes great (0.5%) and is very popular in the UK, lots of pub have it on tap.
In the UK it's common to have 3.4% beer/ale (for ABV >= 3.5% the duty is higher) but there are little options between 3.4% and <=0.5% (alcohol free). I find 3.4% to be a good trade-off between the taste and the alcohol content. I do drink Lucky Saint occasionally but find it less pleasant than various 3.4% ales.
i am in Paris, and I don't see much variety. Obviously there is so much more choice in big hypermarkets, but I don't go there daily, unlike my local, 30sqm store next my apartment
The French beer scene has improved over the last 10 years but yeah, it's still quite limited in terms of selection. When I was first visiting there really wasn't much at all outside of Belgian beers, though I've since had a few very good beers from Paris and other parts of the north of the country. Usually only finding them in larger markets, though, as you say.
The UK's beer scene is wildly different to the rest of Europe, and not something that we've managed to export very well. Hell, we could even export cask ale (rare outside of the UK) to Paris without it spoiling these days, yet nobody really does. Whether it's due to taste or the awkwardness of casks I don't know, but I do think it would meet with success in Paris if someone did it properly. Not all beer has to be refrigerated and fizzy. We have so many varieties that you just don't get with fizzy keg beer, and much of it notably weaker in alcohol content. Some examples:
Mild at ~2.5% (made from reusing the materials used to make Bitter), Session at ~3.5%, Bitter at ~4%, Best Bitter at ~5% etc. IPAs are the hot thing even over here now but we get notably more variations in those than most places too.
I'd be curious to know from anyone in Germany if they have equivalents to these sorts of categories, as what we get from Germany over here tends to all be about the same strength.
Due to ADHD meds I do now have to drink less, and the best non-alcoholic beer I've found so far is Guinness 0%. I'm not a massive Guinness drinker, it's alright but there are other stouts I prefer, but the 0% version is surprisingly close to "real" Guinness and has none of those sock-y flavours that most non-alcoholic beer has.
It is indeed a completely different scene, which is genuinely interested in variety.
It's a bit of a cliche but you really can split Europe into "beer country/wine country/spirits country". France, Italy, Spain and Germany west of the Rhine are wine country. Munich is clearly beer country. And Germany has focused on perfecting a very narrow set of light beers, if you want diversity of taste that's all in the wines. Similarly you're not going to get Parisians interested in beer diversity when they have French wine to argue about.
(It is possible that climate change will shift this; England is starting to produce a few pretty good wines)
Guinness 0% is fantastic. Unlike a lot of brewers the Guinness company were very keen to retain their standards rather than slop out an inferior product to tick a box.
It is. Actually the best candidates for 0% seems to be the IPA beers as the bitterness adds this little "punch" classic zero alcohol beers seems to suffer from.
Others have me ruined that NA beers are pretty decent these days, at least in the US. But I've also taken to literally watering down my beer. I'll pour half a can and fill the other half of the glass with water and ice. Then later do the same with the other half. Still tastes decent, but really cuts down on the alcohol.
It might be worth it to check out what the market offers. Here in Germany lots of well known brands have started to cater to the non-alc consumers for the last few years. I like eg. Andechser Hell alkoholfrei. The increased competition resulted in some good nonalc beers from reputable wellknown brands
Can recommend: Mash Gang, We Can Be Friends, Erdinger 0% and I actually quite enjoy Peroni 0% on a summer day. I’m also told that Guinness 0% is pretty good - but I’m not a big Guinness drinker.
I’ve recently been in Spain and the non-alcoholic beer was great. To be fair I can’t remember the last time I’ve had alcoholic beer because of the same reasons many people mentioned already, so maybe it’s just a matter of getting used to it.
It used to be true for all non-alcoholic beers in Sweden but it is not true anymore, do it is very possible that all non-alcoholic beers are actually bad where they live. Or they just base their comment on old data.
Guiness Zero is my go to for a sipping beer when I'm actually in a pub. I like a pine needles and lemon IPA when it's very cold but they get a bit much when you're having a few over a long evening.
I've started drinking malt beer. I think it's basically pre-ferment beer, so it's non alcoholic and a bit sweet. I like to mix it with Sprite Zero, something like 3 parts malt beer to 2 parts sprite. It's also good on its own.
It's delicious and alcohol free, it does have a lot of calories but mixing it with calorie free soda gets you a bit more bang for your calorie buck so to speak.
They might want to consider also making Federweißer. It has less alcohol, is carbonated, sweeter, and fresher. I generally really like it even though I'm not the biggest wine fan.
In Austria we call it Sturm. Especially this time of year people love to drink it, but drinking it in large quantities will cause unwanted bowel movements.
I don't think this is the generational reasons this article is making it out to be.
We would drink our share of Californian wines, but after the trump trade war, war on Iran, and everything he's done to destabilize the global economy... We decided to stop buying anything American.
I'm Gen X. I lived my best life in the 80s and 90s, socializing, partying (frat boy years included), with alcohol as the main social lubricant. After Covid, almost everyone in my circle stopped or cut back on going out to bars and drinking, me included. It wasn't the price of drinks. Something about the lockdowns simply rewired the social norms (and our brains).
I feel for the farmers. I still miss a nicely chilled Margaret River Sauvignon Blanc now and then.
The thing is, over lockdown I stopped drinking socially. And then I realized I didn’t miss the feeling of intoxication. And then I realized my sleep got a whole lot better.
And then lockdown loosened, so some friends and I went out for drinks for old times’ sake, and I felt awful, both that evening and the next morning. My tolerance for alcohol is just gone, and I don’t have any particular desire to get it back.
I had the same realisation but before COVID. I had a friend who didn't drink, but he was always the most fun person to be around. I realised you didn't need alcohol, or any drugs, to have a good time. Without alcohol I was funnier, had more and better sex, slept better, and had no hangover the next day. I never looked back really.
Nowadays I'm older and not looking for sex so don't take part in that scene. I would say a few years ago when I would go out there was still some peer pressure to drink and I was considered odd going for non-alcoholic options. But nowadays it's not weird at all and the alcohol-free options are much more numerous and varied. Lime and soda was my go to for years but now I'll partake of an alcohol-free beer or cider.
I found the opposite effect from covid personally as a 'zillennial'. As soon as the lockdowns and 'rule of six' were over the first thing me and my friends did was rent a nice house in the middle of the Welsh countryside and have a massive multi-day party. We all felt that lockdowns had stolen what was left of our early 20s from us and wanted to make up for it!
I often wonder if there's a lot of national differences here, in the UK people for the most part wanted to reverse everything about the covid norms as quickly as possible after Partygate and all the political drama. People are still drinking less but it's because pints cost >£6 now in a lot of places, nothing to do with an outbreak of temperance.
As a fellow Gen Xer I identify with this. More and more of my friends drink less and less and when they do they prefer a cocktail instead. I think wine has lost the appeal it used to have in the early 2000s. The cost of a glass of wine in the restaurant doesn't help either. As an ex-avid wine drinker, I would be hard pressed to spend more than $30 of a bottle because of the diminishing difference in incremental quality after that price point.
Yeah it’s probably both at once though. At least my experience has been that spending some time away from alcohol made the negative effects more apparent, and simultaneously, time marches on, making the negative effects more pronounced.
Very interesting how different the experiences can be from one continent to another. But then again, who cares for American wine (certainly not the Euros).
Coming from Europe I'm used to see that every vineyard makes their own wine. Seeing grapes become such a commodified thing is a bit weird, I must say. Buyers of these will probably by definition make blended wines, which are not really held in high regards. People who drink wine are usually quite demanding about their drink.
So yeah, I'm surprised the farmers just let go of their produce instead of making a wine themself, if they think the vintage is so great.
It is true tho that regular wine has been in decline; nobody (aka the younger folks) wants that Monsanto-flavored and sulfured wine anymore, so natural wine has been a big craze and also more funky flavours are swiftly taking ground. Sure, the quantities are different, for many reasons - having less money in the pocket being one of them.
> Buyers of these will probably by definition make blended wines, which are not really held in high regards. People who drink wine are usually quite demanding about their drink.
The highest regarded wines are blended. Bordeaux wine makers that have large estates may only use their harvests (still blending varietals from year to year), but many Burgundy wine makers will buy harvests from different parcels and blend. There are exceptions but that is not the norm.
> But then again, who cares for American wine (certainly not the Euros).
Which is of course its own interesting thing given that almost every European vineyards is grafted from American vines following the wine blight. Like the number of vineyards in Europe that aren't grafted from American vines can be counted on one hand.
This is not particularly relevant to the wine. The rootstock may be from American vines, but the vines grafted on (and thus the grapes) are still European varieties.
I wonder if the industry can shift towards production foods. Grapes are high in sugar which has value to the food industry. We have a concord grapevine at my house that produces 10-15 gallons of fruit a year and we use the grapes to supplement other meals and create fruit roll up preserves.
> while young people are drinking less alcohol due to health and financial concerns
My observation is that gen-z spends less time socializing in real life, and drinking remains a social habit for the most part at a younger age. While they drink less, cannabis, vaping and psychedelics are on the rise.
It's a nice claim to say they are more responsible, but it tells an incomplete story.
I don't think the science is settled, but the idea that there's a lot more to do at home to stay occupied and entertained rather than going outside is factually true.
When I was growing up, there were only a handful of channels and then cable. Compared to what we have now, that was the Dark Ages. There's so much you can do on a screen now that's compelling.
Infinite scrolling on Shorts, YouTube, video games, social media, hanging out with people online, chatrooms—combine that with Uber Eats, and you can do whatever you want.
The one thing that will make you want to go out is, of course, meeting someone to have sex with, but that's become weaponized, especially for young adults.
Boys being called creepy and predatory for making the wrong move was always an issue, but now you can be shamed online with a video as proof. Why take the risk when you can meet somebody online?
One big problem is a camera in everyone’s pocket together with a culture of posting everything online.
In an environment like that getting drunk just isn’t very good for your life/career. Even something as small as going to the dance floor when you are not really good at it takes a lot more from you when there is 5 cameras recording you the moment you look stupid/funny dancing.
If you like reading sci-fi, I’d really recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel) to get some perspective on the extreme of a life where everything you do is potentially visible to any and everyone around you.
I'm too old, and my kids too young, so the current landscape is foreign to me.
As an outside observer, could it be that manosphere influence has an undue effect on young mens behavior, which (if true) would indeed be creepy for a lot of (most?) women, regardless if the execution is awkward or not.
I was certainly awkward in my teens/young adulthood, but in my singular experience, the maturity and confidence didn't come from acting cocky or showing off, but just treating anyone I had an interest in as a person first and foremost, and being comfortable and even open about my awkwardness and shortcomings.
That did wonders. Also accepting that a rejection doesn't mean a personal slight to you, nor a failure in appreciation of you from her, but merely a lack of mutual interest, which is also fine.
what i've derived from my north american anecdata is that any kind of flirtation or even just talking to a stranger about a neutral topic is increasingly automatically graded as creepy. I'd say the social fabric has simply degraded to the point that people have forgotten how to talk to one another, social atrophy i guess. In my northern europe experience women deflect attention with much less fearfulness, and I'd say people just have much higher trust towards one another.
Frankly, I am waaay past this bullshit argument. No, awkward does not come across as creepy on itself. Yes, it is possible for an awkward guy to be creepy, harasser or abuser.
It is never ending cycle of "they do not understand social", "you are infantilizing them by explaining them social explicitly" while the same guys are perfectly charismatic to anyone with actual power or friends.
Awkwardness doesn't come across as creepy to you, but it may to other people. The vast majority of men aren't harassers or abusers, but a lot of women revel in the power to label them "creepy".
If I were young I would stick to dating apps exclusively, since everyone on the app has already signaled a receptiveness to advances.
My observation is that the young people who do drink aren't going for beers and wines, which are tastes that can take time to acquire, they're going for sweet liquors and premix cans of fizz.
Getting Gen-z to even get close enough to the glass to smell a nice red is a challenge. And when they do, they seem to recoil rapidly.
Lord Byron famously had a tame pet bear at university; he did it because the rules forbade pet dogs explicitly. The police state has been going for a while :)
Apparently until recently there was no rule about skinning bears in the dorms at Cornell. Kids at college can still be kids, at least until the administration catches wind of it
There was no police involved. The police state attitude verbiage used by the OP refers to the constant monitoring of children and teens, by parents or other guardians, using things such as Apple FindMy to the point where teens can’t be mischievous to the degree they were able to in the past.
There’s also the implication that the repercussions are worse.
> My observation is that the young people who do drink aren't going for beers and wines, which are tastes that can take time to acquire, they're going for sweet liquors and premix cans of fizz.
Born in 1999, I qualify as GenZ. All my peers drink beer, which is unsurprising given the strong cultural presence. But more and more people have been moving to alcohol free beer, which is becoming more and more widespread. Loads of breweries reacted and started with alcohol free beers, even the ones you would have never expected, like Augustiner Bräu in Munich.
Pretty much all surveying data for my home country for the last few years suggests that GenZ is just drinking less alcohol overall. While there probably are some shifts within the consuming population, that does not fully explain the shift away from the alcoholic staples.
> they're going for sweet liquors and premix cans of fizz.
Not surprising, sweetness literally mutes palate sensitivity. Genzers are the most sugar addicted generation, from a very young age. It would not surprise me to see research in some future that this massive early life sugar exposure comes with muted development of taste.
There's untold levels of chemicals in wine. Organic wine is BS in Europe, organic vineyards actually use more chemicals like giant quantities of copper sulphate. The US is actually a lot better than Europe in this regard.
Source: My father owned a vineyard in France before he keeled over with a subarachnoid haematoma after drinking 3 glasses of Rose at lunchtime.
And these things were cause and effect by some proof? Because there are plenty people who drink a bottle of white, red and/or rose for lunch here their entire lives to old age.
The point is the chemical levels in the wine. The anecdote about my father is just that. Please don’t trivialise that just to point score, it’s bad taste.
I used the anecdote to illustrate I have some experience in the wine industry, having worked hands on for a few years. My father studied chemistry at Cambridge so his understanding of wine chemistry is, or was, expert level.
I’d say the burden of proof is on you though, can you supply epidemiological evidence that wine isn’t harmful to health, if you’re going to advocate for the alcohol industry?
> Please don’t trivialise that just to point score, it’s bad taste.
Apologies; that was not my intention; I was reacting to your chemicals claim only.
I am not advocating; I am saying that I don’t believe it’s the other chemicals, it’s just alcohol, which is the poison in wine. They have 0.0 wine here which is just real wine with the alcohol removed after; that has then, I assume, the same chemicals and drinking that is harmful?
> I’d say the burden of proof is on you though, can you supply epidemiological evidence that wine isn’t harmful to health, if you’re going to advocate for the alcohol industry
I do not think anyone would argue that alcohol consumption is good for your health, regardless of what kind of alcohol.
I'm not really making any strong claims except that people should look into the chemicals in wine. It's a complicated story. Unfortunately many of the USDA links are dead so this is the best evidence I have for the difference in wine standards in Europe vs the US.
But is that alcohol or the other chemicals was my point; GP seem to imply it was the other chemicals; I doubt that. But yes, no alcohol would on average make you live longer.
It'll be decades before we know the true effects of the chemicals other than alcohol that are evidently present in wine, but TFA is known to pose serious health risks.
Not the parent, but I have heard of this as well.[0] The advice in the article is to try to drink wine that is 2010 or older.
But I do raise my eyebrow at the suggestion that US wine is somehow in a better situation and am not inclined to believe it unless someone provides sources.
[0]
"Alarming’ increase in levels of forever chemical TFA found in European wines"
Thanks, it'd be interesting if there was an empirical testing study that reflected how much the labeling prevents the chemical contamination like the one observed in europe.
Most notably the chemical alcohol is known to cause all sorts of health problems and is present in wine.
If you are going to talk about "chemicals", you should be more specific. Most chemicals are harmless, some aren't. Most likely alcohol is the most toxic chemical in wine by a wide margin.
You could also have just glanced at the rest of the thread where I've given far more specific evidence.
I'm rather glad I've drawn people's attention to the issue, despite having to endure extremely patronising comments like yours.
Second, I clearly have skin-in-the-game here because you did read the first comment, so everyone that thinks it's OK to make jokes like the dihydrongen monoxide one (well done that was clever in 2015) can go forth and multiply.
I told an anecdote for illustrative purposes and made no explicit links. Others have assumed the link however.
My purpose was to draw people's attention to some lesser known aspects of the wine industry which I think are consequential, and I was illustrating I have some insignts into this that people that haven't worked in the industry probbaly don't.
Not the parent, but I have heard of this as well.[0] The advice in the article is to try to drink wine that is 2010 or older.
But I do raise my eyebrow at the suggestion that US wine is somehow in a better situation and am not inclined to believe it unless someone provides sources.
[0]
"Alarming’ increase in levels of forever chemical TFA found in European wines"
My grandfather used to burn sulphur strips to clean the glass demijohns. I guess this is why most wine carry a sulphate allergy label these days. Apart from this, I don't recall any other "chemical" being used, other than sugar.
Of course, this was decades ago and today would be called "artisanal" wine making.
> I guess this is why most wine carry a sulphate allergy label these days.
Partly. There is some natural level of sulfites present in wines - very dependent on the terroir, and then the rest comes during the manufacturing process; some sulfites may be added directly so the wine does not spoil.
There are wines that do not contain any added sulfites and even then may cause trouble to the sensitive persons if the sulfur content of soil is naturally high. Some manufacturers therefore also add info about total measured sulfite content to the label.
And nowadays, not only demijohns or wooden barrels are used to hold wine; of course stainless steel vessels, but also concrete vessels and even things like the Georgian qvevri underground clay vessels or amphorae are having a comeback.
You can't generalise from one wineyard in one country, but you know that. And France is hardly an organic wine leader.
Copper sulphate is a fungicide used for centuries and is pretty safe (so safe that my chemical engineer father was willing to use it in his otherwise completely sans-chemicals garden). Organic wine not only does not use (other) fungicides and herbicides; it also does not use other chemicals and processes in later stages of winemaking.
Before 2004 Germany had a %vol limit for selling alcohol to 16 year olds. In 2004 they changed the law such that it is not based on percentage, but whether it contains distilled alcohol to prevent under 18 year olds from drinking sweet alcopops, which apparently was a big thing back then.
US politicians have been at war against teenage drinking since the 1980s when the minimum drinking age was raised. Gen Z social trends helped it along, but this is the desired outcome of bipartisan policy going back decades.
With US legal drinking age being 21, this eats into drinking at university/drinking after work, which is very much where bulk of socializing for young adults happens. Can't imagine it's not hugely affecting adulthood habits.
All thanks to crashing the economy and making the act of spending $15 on a low quality beer untenable for young adults giving 60+% of their income to rent.
Alcohol tax would have been a simpler and much less destructive means of achieving such a goal, but I guess breweries can't lobby when everything else is collapsing too.
When they introduced the higher alcohol tax here in Australia back in 2006(ish), all it did was push us to find ways to make it ourselves. Went from cheap to unbelievably cheap but completely unregulated. Who knows what the alcohol content of some of that stuff was. There are some vague fuzzy nights from that period.
Personal responsibility is what you focus on when you are talking to an individual. If you are trying to make your life better, or someone you know's life better, it is great to talk about personal responsibility and making choices for your life.
But that doesn't apply when we are talking about society wide shifts in behavior. It isn't like people suddenly got genetically better or worse at taking personal responsibility. If suddenly a lot fewer people are making healthy decisions, that isn't because we just happened to birth a bunch of people who don't take personal responsibility. Something has changed. Individuals have a lot of control over their own lives, but at a society level all of those individual decisions average out, and you are left with a representation of the effect of society.
> personal responsibility is the only reliable way in this world to consistently lead a happier life.
If there's a fight between you and a multinational corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees and trillions of dollars, and they're willing to devote more money that you'll ever see in your life towards manipulating you, lying to you, addicting you, removing alternatives, and making it harder for you to resist them, do you seriously think you're going to hold out? And even if you manage to do it, how long can you keep that up?
We do need people to try to act responsibly, but we need corporations to act responsibly as well. Regulations make that possible. Until we get them, sure, resist all you can, while you can, but you will slip up or be worn down eventually. If not in one area of your life, then in another and another. You can't stay hypervigilant 100% of the time, and the stress of being hypervigilant for long periods is hurting you. The attacks on us come from all directions. They target us in different ways. They learn all they can about us and they tailor their tactics to target us when and where we're at our weakest.
If you're having success avoiding screen addiction that's great! I've had some success limiting my use of cell phones too, but I can't say that it doesn't cost me or that everyone can do what I do. For now, I'm able to resist, but that could change. It can be too easy to look down on someone for failing and say they should have tried harder but you don't know how long they've fought or what else they're fighting. Some people can naturally fight harder and longer than others. Some people have to devote their limited resources to fighting other battles. As long as companies can continue to assault our well-being for their profits totally unchecked we're all fighting battles, and for most of them we might survive but we can't ever really win. Have some grace for the people who are struggling, and some compassion for the fallen. Eventually, in one way or another, you lose too.
We crossed over the "personal responsibility" rubicon somewhere around 2016 at the latest. Law is finally catching up in 2026 where Meta is settling/losing multiple lawsuits over the effects of addictive algorithms that caused mental anguish (or something like that. I don't remember the exact language).
Since we're at the legal stage, I hope we can finally get to a stage where such algorithms are treated as seriously as cigarettes. But society moves slowly, because the powers that profit from this pay to push back on regulation.
I and virtually everyone in my generation have been constantly lectured throughout almost entire education about the dangers of smoking and drinking. As a result, while we smoke and drink heavily, it's not even close to our parents. So it makes perfect sense that the next generation, who were not only lectured their whole life but also didn't grow up surrounded by people smoking everywhere and drinking all the time, overwhelmingly avoided picking up these habits at all.
My take is that people “these days” just don’t want to put in the time, money or effort in socializing, especially with new groups of people. Be it dating, meetups or other social gatherings with strangers, it’s about giving as little as you can, in case the event turns out to be a dud. Why risk paying for 2 beers when you could buy one tea for less?
Now, how can I be so sure? Because I’ve been starving at some of these events, whereas others can seemingly call a single slice of pizza dinner.
There’s most definitely a health aspect in there too, but I don’t think it paints the whole story.
I dunno. I don't drink, but I do put time and effort to socialize.
It's just not related to drug consuming acts and more about sports, poker, board games, etc.
I believe that drug-related communications are flawed and closer to animal level than to actually joyful ones. It's better to have a maturity and social skills to communicate, joke and maintain a conversation with interesting people without stimulators.
I'm not from the US though so it's not about the US social scene which is mainly discussed here.
> closer to animal level than to actually joyful ones
That's exactly the point. To experience animalistic joy, rather than the socially-conditioned one.
> It's better to have a maturity and social skills
That's a very silly argument because it doesn't take into account the fact that a day has 24 hours and also people have different natural abilities. Imagine telling a kid with Down Syndrome "come on, you can do it, PhD in physics ain't that difficult".
Communication is a skill like everything else. Having a constant workaround just reduces your ability to be good at it. Why would a healthy young adult make his own skills worse?
You can either get short-term gains with long-term worsening of your daily life by being incapable of new connections and genuine communications or cut the short-term low-level improvements, suffer for a year or two, learn a bit and have a better life for years to come.
It's like going to gym or do other sports. It's often hard and unpleasant at the start, but the more you're doing it, the fitter you are and the more benefits you bring to yourself in the long-term.
I could see it being a mix of both factors. Cash-strapped antisocial members staying at home, and the more outgoing career-focused gen-z members going out but trying to protect their sleep quality. feel like i know a decent amount of people in both of these buckets
I mean, i am about to marry in about 2 months and have no one to invite as i never was able to socialize with anyone outside of school (and since then 5 years passed) and if they mostly have a unhealty relation to alcohol so i don't want to do something with them.
I have like 1-2 friends that i can smoke with and also only know them because of that, we game in out free time and only meet to hand over some herbs.
I would love to go out and meet new peers but i cannot without drinking and after spending like 60-70% on rent there is not enough to spend 6-8€ on a WATER.
Alcohol is one of the worst recreational drugs. Internet natives grew up with more access to information and less draconian drug laws than their predecessors.
In the 90s, MDMA got senators’ panties in a twist. Now, there are multiple 100k+ MDMA-focused events in the western USA annually.
I suspect this is temporary. I think eventually we'll see a wave of laws outlawing weed and psychedelics (again), and then alcohol will make a strong comeback. Booze has been part of civilization since the beginning. There’s even a theory that grains were domesticated so people could brew beer first, as opposed to making bread first. Also, there's talk that the new generation understands that alcohol is bad for your health, so they are stopping, but the reality is that we've known about alcohol's issues forever, yet people have not stopped. No way this will last.
I doubt weed will be made illegal again. It also has a history dating back thousands of years and even in places where weed is still treated as dangerous as things like heroin, has failed to really control its usage. It grows in pretty much any climate and can be consumed in "raw" form, so supply control is impossible.
It's still illegal federally in the US! It's illegal in many European countries and the UK. The places which have legalized it exist in a fragile state that could very easily be washed away with a moral panic again.
I would be more willing to bet on someone trying Prohibition 2.0 again.
This is a shoot from the hip idea. Speaking to younger folks, it seems to be much more cultural/social change rather than anything to do with health.
This might be an odd fluctuation to do with the first primarily social media generation? Don't know but that is just how I have seen it.
You are probably right about banning weed/vapes. They don't have anywhere near the same indoctrination into the structures of commerce and power that alcohol has.
> there's talk that the new generation understands that alcohol is bad for your health, so they are stopping, but the reality is that we've known about alcohol's issues forever, yet people have not stopped. No way this will last.
I never understood this logic. It can absolutely change. Tastes and habits do change in society sometimes forever. Just because people did a thing a long time ago and a tradition has lasted for thousands of years doesn't mean it will continue.
Generally speaking, the longer something has been common the more time it will continue to be common. A fad vs a trend vs a tradition. Of course alcohol use can change. We see several cohorts with very low alcohol consumption. It's just that if we've been doing something for thousands of years, we're likely to continue to do it for thousands of years.
This is far from the first fluctuation of alcohol consumption rates we have data for. This is a major trend that will last decades but not a march to long term 0.
I've read several threads about how cigarettes are making a comeback because it's perceived as more natural or less chemical than vapes. If you care about facts at all you will find it completely wrong and intensely stupid, of course, but you just never know how people will react and then counter-react.
Also fitness. The Covid "sheltered" population is also the Instagram generation, it's easier to get inspired, feel pressure from social media, or find information about how to become muscular. It's at odds with drinking.
Ubiquitous cameras and social media surely play a role. Each and all of your drunk stupidities can and will get recorded and posted to your social group for eternal humiliation.
This I think is the key here. The traits I would associate with Millennials and Gen Z are all related to reacting to being watched all the time. And while alcohol can help a bit with anxiety, zero tolerance for just being a kid breeds a culture where doing anything that can be clipped is a bad idea. Basically, they are boring kids because anything at all that can be used against them is. I really feel sorry for them. If time machines existed and they could see how kids behaved in the past, I think they would destroy all their phones and computers immediately.
A big part of the increases in door costs are from two sources. Lower bar sales and a dramatic increase in the fees for DJs over the last 15 years. Also, taxes from city counsels, higher energy costs (speakers use lots of power), and the youth having less disposable income are also part of it. Basically, its a case of "its not one thing, its everything".
Or it's just bang-for-buck. If a bottle of vodka can be had for anywhere even vaguely in the ballpark of a bottle of wine (and at the grocery store scale, they often are: say, $15-20 for the wine and $20-30 for the vodka), then vodka (and maybe mixers) is gonna deliver a whole lot more intoxication per dollar.
I guess I just wrote a much longer variation of "candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker", eh?
(this is not drinking advice, folks: you'll do plenty more damage plenty faster with liquor, too)
Probably, yeah. N=1 and Europe, but that's what I remember from my university years. Wines were for dating; cheap beers and vodka with cola or juices was for general socializing. Cost was a factor for everyone; cheaper means more people could participate more often.
This generation doesn't know about how to be a proper wino. Go and take a look at the $7.99 1.5L jug bottles of carlo rossi next time you are in the grocery store. You will notice they are covered in dust. The charles shaw at trader joes still moves though. It's up to 4 buck chuck now.
> ...you'll do plenty more damage plenty faster with liquor, too
I'm skeptical. I don't see how there can be a meaningful difference between a regular-strength sixteen ounce beer and one shot of regular-strength vodka mixed in with slightly less than sixteen ounces of water. [0]
I do agree that -because you're drinking far less fluid- it's far easier for those who aren't monitoring how much they drink to get massively intoxicated when drinking liquor rather than beer or wine.
[0] ...other than taste, that is. Sixteen ounces of dilute vodka-water wouldn't be a joy to drink.
I don't see people carefully mix their liquor in the exact same proportions as beer and then drinking at exactly the same rate, so your argument is about as relevant to real world drinking as "if you mix 5% strength beer with four parts water it's basically not going to get you drunk". With or without normal amounts of (typically sweet) mixer, spirits tend to lend themselves to faster consumption and the carbonation in beer also has the property of giving you that buzzy feeling (and that vomity feeling) earlier so you don't feel quite so much inclination to top up.
One or more shots mixed with a small quantity of orange juice, typically served at between two and four times the alcohol concentration of beer and typically consumed at equivalent speed. What the hell do you think a Screwdriver is?
Sure, I read your second paragraph, but as I pointed out in my own post, you might as well express skepticism that people harm themselves faster with beer than with shandy whilst treating not mixing beer with four parts water as edge case irresponsibility rather than how people actually drink it. Every drink is equally safe, diluted down enough...
Tbf I don't know many young people who'd pound screwdrivers. Like IDK how different things were in the past but back when I was in university (right up until covid) the drink of choice was straight liquor plus a chaser. Many a party were had around handles of whiskey, vodka, or rum with limited "mixing in".
It was just outright more cost effective and as college students we just didn't have money for the alternative so most of the time it was hard liquor and maybe once a week we'd go out to drink and then it was mostly rail liquor mixed drinks or outright shots and shooters.
It’s the tech wet dream. Come back from work (where you are doing some manual labor the LLMs cannot automate yet), consume content while the rented rob car takes you to your apartment, get some weed and immerse yourself in your consumption device (phone, tv whatever).
Effectively every non sleeping minute of your life monetized by tech.
Afaik, they also commit less crimes and get less pregnant as teenagers. They are overall more responsible then the generation that complains about them.
Alcohol is a mind-altering drug! And I expect it has worse long-term consequences than quite a few of the other drugs that have become more mainstream recently.
Ketamine is also normally given to humans. It is used in hospitals as a sedative/anesthetic, and also in depression treatment.
Used responsibly it's perfectly safe. Much less harmful than alcohol. I don't know why people assume that something is unsafe just because we give it to horses. Do you think people want to harm their horses?
This is an argument I have had on both sides. One side demonized it, the other said it could do no wrong.
No, weed is not a one way path to a death sentence as you become a raving Satanist! But it also isn't harmless and there are things to keep an eye on, just because it doesn't kill you doesn't mean it gets the all clear.
If you want to do it, go for it, but please be aware of the potential issues.
They are significant but so are those of alcohol. Most data indicates weed is safer. (This study puts it at about half in terms of harm to the user: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285843262_Drug_harm... . Alcohol ranks the highest in terms of harms to others but that is also a function of how widely it is used)
looking from the tail end of the generation, many of my friends ( and also I ) were led to believe somehow that things like marijuana, psychedelics, non-Alcohol have such low consequences that are entirely a rounding error compared to alcohol. which is ...
Idk, when I was young I was drinking heavily, today I drink some beers and smoke weed and I feel I’m much better for it. It doesn’t ruin the next day and I can do more things. But you can definitely overdo it. Psychedelics definitely can mess with your head, though, if not careful.
Indeed. Alcohol is so much more dangerous and damaging to peoples lives and the lives of those around them that it doesn't even compare. Alcohol would never be legal if discovered today. Compared to alcohol the risks of cannabis are a rounding error.
But that's only because alcohol is so incredibly dangerous. There is real risk with inhaling particulates and burning gases into your lungs. And it should not be ignored. It's just that compared to the lives ended by alcohol it is a rounding error and that makes it seem safe. Neither are.
Alcohol is deeply deeply ingrained in society. (Almost) universally. It has been for thousands of years. I just don't think you can extricate history and culture from how we set policy and views on alcohol.
While it may be rational to try to lump it with other newer dangerous substances, removing alcohol from humanity would be full on cultural erasure for many places. Not to mention to total destruction of entire industries that people's livelihoods depend on.
I guess a way to think of it is - if it was part of culture for 1000s of years it'll probably take at least 100s of years to phase out.
there was some commentary on the amazing regenerative power of the liver on a post here a few days ago to this end. i did a little more homework and the way in which agricultural civlization and the ability of the liver to process ethanol evolved in parallel is profound. some settlement had a bumper crop of wheat enough to ferment over the winter and they were like, sheeeeeit and then the liver was like sheeeeeeeit
we've been collectively alcoholic for 15000 years, turning the body's chemical filtration plant into the body's largest organ that is literally called the liver, and we're supposed to give it up in 20 years? bosh. flimshaw
I agree. Individuals have the right to chose to damage their bodies if they wish. And laws already exist covering hurting other people while irresponsibly intoxicated. I see no reason to try to use state violence to prevent people from hurting themselves with alcohol. This doesn't change that alcohol is a poison and seriously incapacitating compared to say, cannabis.
No they don't. unless you think health care should be singularly the responsibility of the individual and we have no responsibility for caring for the sick or seriously injured even if they have lack the financial resources to cover expenses.
Alcohol is engrained because it was safe to drink because of the process of fermentation. However, it had much lower alcohol content and certaknly the hard liquors we know now were almost never at all drunk.
Your comparing 1-2% alcohol consumed because the regular drinking water was not accessible and unsafe to 7%+ alcohol consumed for recreation. Disengenuous.
Extract a sugary liquid from fruit or malted grain, expose it to the pervasive and random yeast in the air around us and if it doesn't mold over first you'll probably get something in the 8% ABV range before the alcohol waste product inhibits the yeasts' metabolism. With some deliberate cultivation, which humans thousands of years ago figured out, you can selectively breed the yeast slurry in your vessels up to a 11-14% alcohol tolerance. They didn't know the science but they knew the process.
Leave it exposed and you'll eventually get a random acetobacter infection and ta-da, now you have a vat of vinegar. Which would still have utility, but is much less fun.
The 1-2% alcohol drinks were called "small beers" and were the second runnings off the grain that was used to make full-strength beers or barleywines. Humans liked variety.
And people drank water, not just alcoholic small beers, there are depictions of water filters dating back at least 3500 years, and a long history of water purification techniques, and a ton of ancient wells which were dug.
Smoking kills several times more people per year than alcohol use. The CDC attributes 480k to smoking vs 178k from alcohol. People smoking cannibis likely smoke less than those smoking tobacco but it’s not safe. Maybe try edibles instead?
Alcohol is indeed dangerous, but I think it is misleading to compare the number of lives ended by alcohol to the number of lives ended by other recreational drugs just because there is a much larger number of people consuming alcohol. Almost everybody who consumes alcohol is not an alcoholic.
you should go look back at profiling and optimization
if you want to fix the most things with the least effort, you optimize the hot paths. in this case, thats alcohol and tabacco. they have the biggest opportunity
That's dumb though because then you just push people to other things and you will see the same issues arise as consumption increases to alcohol levels and there's a reasonable probability they will be worse. Already the percent of fatal accidents involving active marijuana found in the blood stream is higher than alcohol car fatalities. 40% vs 30%. Homicides show a similar pattern. And marijuana consumption is only 17% vs 54%. All time high for MJ and near all time low for alcohol.
Alcohol is consistently more dangerous statistically than most other things, I doubt lowering consumption is the driving factor behind the patterns you're mentioning.
I have a couple friends in their 60s who drank a single glass of wine every day, for decades. Then, they decided to stop. They were amazed at how much better they felt.
Cannabis today is much stronger than it was in the 70s.
In places in the US where it’s now been decriminalized, it’s a completely different beast from what it was in the 70s. So much so that the potency of the plants kind of isn’t even relevant anymore for typical users. It’s a far cry from when I was a kid and there was peer pressure to keep taking hits from a joint of unknown potency at too quick a pace to do any sort of dose control.
The people I know who are using it are buying it as tablets and gummies that come in 1mg increment doses, and taking exactly as much as they want to have, which typically isn’t much.
Vape pens are presumably also more consistent and predictable, and seem to be taking over. I can’t even remember the last time I smelled actual weed smoke.
It actually strikes me as much more healthy than alcohol culture, where dose control can still be a problem because it’s hard to tell how many units of alcohol the bartender put in your cocktail, and driving home afterward is still quite normalized.
Yes I find this a big difference in modern weed culture and alcohol culture. At my age most of my friends know their tolerance for weed quite well and we usually keep low dosage edibles around just to offer for friends who consume weed a couple times a year.
While I don't drink that much anymore, when I do I just kinda have a murky mental binder of how strong a drink is at a given venue I've visited before but even then it's very unsophisticated.
It's still inconsistent as fuck. There's no real industry standards and analysis. The same gummies from the same pack bought at a dispensary can vary wildly in my experience. Pens are a bit more consistent. But yeah not as variable as the bathtub gravity bong rips of random weed that people got from who knows where.
I think their argument is that while it's stronger (and it is), it's also more predictable and has safer and more predictable delivery mechanisms.
Also, there are high grade derived products that do exactly what's on the label.
For an example of reasonable use: if you want to lower anxiety a bit, which is a primary driver of alcohol use, you can now reliably get a high CBT strain, or CBT gummies, or CBT vapes, and they are generally less dangerous and less addictive than other chemical solutions.
This would also hold for decriminalising party drugs. Most of the fentanyl deaths for instance are in people that didn't even know they're having fentanyl.
Potency is an interesting subject because in theory one should have consume less amounts over the same time period for the same effect. In other words, smoking one potent joint, while carrying its own risks, is probably healthier than smoking n > 1 joints to get a similar effect.
Cannabis, the literal plant, is strong than the 70s, but it's not like humans haven't been making concentrates (hash, resins, etc.) for 1000s of years.
Alcohol is responsible for more deaths and addiction that any other drug in the world.
Not only that, alcohol's main mechanism is through depleting oxygen in the blood, which in essence means the feeling you get from drinking is brain damage.
Notice how like 90-95% of the tkme when skmeone does something uncharecteristically horrible such as rape, murder of passion, or assault, they are drunk. Is that a coincidence?
That's not even talking about drunk driving, one of the leadings cause for all major traffic accidents in the US.
Prohibition literally started because drunkards were beating their wives, wasting their entire paycheck at the saloon (free lunch), and other savagry so much the women, who couldn't even vote at the time, were so pissed off they created the the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Let's be clear here too, most temperance groups were the biggest supporters of abolition. Only reason abolition didn't work is the government was too lax on enforcement and allowed written doctors notes for alcohol use the basis for evil organizations like CVS and Walgeens that have devestated this country as the distribution arm of the highly lucrative pharmecuetical drug trade.
>alcohol's main mechanism is through depleting oxygen in the blood
Blood oxygen is quickly and cheaply measured with a pulse oximeter, which shows this to be false. The primary mechanism of action of ethanol is increasing the sensitivity of some GABA receptors (similar to benzodiazepines and barbiturates). But ethanol has very complex pharmacology, which a huge number of other targets. See:
But that is also because it has been used much more often than other drugs. Don't get me wrong, I agree that alcohol has some very bad effects. But if you ban (or decrease consumption of) alcohol, but that gets compensated by an increase in the usage of other drugs (which I am not saying is inevitable), you might be trading a bad situation for something far worse.
A personal anecdote. My extended family has a long history of substance abuse and addiction. Of course, historically the substance so abused has mostly been alcohol (and tobacco, but that is less harmful in this kind of sense), and I saw [both first-hand and second-hand] a lot of direct and indirect effects of it that were very harmful and destructive. But recently, with another family member, I also saw first-hand the effects of addiction to another drug, methamphetamine, with induced psychosis, and I would choose dealing with an alcohol addict over this a thousand times. At least an alcohol addict is unlikely to suddenly decide to murder you, or to jump out of window, or any such mad move, just because some demons tell them or they suddenly realize that you have been an alien or a reptilian all along, or any similar crazy thing [which is actually pretty horrific when you face it in a real life from a close person]. A drunk person is also much more easily defeated physically than somebody who is high on meth and has some psychotic episode. [Though I am aware that alcohol caused or catalyzed many violent attack and murders too, I am not trying to trivialize that.]
In the real world telling people to make the hard choice you support (such as abstinence only stances) makes a large majority dismiss you completely. It’s mostly self-serving sort of advice that might apply to individuals, but we already know you can’t enforce it on a society.
You really. Really really. Need to research the temperance movement and the utter disaster that it was.
You’re regurgitation of propaganda here is so laughably missing the point.
Downvote me if you want but look it up. The temperance movement and prohibition that followed was run by wealthy women who filled their time judging the lower classes and factory owners who wanted to end labor union meetings and continue to underpay workers in horrid conditions while blaming alcohol as the problem.
Easily one of americas worst decisions and propaganda people like you still believe to this day.
You're right, but the idea that "Oh I'm not drinking it's just not healthy" is more common among younger people I've noticed than it was around people who were older when I was very young. I meet many young people whose main two activities are overworking and overly gymming/fitness activities. Such people drink a lot less than normal.
> While they drink less, cannabis, vaping and psychedelics are on the rise.
All of these are cheap. As long as you got a garden and it's legal, growing weed is ridiculously easy - it's literally called weed because it thrives pretty much anywhere. Vapes are much cheaper than cigarettes (eh, we'll see how long that lasts and authorities crack down on shops selling smuggled / greymarket vapes...).
In contrast, going out and getting drunk to the point of getting decently hammered can easily cost you 100€ and more here in Germany, and we have low alcohol taxes...
Wine is also sweet and sweetness is unhealthy. Part of the Gen Z crowd that doesn't give a shit about wine is correctly disillusioned with flawed culture. We don't live in a world where you can get by growing grapes and making wine at your small vineyard. It's industrial. There is no bottle of wine actually worth $1000 to anyone with a sense of pragmatism and the fact such expensive wine exists just turns people off from caring about wine. A lot of societal ills come from the fact that we have old people unwilling to change running the world. Gen Z is doing okay considering the rent-laden prison they grew up in.
Scrunching up my face trying to figure out how to respond to this...
I think you are right that a lot of the wine which people consume, the mega industrial mass volume stuff sold in supermarkets, is a bit sweet, although often not by a lot--Josh and Bota Box, two of the biggest brands, have like 5-10 g/L of sugar. Stuff like La Marca Prosecco and Barefoot Pink Moscato is noticeably sweeter.
However, in general, I don't think it's fair to say "wine is sweet". Wine in general is not sweet outside of certain styles that are intended to be so. If you grow grapes, crush them, and ferment them, the fermentation will generally run until the yeast run out of sugar, leaving only trace amounts behind.
I've noticed that a lot of people who don't have that much experience with wine will tend to mis-identify things as sweetness when they're really noticing some other aspect of the wine.
Anecdotal experience tells me that they're just better at hiding it than previous generations. Gen-z is depressed, and depressed people reach for drugs and alcohol to cope. I think we're going to find that the data on this has been manipulated.
To be fair, American wine, probably undeservedly, doesn’t seem to have much appeal in Europe. There’s still a strong perception that wine should be either French or Italian, and anything else tends to be (again undeservedly) frowned upon.
I've always been around American wines and I can assure you it's fairly well-deserved. The quality in (even "high-end") American wine just simply is not there. The same can be said for their whiskey.
For the most part it's not "bad", there's even some pretty good options, but nothing I'd describe as "premium". Americans have this strange affinity for additives, and it's not hard to tell in the final product.
US news outlets are often blocked where I live too, but not this one. Here's what the articles says:
There are a variety of forces driving the decline in wine sales. Baby boomers are aging out of the market while young people are drinking less alcohol due to health and financial concerns. Wine faces competition from craft beer, liquor and canned cocktails as well as cannabis.
“The kids just aren’t drinking as much,” Berryhill said. “And it’s not just wine, it’s whiskey and beer and everything. And then you’ve also got the competition with all the seltzers.”
Tariffs have reduced exports, particularly to Canada, which was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.
The trend is said to be declining wine- and alcohol consumption in general. But tariffs and US-Canada relations are also mentioned.
For my part, I loved a few Californian wines, but ever since Trump threatened to invade my country, I haven't bought a single bottle, and I never will.
I think that mirrors others here, those bottles seem to be going out of rotation entirely - and we generally mark whether a product comes from inside the EU now.
Which, curiously, started when relations went sour.
The article mentions this - Canada was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.
I suspect wine is extremely susceptible to this effect too. It’s basically always stocked alongside produce from many other countries, the origin is most of the marketing, and there aren’t really any stand out brands. I’ve probably had a Californian wine before but couldn’t name a single one.
If you own a venue or store and decide to stop stocking American alcohol, someone will probably notice you don’t have Jack Daniel’s but not that you’ve stopped selling Californian wine.
Even if it ends up back on the shelves the damage is done. Many will avoid American products until the day they die, and endeavour to teach their children to do the same.
America doesn't need anything from the rest of the world, or so is claimed, so the rest of the world should not burden itself with purchasing American exports.
The same thing is happening in Marlborough, NZ - the center of the wine industry in New Zealand. (And probably elsewhere in NZ, but Marlborough is where I grew up). All my life, every year has seen more and more vineyards throughout the valley, until a few years ago it began to slow and recently they've actually pulled some out, which is totally unheard of.
If so its been going on for a long time. I remember seeing UK TV ads in the 70's/80's for Paul Mason's Californian Carafes - cheap/mainstream wine. Now I'd say most American wines for sale in Europe are higher end and more expensive.
If you want a cheap bottle of wine it would be New Zealand, Chilean or Spanish
OMG, it's interesting to see how the average person reasons about the world.
You have your pet theory, you, without evidence, decide that every fact you see is confirmation for that theory, so now you believe your theory even more.
I want to say something to make you feel bad about this, but you think I'm telling you that you were right all along.
Do we really need evidence to draw a line between the US's biggest trading partners boycotting the US alcohol industry and a drop in sales in the US alcohol industry? I feel like the only way you don't make that connection is if you're either severely uninformed or so lost down the MAGA rabbit hole you've forgotten the taste of food, the sound of water, the touch of grass...
The fact that US wine declines more than other wine isn't a theory it's a fact. The reason could have several theories. One is that people are simply boycotting. This is supported by polls etc. But another would be if prices drift apart and a strong dollar makes US wine less attractive relative to (say) French and Italian wines.
As usual the reason overall wine sales would be down e.g. 10% and US wine sales down 20% in a country will be a combination of multiple factors. My pet theory though is that at least for some countries, the boycott factor is the big one.
My parents live in a massive fruit growing region of the country. Just this year, 2 of the major packing firms in the county both declared bankruptcy. It's not just the trade war, but years of shrinking seasonal workers that fell off to a trickle as well.
The knock on effect is massive. The seasonal workers supported a large permanent workforce - and more importantly tax revenues in the county are collapsing.
But the really important thing to understand is that once the industry is gone, it's gone for a long time. The other markets competing with the US are already expanding their industries to fill the void. Once those trees are planted, they produce fruit for several decades to come.
From a layman perspective, American fruit growers refused to change with the times. How long are they still trying to make the “Red Delicious” apple work? Another ex-major packer I know of made the peach fruit cups, which people have been catching on are just filled with corn syrup. But these have been long term purchasing trends, yet the growers seemed blindsided by the packers ceasing operations.
There has been massive innovation and development in apples in the past 20 years. Every apple farm with a clue is growing trees for the past decade that look nothing like the trees of old. They’re growing varieties that didn’t exist 20 years ago. If you’re still seeing Red Delicious anywhere, it’s on the buyers at your local markets that missed the boat.
I mean it also takes a long to build an orchard and get the apples to fruit. So older orchards are happily still producing old varietals instead of ripping and replacing the trees. Not everything old must be replaced with new - so wasteful.
I planted an apple tree in my yard 20 years go, just for fun. Last year, it finally decided to push out more than a few apples. This year, it put out so many the branches have bent nearly to the ground.
Idiot consumers forcing us to take forever for market innovations to come to market is not even close to new, and the consumers 100% deserve the blame, contempt, and policies designed to frustrate them.
I have to deal with this crap right now in the world of laundry and adjacent world of cleaning. We've had new Enzymes finally hitting the market en-mass for the first time in decades (DNAse/Lipase) which when combined in full spectrum with all other known enzymes leads to truly superior cleaning results. Literally no one has any excuse anymore for smelly clothes as a result of these innovations, and it's probably going to take another 5 years minimum for anyone outside of the nerds on r/laundry and other enthusiast communities to take advantage of these new innovations. For now, the so called "gold standard" Tide laundry detergent people are buying is straight up incomplete and could be tomorrow reformulated with both enzymes to radically improve its performance and isn't for... reasons???
Where else have we straight up regressed on technology? Vacuum cleaners were better in the 1980s when a higher percentage of America used central vacuums, an objectively superior technology. Guns were often made to higher metallurgical standards, CRT vector displays (Vectrex) to this day get better effective refresh rates, brightness, and glow effects than existing displays (OLED) and peaked in the 1980s.
"Worse is better", literally, and all because of idiot consumers voting wrong with their wallet. They deserve contempt.
Oh, and Americans refusing to embrace bidet toilet seats, or air purification (both important circa covid, fecal plums and poor indoor air quality were a significant infection vector!)
The enzyme stuff is funny to me. DNAse, no purpose there. Why not RNAse too? People can't articulate why they even want a DNA degrading enzyme. Lipase to degrade lipids seems good, but then again, that is already the function of soap.
I knew a number of people whose home had central vacs but funny enough, none of them worked anymore. It was a sort of "what's that weird plug thing" conversation that lead to that somewhat underwhelming finding. I get the sense it is one of those things where if you want it fixed, you'd have to call a technician who will probably give you a quote you don't want to hear. Then you just forget about ever getting it fixed.
i don't think one necessarily needs the best of the best... probably cheap is enough for a bunch of people
i'll start by having my OLED smartphone dying after many years and the one i got used LCD. much worse and it felt like plastic. colors, brightness, even if my screen now refreshes twice as fast as the previous - fast forward 2 years i don't think i ever thought about the difference, nor saw it after 1 or 2 weeks with my phone
totally valid critique on durable products and better substances for cleaning although
I don't know that central vacs were the height of vac technology, but I cannot understand how weak cordless/battery vacuums have such marketshare compared to a vacuum unit that gets 110/240v of power direct from the wall.
> CRT vector displays (Vectrex) to this day get better effective refresh rates, brightness, and glow effects than existing displays (OLED) and peaked in the 1980s
Except that they're absolutely huge and heavy for any halfway decent screen size and resolution. If I were to replace my two 24-inch screens with CRTs, I'd need a second desk for them alone.
Ok so I have a soy sauce, or so I think it is, stain that I can't remove on a shirt. Is it still possible to clean it? Nothing I've tried seems to get rid of it.
Blood stains are easy. Wash cold, and they come right out.
I can’t remember the last time I had curry stains on anything, and I lived in central India for a year. I just used the typical local detergent and did my own laundry. Always cold though, well as cold as it would ever get - 80F was typical.
Nobody in any major apple growing region (Washington) is growing Red Delicious as their main apple variety for consumers, not even close. They're all growing various club apples (e.g. Envy, Cosmic Crisp), and there's massive competition to be the next honeycrisp (btw, honeycrisp quality is seasonal due to packaging, out of season they're significantly worse because they've been in storage for a long time, Apples are harvested only once a year)
My wife and I used to drive around aimlessly when I was in grad school and she was just starting her career as a doctor. We found that it was a good way to relax, and we sometimes discovered fun local gems when we did this.
One weekend we stumbled on a local apple orchard doing a cider making demonstration. We were the only people there so the orchardist (he called himself a “pomoculturist”) personally showed us around, picking an occasional apple, telling us about it, and then encouraging us to take a bite.
At one point he picked a deeply dark purple, almost black, apple and handed it to me. “Black Oxford” The flavor was intense: acidic, sweet, floral. Then another, dark red and fragrant. “Winesap” Then “Belle de Boskoop”. And on and on.
None of these apples are sold commercially except at small scale directly from orchards. The flavors, appearances, and aromas of apples is truly astonishing. So I think that’s why Red Delicious gets all the hate. The world of apples is amazing and huge.
I prefer to see Red Delicious as yet another miracle of apple genetics, just one that I don’t personally care for. But if you have the opportunity to visit an heirloom orchard, please do.
For me, it was a life-changing event: I now have a small heirloom orchard of my own.
It's mealy, bitter, and has a thick unpleasant skin. Many articles call it "the worst apple in the world." Decades of engineering it for transportability at the cost of taste and edibility are to blame.
But the U.S. has created new, much better apples, like Cosmic Crisp (2020)
I've read that Honeycrisp is difficult to grow, that's probably why.
Cosmic Crisp is much easier to grow, at least in the climate it was developed for/in. Those 2 varieties are somewhat similar, although I find Honeycrisp a bit more subtle in flavor and enjoyable, while Cosmic Crisp has just a strong sweet/tart flavor.
My understanding is that demand killed the Honeycrisp. When it first came out, it was very delicate and could only be grown in certain places. But it was a perfect apple- crisp and sweet and bursting with flavor. So everyone who tasted one loved it and wanted more.
And so the food scientists went to work, and figured out how to cross-breed in the ability to grow in a wider variety of places. And adding in the capability to grow in large numbers like the Red Delicious turned the Honeycrisp into an apple that tasted more like the Red Delicious.
The US is really amazingly good at growing food, but it is because the physical reality- not just transportation but growing conditions- trumps taste in the main.
My advice, as someone who grew up regularly apple-picking, for going local is to prefer the types that are local versus the names that you recognize from the supermarket. Unless you are in exactly the right area (upper Midwest), you will be much better off with the best apples for your region then with a locally grown Honeycrisp.
In upstate New York, I would recommend Autumn Crisp, Blondee, Macoun and Shizuka. I haven't picked apples in Virginia in about a decade, so I'm probably out of date on the right types to get there, but I remember loving Stayman apples.
I've enjoyed listening to dozens of talks by Alan Watts, who is a pretty chill guy until he comes across the subject of red delicious apples. Never heard him curse about any other subject.
It's mealy, tastes pasty and bland with no flavor. Honeycrisp so much better tasting and texture! Red delicious were bred to have a dark red outside and look like a classic "apple" while sacrificing the apple flavor inside.
No idea if this is still true of what is currently sold under the name. All apple verities are clones so the they should be (mostly) the same but the verity is old enough to not have anyone protecting the name.
Red Delicious is not a pure clone of the original. Random genetic mutations have happens over the years and those were cloned. Normal breeding has more genetic variation but clones get some
I am somehow in the "I like Red Delicious" camp. Perhaps because I was used to Kashmiri apples, that apparently share the cultivar roots of red delicious. Never liked the more acidic varieties. Actually like the "mealy" texture - (it feels grainy to me)
In my family they’ve always been known as “those apples that look pretty on the shelf at the supermarket but taste like cardboard and aren’t even good for cooking”. We’ll all opt for just about any other cultivar if given the choice.
Oh, I read this as "disease killed the fruit=>the packing companies went bankrupt=>the farmers stopped growing=>no one needed a seasonal workforce=>all of the people who served the seasonal workforce lost their jobs."
The thing about the "wages are low because of immigrants" is that it neglects that all of those immigrants are consumers just as much as they producers. They need food, medical care, places to relax, places to live, and so these immigrants employ plenty of native born people, people who would not have jobs if those immigrants weren't there consuming. Even if you could get higher wages to draw other native born people in from another part of the country, then you are just stealing the people and all of this sort of consumption from another part of your same country.
Not all farm workers are immigrants, legal or otherwise. There are many temporary, seasonal workers that make poverty wages, but it's more than they would make in Mexico or wherever else. The farms provide basic necessities and pay the workers as little as possible.
Technically yes, but it still isn't a quick fix. Seasonal and temporary workers still need other seasonal work or jobs that let them leave for seasonal work and need the capital investment to be able to travel for work and live at different farms. A single seasonal job paying good won't by itself get someone to invest into van-life, its maybe 2 months out of 12 and not entirely predictable work/profit just from yield variability. And most modern jobs don't let someone leave for weeks at a time to work elsewhere, atleast not any that are near the price range of basic physical labor.
You also lose a significant amount of productivity from first-timers in any process, and other full-time jobs taking away your expe
Higher wages means higher prices. At a certain point your price is uncompetitive with imports. You can use tariffs to protect a local product against an imported one, but that would require a competent leader who doesn't get emotional and declare a war (bomb-based or trade-based) when his feelings are hurt
Was one of them Del Monte? They made a bad bet about consumption patterns from COVID persisting, but canned fruit demand didn't stay high, if I understand correctly.
I was told if we kill people in the streets and create concentration camps to put everyone suspected of being an immigrant in (even if they have legal papers, bc hey those can be fake who knows when your Prez thinks voting is fake) and send every immigrant back then Americans would be wealthy and prosperous and you're saying that's not the case in a country that's had extremely low unemployment for almost 15 straight years (excepting COVID)?
Grand-post doesn't specify what kind of fruit the region their parents live in specializes in, and plenty of fruit grows on trees (citrus, stone fruit and apples leap immediately to mind).
And I know that some Washington apple packing and Florida citrus packing companies have declared bankruptcy in the past year, so those would be my guesses.
While technically incorrect, tree is informally used to describe grape vines in some regions. Similar to “tomato plants” which is a more common example.
I just got back from Italy where I bought several cases and large formats of wine that, even after shipping, cost less than the non-plutocratic greats from California. Wildly, I got charged zero duties. Not even MVN. (I suspect it’s because I’m in a red state.)
Given how much of American farming went hard MAGA, it’s really difficult to feel compassionate for their struggles. Maybe after bankruptcy the new owners will be better.
Let's just say it as it is... Wine is 'supposedly' an acquired taste but for most, it tastes bitter and not enjoyable for the cost. Tastes shift and luxury items from yesteryear no longer makes a strong statement about affluence to this generation.
I don't think you'll have several thousand years of people enjoying wine and then suddenly one generation decides that "wait this doesn't even taste good?".
I really like wine, and a $8.50 bottle of good quality French bubbles isn't a luxury good or a status symbol it's just life.
But it's definitely acquired - and the fewer that acquire that taste, the less you'll sell. And people I guess often establish that taste in the 20-30 year age, and if people go out less and drink less, perhaps they'll not grow up to be wine-drinking 50 year olds?
I think it just depends on what you like. I am not a big fan or most red wines (though some are good) and they give me headaches, but many chilled white wines I can drink like water.
I believe they mean having alternative choices in what one can legally consume to get high/drunk/etc. Anecdotally I know a few folks who went from illegal pot in high school to wine as adults because it is more socially acceptable, then back to pot when legal.
I don't know any pot smoker who ever gave a flying crap if it was legal. Let's not whitewash the past. It became legal for a reason.
If you feel this way about pot, have you not also considered that similar already occurred with alcohol roughly a century ago (in the USA)? Why do you think cops avoid overpolicing bars when they'd be entirely in their right to do so?
Personal use of drugs is the clearest example in all of criminal justice where people of all beliefs have to admit there really is a much bigger and widespread mental health problem at the root of it. This is very very far from a new topic. There's nothing special about pot.
> I don't know any pot smoker who ever gave a flying crap if it was legal.
I know plenty.
Generally they fit the pattern of being familiar with it from exposure a few times as teenagers or such and liked it, but it wasn't a big enough deal for them to want to find and maintain a relationship with a drug dealer, concerns that if they pulled it out at a party it might lead to consequences within their social or professional circle, etc.
I don’t know what GP is smoking. Most people do not maintain a relationship with a drug dealer. Legal access available from a convenient store front unlocks plenty of users who did not want the legal risk or hassle.
The biggest case you can follow is Canada. Even wine-drinking elderly sometimes switch to cannabis, due to lessened hangovers. Also, removing the friction is a huge boost to basically any industry.
Edibles/beverages are widely available now. Previously you'd have to purchase flower on the black market then use your home kitchen (which could be shared with your parents) to decarb and infuse it.
Sorry, but what way do you think I feel about pot? I was just providing anecdotal examples to explain the reasoning of why pot being legal could have an impact on demand for wine. It’s just a demand curve relationship, not my personal opinions on the legality of pot.
For the pot smokers who care about legality, it does matter for folks who have to take drug tests for their jobs. Several of my good friends stopped using it when that was a concern.
I happily smoke pot while illegal if it happens to be around and someone else provided it and I don't have to drive that day or do anything the next day. I chipped in or did favors not to be a mooch but never bought it directly myself, nor posessed any. None in my car, my house etc.
So that means very infrequently. Depends how many and what kinds of parties I found myself at that year.
I totally like it, will not hesitate if conditions are right, and the only reason I stayed away not doing any more than that was it wasn't worth the risk.
Even today I don't risk it because sometimes I drive across many state lines and I don't want to worry about keeping track of where I might possibly get in trouble if I piss off a cop at a traffic stop, which I am likely to do.
I don't think it's so crazy that there are pot smokers that can take it or leave it. Merely, you would probably never have realized I was a pot smoker, because I don't talk about it all the time for no reason, or even think about it. We'd have to be not merely aquaintances, but we'd have to sometime be at the same party at the same time with the other conditions met. You can't count these people that you have no way to know to count.
There absolutely is a contingent of "wine mom" types who used to enjoy a glass of wine in the evenings but have transitioned to gummies or other edibles before bed.
I know several people who started drinking less and used pot more back when they were able to get their medical marijuana card. Now that it's legal here, I expect more people have done the same.
Not everyone is a hardcore binge drinker or an all-day-every-day pothead. There are lots of occasional-to-moderate users of both, and legalization of weed has increased availability for the casual user. There are many casual users nowadays who have never interacted with the illegal side of things, and never had a relationship with a dealer.
Weed is not a direct replacement for alcohol, but it can be a preferred alternative sometimes, for some people, and legalization has made that more attractive.
That's a pretty big claim. Alcohol's harm to major organs like the liver is pretty well known. What kind of harm does THC/CBD cause when consumed orally?
Alcohol poisoning is a thing. I have yet to hear of a case of canabanoid poisoning. Canabanoids also don't lower your inhibition, which is why DUIs went down in states that legalized. The difference in risk could not be more stark.
Countries other than the US have, for reasons that you may choose to find mysterious, imposed tariffs on products exported from the US.
Tariffs raise the consumer-visible price of those goods. This then, due to demand elasticity, causes consumers in those non-US countries to buy fewer of those products.
Some impact may be badwill as well but quite a bit is first-order impact of second-order tariffs.
In 2024 (pre-trade-war), the US exported $168M of wine to the EU and $460M to Canada. Any recovery in wine exports to the EU won’t make up for Canadian boycotts.
Numbers for importing California wines went from $540 million, to $40 million in 3, 5 years. For one province alone. And this wasn't a federal decision, this was people telling their provincial government to do it. And they listened.
Question: what is the ratio of US wine imported into the EU vs US wine imported into Canada, by dollar value?
Question: what is the percentage increase in tariff amounts on wine between the pre- and post-USMCA state of play between the US and Canada?
Sometimes seeing why something has happened requires considering wider context, which is why it's usually good for a nation to ensure primary education includes solid economics, history, media literacy, etc curricula.
I'll give my own personal reasons, our interest rates were going down.. Trump decides to start a trade war, then the central banks get a bit worried, then Trump decides to go to war with Iran.. now the central banks are increasing interest rates, as the future is uncertain.
His whole rhetoric is America should make more stuff right... Well, we can certainly stop buying that stuff since the choices he's made have hurt us. I'd prefer to buy closer to home thanks.
Because of years of trade war, American wine industry is taking a beating around the world and a lot of Australia, NZ, and South Africa is picking up that slack. Even niche producers like Chinese and Japanese wine industry are very quickly maturing into real home-grown industries. The biggest market for California has always been Asia, and it's been near impossible to stumble into Opus One the way you used to be able to in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, etc.
Old world has always been able to be flexible, eating these kinds of punches by pivoting into NA or brandy during gluts, and demand has less fluctuations. This contraction, like a lot of everything else happening in the US, maybe was already coming because of some trends overlapping, but policy threw gasoline onto a combustible and fragile situation.
Ok, so does this mean prices in the US will go down? I keep seeing stuff about countries shifting away from US goods but prices seem to continue to rise.
>Ok, so does this mean prices in the US will go down? I keep seeing stuff about countries shifting away from US goods but prices seem to continue to rise.
The actual answer is yes, at least when it comes to wine (although I will note that the trade war stuff is only part of the picture--it has certainly hurt a number of wineries that previously relied on exports, but the wine industry is experiencing a much broader downturn than just this).
Not all wine, of course, but some wine is indeed seeing prices drop. There have been some great deals to be had in the past few years in certain corners, both big and small. Costco has had increasingly good deals on wine lately and other large retailers are having more and more as well.
There's a lot of price stickiness with wine, with wineries not wanting to lower sticker prices (since price is closely tied to branding and market positioning), so there's also been this fascinating trend of wine increasingly being bulked out to online retailers that operate on a rotating flash sale model (companies like Last Bottle or Wine Access), or to third parties who relabel it and sell it under an NDA on the original brand. These segments of the market are only going to continue to grow in the coming years as the glut of wine continues.
Prices and costs generally increase as the quantity sold decreases.
If they're buying fewer bottles for example, bottles will cost them more per bottle.
And if they're "losing money on international sales", often times they'll try to recoup that elsewhere. Like jacking up their own prices in justification.
There was a time not too long ago that Napa wineries still had free tastings and cheap bottles. As demand went up, so did prices. As demand goes down prices also go up? This seems disconnected from the supply/demand curves we learned about in econ 101.
Econ 101 usually teaches a simplified model... Still my lower divs covered the relationships between scaling supply and costs. It really just depends on the market, sometimes you are amortizing a high capital cost over each unit sold, while other times you are paying high input costs that are directly related to your scale. Scarcity/abundance of inputs is another major factor.
Higher demand incentivizes more production, increasing supply which drives prices down. Demand increases only drive up prices if supply is constrained.
Very likely wine demand was not going up, and price increases were instead due to increasing costs and inflation.
Wine has the advantage that it keeps really well, and in some cases improves (becomes more valuable with age.)
So when demand softens it may be advantageous to hold back the excess rather than lower prices. Yes, there are cash flow issues when this approach gets out of hand, but financial interests can cover a lot of that as well.
Reportedly, last year ~10% of California vineyards were uprooted, some grapes like Pinot Noir production is down 30%. Growers are going to keep trimming until they get back into the black, or prices fall down far enough for consumers to come back, whichever happens first. And it's not going to be just CA, it will be NY, TX, WA, OR wineries too, all areas that had big capex expansion over the past 10 years.
You can see it happening in real-time, right this moment. Go to your local Costco wine section, look for the clearance markdowns where the price ends in $0.97. That means it's marked for clearance and won't be coming back, and there's some screaming deals right now.
Companies will try to make up lost sales by serving American "whales", especially in a luxury good like wine. I would expect prices to rise here in the short term and then the market will decide whether that means those of us outside the 1% stretch our budgets to keep buying or turn to the cheaper options.
Kind of like the Super Bowl and other major sporting events. Normies can make that their "major trip" for the year but mostly they want to sell their multi-thousand dollar tickets to folks who will be at the next big thing the following month.
Wine grapes aren’t good for eating. People buy big, sweet grapes with thin skins and no seeds … which is virtually the opposite of what grapes grown for winemaking are.
dessert and wine sorts are different. Also, people eat much less grapes than they drink, though some could be turned into raisins, but it is again not that much.
Late 30s. Used to drink a fair amount of wine/beer. I Drink a lot less now.
- Getting older, it affects me for longer. I don’t want to write off feeling tip top the next day. Too high a price to pay.
- I try and train (exercise) hard most days - I can’t train anywhere near as well after alcohol.
- Kids - when you’re trying to fit work, hobbies, training, learning / self development and kids / family in, there’s not much room for slack. (Which could be considered a bad situation in itself…)
Has just become not worth it regularly. Fortnightly binges work better!
Yep fully appreciate that , being slightly glib- it’s probably a fraction of what it would have been spread out though, and probably feels like more of a binge due to infrequency / age than it actually is!
Opposite for me. Late 30s but I drink more or the same.
But I don't drink my go-to Zinfandel anymore as it has a big ass flag printed on the box. It's embarrassing feeling the cashier's judgemental gaze. They know I'm a drunk of course but I don't want them thinking I support the US
Tell the wine makers to stop putting that flag on there and maybe exports may pick up again
America’s obsession with their flag is now seen as nationalism on the outside. I always ask to imagine Germans putting their massive flag absolutely everywhere possible and how would that make everyone else feel.
Things are certainly changing. My son lives in a flat of 5 male University engineering students in the UK. None of them drink much alcohol at all. They don't even drink tea or coffee. Very different from when I was at University in the 80s.
When I was in my early 20s, I had a “moment of lucidity” where I, while drunk, looked around at all my other drunk friends and couldn’t help but think: this is a huge waste of time, and I’m going to feel awful tomorrow. A few weeks later, I stopped drinking entirely.
Some of those friends disappeared almost immediately. The only thing we really had in common, after all, was drinking together. But what was most notable was that, within a few short years, the vast majority of that group of friends was stone-cold sober.
I’m now in my mid-to-late 30s, and I don’t have a single friend who drinks anymore. My wife and I never started drinking again, and we’ve even seen some of our older family members stop drinking too.
At least in my anecdotal experience and within my bubble, it’s becoming increasingly normalised to be sober. When I quit drinking, people questioned the decision, asked me if I had a problem, and were generally quite hostile the idea. When my sister-in-law quit drinking last year however, people celebrated the decision.
Times are certainly changing.
Sidenote: the amount of money I have saved by not drinking is astounding. I mostly funnel anything I don't spend into index funds and the returns have been staggering.
The mention of generations not drinking just seems like the standard nonsense you see on stuff like this where businesses want any excuse but the price of the end product.
A lot of places in the world are going through huge increases in cost of living, their choice of alcohol is going to be a cheaper buzz as a result, not expensive ‘prestige’ alcohols
Napa used to be covered in peach orchards until it became clear that grapes were much more profitable. The trees were cleared to make way for vineyards.
The next profitable use of land will show itself soon enough.
It's amazing to me how everyone is so sure of their pet theories. Young people are socializing less! It's GLP-1s! Pot is pushing out wine! Or is it craft beer! Or liquor! Or Covid made us all drink less!
How hard is it to say you just don't know? The reason we have researchers and sociologists examine this stuff is to look at actual data and come to a better conclusion than rando Internet person that pulled it out of their ass.
Looking at the current state of politics, it's basically impossible for most people. Even agnosticism is not that widespread, and that's a known position. It's not even that with most topics.
This is being repeated over and over again on this page, but it's factually untrue… I've tasted dozens of kinds of wine grapes, and lots are tasty or at least as palatable as some of the blander table grapes – some are even widely recognized as such (muscat!). Also, even varieties that are not great for eating can often be used to produce some very nice juice – cabernet sauvignon, merlot, chardonnay are all used for high-end, monovarietal grape juices in France for instance.
I was thinking the same thing. Why not just sell the grapes straight to us grape loving people? They do have a short shelf life though, and as a lover of concord grapes I do go bananas during concord grape season but I really can only eat so many before they start to spoil and I do eat large amounts of them. The concord grape dealers know me and flag me down to give me deals.
The US is the #4 wine producing nation in the world, with over 80% of American wine being produced in California, so yes, Californian wine is very much a thing.
There are taste difference, brand prestige and story differences, and scarcity. The most extreme examples of this would be in burgundy where laws from a few hundred years ago ranked the value of very small and fractured plots of land and it’s been memed into the best wine in the world so you have the prestige of this ancient law, the scarcity of these small plots built in, and a region that is good but not my favorite selling the most expensive wine in the world.
Not sure how the extra supply for grapes affect retail prices of grapes for regular consumption. But at Costco in Southern CA, the price of grapes have been fairly stable (~$5.99 - $7.99) over the last year or a little more.
California’s wine grapes (vitis vinifera) aren’t suitable for eating. Some varieties (vitis labrusca) can be used for table grapes or wine grapes, but those aren’t really grown in California.
Everyone says this, but here's a sample of size 1: some years ago I was at a Sonoma winery during harvest season, reached my hand through a fence, grabbed a bunch of grapes and ate them. They were delicious.
The issues are they likely have seeds, might not travel or store as well, and are smaller than consumers are used to. There's also already a supply of table grapes you'd be competing with. To your experience, if they're ripe, they'll taste sweet and grapey. They're not that different.
They taste so different than the grapes in the grocery store they might as well be a different fruit entirely imo. So much better. Sweeter. Berry or stone fruit like. Almost floral. The vintners are seriously holding out on us. Yes there are seeds, but that is the price you pay for the finest grape you will ever feast upon. You go back to a store bought "red seedless" it taste like a sad old cantaloupe in comparison.
I noticed Trader Joes was selling champagne grapes the other day. Things must be really, exceptionally grim. France has been stockpiling wine in state owned warehouses (to keep it off the market) and paying farmers to tear up their vineyards.
Article fails to note that the 2010s saw abnormally high per capita wine consumption, and even after the 20% decline in the 2020s to date, per capita consumption is still more than 50% above historical baseline. This isn't the death of a once stable industry, this is a predictable bursting of an obvious bubble.
About time really, living in the Western Cape in South Africa (similar climate to California) and its mind blowing how much of the best most productive land is used for wine production. With some of the highest fetal alcohol rates in the world, cheapest alcohol and most dangerous roads due to drink driving it's time we take a hard look at whether it is worth it as a society. Farm workers in these areas can't afford nutritious food because the best land is used for producing wine for export mostly to benefit foreign land owners (here's looking at you Richard Branson, etc) instead of growing food...seems pretty crazy really.
South Africa is big, really big. That small sliver of land you see devoted to wine farming is not the reason they can't afford nutritious food. But it does provide those farm workers with a good income relative to other farm industries in South Africa (their wages and benefits tend to be better).
It's the cost, having a glass or bottle of wine before was just like buying some cheese to take to a party, now it's something you have to think about that, pair that with a potential hangover and people just decide not to bother.
I would expect Californian wine to be overpriced, as most things are there. That could also be a factor. If your local wine costs as much as a nice imported Spanish Rioja, why would anyone pick the local wine?
If you sell the land the rip up the vines, you've destroyed the winegrowing capacity.
That's fine if you believe this is a long-term trend and creative destruction needs to replace it with something. Maybe it will even be more economically productive than a strip mall or a subdivision. (Maybe...)
That's less fine if you think this is due to temporary fluctuations in demands, such as say decreased demand of american goods due to either economic status or perception of american goods in global markets. That framing is one where some stupid national-level moves may have destroyed or consolidated american economic might. And whether consolidation is the same thing as destruction, it at least decreases competition and increases mediocrity, which reading between the lines on your tone is something I suspect you in theory might support.
The decrease in consumption predates the current trade issues. Peak domestic wine consumption was in 2021 and has been falling rapidly ever since. There hasn't been a decrease in demand of this magnitude or duration since the 80s. Despite several years of declining consumption, per capita consumption remains over 50 percent above historical baseline. Combined with demographic changes that will decrease avid wine consumers as a fraction of the population, it's quite clear that the 2010s bubble was the short term abnormality.
Most money gets spent in over-65 cohort in any case simply because they have the most of it, and they love wine. Just make less of more expensive ones.
People are increasingly broke and have less leisure time to spend it drinking. I stopped drinking during the pandemic and have had maybe one drink a year since. Once you stop, you really don't miss it.
That said, American wine—and California wine in particular—has a bit of an IPA problem inasmuch as there is a lot of overpriced, overproduced swill being priced exceptionally high by international standards.
Not just American wine... wines from any region have always been more expensive in the US.
Quick poking around Google... Italy, France, and Germany all have mid-tier bottles of their own domestic wine for far less than we (in the US) get any wine, domestic or import.
It is incredibly difficult to sustainably run a winery in California. The margins are often negative without operating at a large scale, which is part of why the industry has consolidated heavily over the past few decades.
Often times, wealthy people buy wineries as a hobby to dabble in, but end up selling and calling it a day before it drains their cash. If you want to buy wine for cheap that is made in California, buy mass-market wine.
Smaller brands are generally expensive because that price is necessary to sustain operations, but most of the time that fails, and the owners end up selling.
I get the swill at a discount :) "The best wine is the wine you like best." Best deal I recently got was a few hundred bottles for under $1k, <$5/bottle. Easier than the trek to a Trader Joe's or Costco, ymmv (and I don't feel bad throwing a bottle out if it isn't for me, versus a $100+ bottle).
You allowed to do that? You'd at least have to tip the box on its side if storing for a long time now?
I'm no sommelier but I hear the cork needs to stay wet or they'll spoil.
Only one so far, I'm willing to take more but not a lot on offer. Maybe I'm talking to the wrong suppliers. There's a right price for everything, but I am looking for fire sale|"going out of business" prices. Replies with leads welcome!
I haven't noticed any retail wine prices stabilizing or decreasing, at least in the Bay Area. Napa wines are still exorbitantly priced, and imports are way the fuck more expensive due to tariffs.
On a pure price-performance basis it is difficult to justify buying US domestic wine over French imports. The quality of the latter is consistently higher at reasonable price points. California wines haven’t justified their price tag for a long time on average.
Please don't jeer like this on HN. Wine grape growers all over the world are experiencing similar declines in demand. The same thing is happening in Australia (I know people personally affected by it) and it has nothing to do with any flavor of political rule.
How is this jeering? I'm pointing out important facts about one of the subjects in the story that weren't included. I didn't celebrate or express my opinion. Should I have worded it in a different way?
It does suck for everyone else who didn't vote for this and I feel for them.
You didn’t point out “important facts”; you’ve raised vague associations and extrapolated them in a way that seems damning. There’s no evidence I can find that this man or his family members support this federal administration or its policies. Most of them haven’t been public representatives for over a decade. The last one left office in 2018. And all of that still has absolutely nothing to do with the macro forces affecting demand and prices for wine grapes throughout the world.
> Should I have worded it in a different way?
You shouldn’t have raised it at all. It’s a weak, tangential point, almost completely substance-free, and is in clear breach of the guidelines. HN is only a place where people want to participate because most people try to make solid points, and avoid posting junk like this.
Even if that slippery slope logic were true, the vast vast vast majority of farmers in the country are some flavor of conservative. It would be hard to ignore all of them and also care about our food supply.
I think OP was more pointing out a supreme irony with the farmer demographic. They rely heavily on seasonal immigrant labor yet they voted for immigrants to be rounded up and forbidden to enter the US. Their sales rely on exports (e.g. soybeans) and imports (tractor parts, fertilizer) yet they voted for a complete upending of the global trade system that benefitted them. So that they are complaining about the current economic climate while simultaneously politically being fully behind it is schadenfreude for many.
Both political parties are made up of constituent cohorts. All Republicans are not anti-immigrant, anti-trade junkies in the same way all Democrats are not anti-work socialists. I think you'll find farmers in particular are generally much more pro-trade and pro-immigrant than the rest of the party.
The story is these farmers voted for Trump despite him tilting against their best interest. But the reality is they probably put up with his views on immigration and trade hoping they would be more than offset by his views on land use and tax policy (and have been sorely mistaken).
I know that people really want to make schadenfreude out of this But when the shoe is on the other foot and Republicans make these same kind of ad hominem attacks they equally fall flat. No, just because someone voted for Joe Biden doesn't make them a police-hating communist.
It's a little hard to feel bad for these people when they already saw how Trump didn't actually push their interests during his first term, and yet they voted for him again.
Meanwhile, the Project 2025 handbook was there for everyone to read, and Trump's rhetoric was based on cracking down on immigration (bye-bye, seasonal labor), beating up our trade partners (need to import farm tools? pay more!), and slashing federal government spending (haphazard and largely a failure to actually save money or tackle deficits or debt).
The 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act was a fine preview for more of the same in 2025, so I'm not sure what these voters were looking for when it comes to tax policy.
Land use is generally a state-level concern, so I'm not sure what they think Trump would be doing for them there.
> All Republicans are not anti-immigrant, anti-trade junkies in the same way all Democrats are not anti-work socialists
Democrats are not anti-work socialists and never were. They never had rhetoric that would imply so. However, republicans do have anti-immigration, anti-trade rhetoric and politics.
> No, just because someone voted for Joe Biden doesn't make them a police-hating communist.
Of course, because Biden was not hating police and was not a communist. Republican party however is exactly what it is accused of being here. And Trump is its ruler and champion.
> these farmers voted for Trump despite him tilting against their best interest
There is a good amount of research that suggests people do not vote using reason, or necessarily consider their own best interests. Rather, it is suggested that most people who vote affiliate themselves with a political party that appeals to their interpretation of morality; and then they vote on tribal lines.
I could buy it if we heard about reluctant Trump voters who don’t really like him and disagree with a bunch of his actions but reluctantly voted for him because they thought he was better than the alternative. This seems to be extremely rare, though. Maybe those voters just don’t get air time.
Which policy related to Canada is affecting the grape business? I didn't see it referenced, and assumed that since it's being described as a trend over 3 years then it's not just about tariffs.
Us alcohol products unavailable in most of Canada. So there’s a fair bit of export gone missing. And European response is probably reducing demand for us product in favour of their own.
Ah, gotcha. I presume there's then substitution effects on both sides of the pond, but the US loses more on net from the Canadian shift from American to other wines.
I'd worry about farming in Utah or Arizona deserts long before sonoma and central valley.. They're draining rivers and aquifers to grow grass in the desert to sell to even drier deserts in China and the middle east.
You do realize that California is a huge state, spanning nearly 10 degrees of latitude, and not all of it is a dry desert like much of inland southern California is, right?
Some of the best and most versatile farmland in the US is in California, and the northern half of the state is flush with water. Before the current system of watersheds was built, there was regular flooding. Some of us in NorCal get to experience some of the tastiest, cleanest drinking water in the country.
You're confusing SoCal and the Central Valley here. Southern California (LA, San Diego, the Mojave Desert) doesn't have enough water. The Central Valley, fed by the Sacramento River from the Sierras and Cascades, and then extended south with canals, has plenty of water for agriculture. In fact, it was quite prone to flooding before we engineered the water shed.
All of which is irrelevant to the wine conversation, because the relatively dry climate is exactly what makes the Napa and Livermore valleys some of the best in the world to grow grapes. You've got good soil, dry summers allowing for control over how much water the grapes get that make them grow more flavorful, and very few frosts. The fact that the region gets almost all of their rainfall during the winter also helps avoid the grapes going to mold.
There are farms near Sacramento airport in a “reversed irrigation district.
They have to pump water OUT of their fields and pay for the privilege of doing so as opposed to pumping it in from an irrigation canal.
Nothern California has no shortage of water whatsoever, and indeed it’s a regular news item whether or not to divert a few million extra gallows into the ocean to sustain some variety of fish that likes to swim around in the delta.
Just for some context, a million gallons of water is about three feet covering one acre. Almonds use four per year. There are individual farms in the California delta using three orders of magnitude more per year.
It’s good to remember that California is one of the biggest states, with land area similar to Japan or Sweden. This area covers a wide variety of climates, from towering frozen mountains to one of the lowest and hottest places on the planet. It’s not a place that admits much generalization.
It gets hot here, but Temecula gets a breeze from the ocean that makes it somewhat tolerable for growing grapes. The wines were tend to be the high-alcohol variety (think cabs and zins) because those are what grow better in the heat.
Most of the wines here aren't that good, but the wineries are more the attraction because they're beautiful and a short drive from LA, SD, or Palm Springs. Popular for weddings and bachelorette parties.
(There are some wineries here doing interesting things but if I'm buying wine to consume at home I'm usually looking for other regions than my backyard).
A somewhat drier climate is actually a plus when it comes to growing grapes, at least of the type that wine is made from. Sonoma and Napa are also somewhat dry (though not as dry as SoCal), and get most/all of their rain in the winter, so it's easier for farmers to control how much water their grapes get.
Wine grapes are rather nice to eat (at least the ones I've tried), but they're typically smaller than American table grapes I've experienced, but hey, sell them as heirloom varieties at Portland farmers markets maybe?
It's gonna be quite a lot of additional surplus, and, they already do this. Surplus wine grapes get sold to concentrate makers, however, it pays less than it costs to grow them because concentrate is basically a commodity sweetener competing with sugar, corn syrup, and apple concentrate. Bottled grape juice is a small and shrinking market, and in that market, most people expect Concord flavour (these aren't that), plus a lot of bottled juice is reconstituted from that same commodity concentrate anyway.
Yes! I don't drink alcohol but have gone wine tasting with friends and one vineyard had grape juice from some of their grapes and it was interesting and yummy.
An interesting variety of grape juices would be very cool.
NA grape soda made from wine varietals is a niche product you can find in some wine producing regions here in the US and usually fairly expensive for a soda. All of the ones I've tried are pretty tasty, tough!
What's happening is that consumers are paying more money for less value. So any business which produces real value is going to struggle to make a profit while fake businesses 'front companies' which produce nothing except lies are going to be making a lot of money. All the money is going to be captured by companies which control the customer relationship; I.e. media companies.
The global financial infrastructure is set up for this to happen.
It's like how they're trying to put protein in everything now. People are eating less meat and quality natural proteins and instead eating cheaper, low quality, synthesized proteins. Companies can slash production costs while branding it as 'healthy' and charge a premium... Let media brainwashing fill the gap and create the profit margin out of nothing. An extreme case I saw was cheese; the other day my wife bought some horrible cheese with '50% more protein' which tastes like plastic... Paid premium for it. I suspect the protein is from whey which is usually a waste byproduct from cheesemaking; they usually remove the stuff because it makes the cheese taste worse... But now they leave it in slap on a '50% more protein' and charge a premium for it. Then when you watch YouTube, you see all these food influencers using the word 'Protein' all the time when referring to beef or chicken... Brainwashing you into thinking that they are equivalent because they want to sell the cheap stuff to you through a different channel as a premium product!
As for synthetic proteins like beta-lactoglobulin which they feed animals to substitute whey powder (which they now simply leave in the cheese as discussed)... Guess what they use to produce these? Yeast + Sugar! Now you know why all the media has ganged up against sugar! Sugar is the new villain now because they don't want people eating it and drive up the price. They want sugar to be cheap so they can convert it to artificial proteins... Which can be sold directly at a premium.
Basically, the waste byproduct which used to go into animal feed is now fed to humans instead... And the animals we raise for meat now consume synthetic crap made from quality products that are being suppressed by the media.
And guess what; some of the new proteins and chemicals used to feed livestock are difficult and hazardous to produce and so the companies behind those have an oligopoly.
It's kind of insane how the entire economy turned into a pure manipulation play.
Anyway this is on a bit of a tangent from the topic of grapes and wine but the culprit is also media manipulation driven by the design of the financial and political system which produces and supports media monopolies.
for consumption as raisins? I think raisins come from a particular variety - wine grapes aren't even that good to eat fresh, I would guess they wouldn't make good raisins either.
While I enjoy a glass of wine every now and then, I'm not going to lament the decline of an industry producing alcoholic products; it's inarguably good that younger generations are drinking less. Sorry to the farmers, but profiting off of increasing public health risk maybe should be a precarious business. I'm not gonna get upset about tobacco farms shutting down or having to switch crops, and alcohol is just another addictive and harmful substance (I've known more people who died due to alcohol than any other substance, one in a drunk driving accident, one due to liver failure, two were alcoholics who died by suicide...can't be certain it was the alcohol, but addiction certainly didn't help their situation).
But, also, the income of younger generations has been crushed so much, the ones that do still drink can't afford expensive luxury booze. Decent wine is an expensive way to drink alcohol.
In the drugs loving country that is the USA, now more than 25% of households have someone taking some "ozempic" like drug for dealing with obesity.
The consequence is that the Homer Simpsons do not feel the need to drink alcohol anymore.
We created a system for measuring future trends for a food company and the trend of people avoiding sugars and alcohol is the strongest now.
For people outside the US to understand, you need to know that all foods in the US supermarkets are flooded with sugars in a way that is hard to comprehend unless you come from outside. You have the highest obesity levels in the world.
Those drugs have secondary effects but obesity has too, and they work very well.
I visited Charleston and was surprised they’ve only legalized THC insofar as THC drinks are available at bars. But a lot of the young people were drinking cans of it instead of spiked seltzer, which was the only alcohol anyone was holding. No beer, no wine.
Similarly: they all were smoking computers—not a single analog cigarette in sight. Tobacco farmers in shambles?
It's also also competition. In 1970, your option was to stay home and watch one of three TV channels and that's it. Now, your options are literally to watch any movie ever made, watch any TV show ever made, or play any game ever made... all connected with your friends online.
It is a part of it, but it's not just weed. I would argue the economy is the most impactful factor here.
1. 10-15 years ago it was expected you would have 1-2 glasses of wine at lunch as a front office guy / banker while talking shop. Now you will get a trip to HR unless meeting a client or in a place that still allows it. I imagine similar things in other areas. I still see construction workers drinking a can at 6:30pm however.
2. For good reason, "we were both drunk and X happened" doesn't work as an explanation anymore. Turns out that was a big a part of it.
The only real place people are still "expected" to drink is the army (cos there is nothing else to do) or meeting some boomer client. Younger people just do other drugs/stimulants.
I don't think it's all good, though, since a lot of social events that were previously facilitated by alcohol just disappear. Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two? Turns out people suck at socialising without alcohol, and if alcohol disappears, people just stay at home and play video games or something.
Doesn't Finland, like the other Nordic countries, have a long history of alcohol abuse and pushing against it (like, with draconian prices)? Isn't maybe just that policy "winning"? Also, couldn't this be yet another case where the Nordic are seen as "one step beyond" the rest like it was the case when fully digitalizing schools, only then to backpedal realizing it's not all so good and there are drawbacks that were not considered?
I say this to connect with the second part of your post, to which I fully agree: alcohol is not generally good for health and it can be abused but also small quantities here and there won't probably hurt you in a serious way and will give some social benefits like the ones you mentioned. (and the same applied to other light drugs as well!)
Yes and no; all the Nordic / Lutheran countries have some mildly prohibitionist policies like the Norwegian wine monopoly, and yes it gets very dark and depressing up there which led to alcohol abuse becoming a social problem in the early 20th century, but that situation was stable for years and the decline in alcohol consumption is a global phenomenon.
Romania has seen a similar decline in consumption (though still in top 3 across EU in consumption), such as that nowadays we have articles from media outlets (as a voice for the industry) that complain of the downward trend. While in reality we should be celebrating this change in culture!
People drink less but there is less stigma around alcohol and obvious other once illegal drugs.
You saw the same thing with smoking in the 90s in the US. Kids nowadays wouldn't believe the amount of bitching there was that you couldn't smoke inside restaurants, etc.
And I get it -- cultural assumptions changing is messy and can feel confusing to people.
PS: Also alcohol sold in public spaces has relatively high margins, so that explains that.
On whole I think it's a terrible thing that people have started taking themselves too seriously.
should have offered them some THC to chill them out :P
That is a fair point, but personally I enjoy the time during which my child is playing with their peers and not trying to have me as a substitute for these kinds of interactions.
In France they still drink a glass or two during lunch break. I've seen office workers in La Défense, where one would normally commute using Paris Métro Line 1.
You have a reason to go there, which is socialising with the parents presumably. If you can't have fun with people without drinking and then blame it on the lack of alcohol... that's no good.
You can socialize and you kind of have to, but they've probably invited every classmate from preschool or whatever, so there's 20 people you probably haven't met before, have nothing in common except having kids the same age, and will probably never see again (except maybe at the next birthday party). And often the parties are held in a McDonalds or something, so catering is chicken nuggets and shitty cake with a Paw Patrol motif.
The kids are friends: that's why the parents are there. The parents may or may not particularly vibe with each other.
And a small amount of alcohol does take the sharp edges off social interactions with someone who might otherwise annoy you.
I heard a comedian make the point that HR only began to exist once women became more prevalent in the workforce. And at that point you do need much more oversight. And having women in the workforce is positive since they're ~50% of the population and offer distinct experiences.
But I wonder the unseen downsides of having HR so powerful in an organization. From useless screening of candidates, to overly corrective actions by everyone terrified HR will essentially fire them. Maybe it would be better to have 1-2 glasses of wine during lunch occasionally. They're extra-judicial, easily the most powerful group in an organization with little oversight.
At my org they also organize the Thursday evening drinks session :)
For sex stuff, sure, which was my point about women. A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed, etc. And I guess having everyone jump through hoops with training about all the various isms can provide plausible deniability when something illegal happens. But I think you're overstating the role HR plays here.
Behaviors and cultural norms don't change overnight, and HR is ultimately subordinate to leadership, especially in private companies with partnership structures, etc.
Modern HR feels like a better balance, with the caveat that it will usually protect the company from any employee.
Instead of "women in the workforce", I'd say it was changing society and social norms. A century-ish ago, in quite a few sorts of places, workspace disputes might well be settled with fists. (Yes, there were many norms and unwritten rules about that.) Post-WWII, there was a long trend of gentrifying social mores, which discouraged such things. New laws and legal norms encouraged lawsuits over things previously tolerated, or settled informally. And more than just women, civil rights laws and norms pushed into the workplace. Bring in the lawyers, reporters, new public ideals - and a business really needed an HR Dept., to prevent disasters.
(Yes, this pretty is US-specific.)
The US isn't even an outlier. I'm not sure why, I don't buy the health reason argument, since I don't think people pay attention to health studies. And they have been smoking (marijuana) which is terrible for the lungs and has other health issues. And there are problems with obesity.
It's not because of health consciousness.
Overall, people aren't drinking or having sex or going out as much, these are all in decline.
Alcohol is going the way of cigarettes.
Maybe that's not a representative sample but young people still want to socialise and at that age you can get away with it so why not.
Having said that, the UK is absolutely a nation of pissheads, the US has always has that puritanical streak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_(book)
It also helped occasionally in severe OCD crises when no other strategy would break a cycle of compulsion: literally a single shot of alcohol will.
And it can help if I am stuck in self-defeating ADHD loops.
None of these things are advisable or worth the health damage even small amounts of alcohol could be causing. The only thing that is worth say a dozen units per year is reducing social anxiety. There are people I only know because I had a rare drink.
You mean AM, right?
https://statbase.org/data/usa-alcohol-consumption-per-capita...
Suggests it increasing
2021 - 9.76
2022 - 9.77
2023 - 9.56
2024 - 9.56
2025 - no data
The peak was 4 years ago and the stats you shared seem to agree with the “news” here that it’s decreasing recently.
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/surveillance-reports/...
Looks to me like the real peak was the late 70’s / early 80’s with beer on a steady decline ever since and wine/spirits not quite replacing it.
At least here in Germany, this is all but gone. Our version of OSHA cracked down on that hard simply because of all the accidents that happen when you combine alcohol, a lot of intake of alcohol due to the reality of physical labor (aka, sweating) and heavy machinery.
And on top of that the police in rural areas also enforces alcohol limits these days.
People seek pain management where they can get it, and alcohol isn't the worst.
Seem so on the whole in Europe in higher-income countries. But the decline seems to be slowing.
(It is surprisingly difficult to find annual alcohol consumption statistics on google. It feels like swimming upstream. It keeps giving me data on alcohol-associated deaths, or total alcohol+tobacco spending!)
WHO dataset, alcohol pure litres total per capita annual [0]
Switzerland (4th biggest decrease):
2020: 11.4 litres
2024: 8.8 litres
UK:
2000: 12.3 litres
2024: 10.4 litres
Ireland:
2000: 14.78 litres
2024: 10.27 litres
There are some countries which have seen an increase over that time period:
Bulgaria +2.33
Latvia +1.99
Portugal +2.10
Moldova +4.14
Bosnia and Herzegovina +1.86
[0] https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...
Seems like the WHO might not have generated a per country per capita alcohol consumption dataset after 2020? Imagine COVID + US defunding in 2025 (~20% of budget) caused a lot of turmoil in lower priorities. :(
Personally I microdose THC via an extraction I make myself(somewhat ironically using alcohol). Can’t do it in the mornings as I wish though, society still hasn’t caught up with a more heterogeneous drug use, only caffeine and tobacco are erlaubt…
But my job involves chemical plants and oil refineries, and they use DISA, and DISA drug tests everyone thoroughly.
I can count on getting a test that involves hair, urine, and breath samples at least twice per year. (It's supposed to be annual and random, but "random" seems to be rather heavily-weighted.)
THC hangs out way too long for that.
It's stupid: A person can be completely ripped on booze every night and cocaine occasionally, or live entirely in a world of psychedelic drugs like LSD or mescaline and that's... fine, I guess?
But smoking a bowl will ruin them on those tests.
I have not heard a single doctor talk about microdosing THC as a cure for ADHD and I wonder if my experience is coincidental or there’s really something there?
It says A LOT about you that you immediately jump to arrogant conclusions
Even now in the Korean-American community, the running joke is that if one suddenly starts going to church in their 20s, it's only because they're looking for a romantic partner.
If the bar was the primary Western common area ("Where everybody knows your name..."), then its disuse leaves nothing to replace it.
For example: Swedish sales for US wine was down around 20% in 2025. The overall decline was about 10%. In a shrinking market, you don't want to also have a shrinking market share.
I'm sure the figures are similar in other countries - and this year it's going to be very different in Canada as well. I imagine Canada was always a big importer of US wine seeing as it's close by and they don't have much domestic production.
Seeing many people comment that they drink less; I'm happy to report I still try to drink as often as I can (Which is still not as often as I want).
US exports have been growing every year since the pandemic low of 2020
US Exports (in billions of $)
We obviously do not have full data for 2026, but the first half is higher than the same time in 2025. But this is really driven by economic activity, so if there is a global recession, you can expect fewer people to buy US goods, just as you can expect Americans to buy fewer foreign goods. The 2020 low was not because of a boycott, but a general economic decline, and as far as I am aware, no boycott of US goods has ever been detected in the trade data, it's always been a media affair or hyperlocalized (e.g. some people boycotting Apple or Windows or Google seem to be the most common media stories).And I think this is a pretty general situation, e.g. consumer boycotts rarely show up in trade data - to hit trade data you need government sanctions, nothing else moves the needle.
Export volume (millions of gallons):
Noted elsewhere, Canada accounts for more than a third of US wine exports [1], so the trade-war with Canada in 2026 surely wasn't helpful either to keep export-volume at 2025-levels...[0] Association of California wineries: https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/us-wine-ex...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-08-26/california...
This is like when a story about housing costs was posted and the Canadians chimed in that the US housing woes are due to not having access to Canadian lumber, and the board had to explain to him that that 80% of lumber used in US production is sourced domestically.
The real average is closer to 25% of lumber coming from Canada but if you look at specific types like SPF which is important for framing, it’s almost evenly split between US domestic and Canada-sourced. Douglas Fir is heavily sourced from Canada. But some lumber like SYP is almost all US domestic.
And in terms of particular states, tariffing Canada sourced lumber has outsized impact because Canadian lumber has a freight advantage so getting US sourced lumber is going to drive up prices even if Canadian is avoided.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the wine story was equally complicated.
Also, the idea that California wine - of all products - is very sensitive to exports is a bit strange since although California wine sales account for more revenue than the entire wine industry of any other country -- 68 billion dollars worth of sales each year (https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/california...), the state exports relatively little, only about a billion dollars of California wine is sold abroad. So 98% of California wine is sold within the US. Only 2% is exported.
And yet there are so many people on this board that are convinced that Europe, of all places, is somehow responsible for driving California wine grower sales woes.
It's pretty funny if you think about it, you have some Bosnian dude and when you tell him that Ford is facing a sales slump he immediately shoots back -- it's because the Bosnians are no longer buying Fords! Truly an amazing example of economic narcissism.
It is definitely a reality that certain goods have seen localized boycotts, like alcohol in Canada, and some services have had to change (data sovereignty in Europe got a lot of traction).
The discussion is about US wine production and consumption. You present the aggregate total vale of all US exports in US dollars to 6 significant digits. Does the variance of the volume of wine exports in litres even show up in those 6 signifcant digits?
Consider: (1) is six significant digits of precision justified, or is it insignificant accurancy? (2) Do those aggregate numbers take into account inflation? (3) Do those aggregate numbers take into account the (not insignificant) devaluation of the US dollar? (4) Do those aggregate numbers include both goods and services?
No, if you were to make an honest argument by quoting US exports, you need to limit it to the volume of US wine exports in litres. Misdirection can be a great tool of propaganda but is not a useful contribution to interesting intellectual discourse.
What would be the reason to boycott wine only and not other US goods? What about the US wine industry is controversial that does not apply to the other industries?
So I wrote that there is no evidence of boycotts showing up in trade data, which is true.
Then, after doing some digging, so I pointed out that almost none of California wines are exported anyway. So obviously this cannot be the result of foreign boycotts.
So let's get back to the "incredibly disingenuous and specious argument", and start with the dictionary definition of those and go from there, because that accurately describes how I view your response.
While boycotting iPhones might be difficult, taking the Cabernet one shelf over takes almost no effort or negative impact to the consumer. It's rarely more expensive to switch from a US wine e.g. French or Australian. It's sold in the same store.
For the specific example of Sweden, every single wine bottle in every store is sorted by country in the store. And it sits above a price sticker with the flag of the origin country on it.
That's wildly different from similar choices e.g. when you pick a can of Hellman's Mayonnaise, there's no US flag under it. But for wine in particular, the country of origin is almost always known to the buyer and involved in the process, even if Sweden stands out as an extreme due to the flag being under the bottle.
That's why I believe the boycott which isn't a boycott on US wine but on US products in general, is _most notable_ for wine or in some other case not notable at all because it's a small effect and consumers don't always know what is American and what isn't (Hellman's example). But for wine, everyone knows.
The difference between the general slump in wine sales (10%) and the decline in US sales (20%) could have more factors, such as price. But it's easy to assume - and polls suggest - that consumers really do avoid the US wine.
Anyway, wine is about at least 3x more expensive than grape juice so it's better ROI to sell good wine. They could make alcohol free wines, but in my experience everything I've tried sucks, just like alcohol free beer.
Knowing that I can tune my level of enjoyment of whatever is happening.
Though there is an old saying from where I grew up - alcohol is stealing happiness from tomorrow to have it today.
And that has always stuck with me - whenever I drink I get a bit happier that instant and feel worse more tired the next day.
And that is ok if I am going to a social event and I want to get the most out of it, and I know next day will be chill anyway - who’ll can make the “chill” time even more chill.
Have you tried lighter wines or prosecco? I've had some summer wine from a grape variety called Inzolia in Sicily. Quite light in alcohol, tasted a bit like lime water.
https://www.wine-searcher.com/grape-715-inzolia
My experience is that grogginess really depends on the wine that you drink, but it always ruins my sleep if I exceed two glasses (150 ml). For instance I would almost never drink high alcohol (>13.5%) or high sugar content Rieslings. They almost always give me headaches.
Fortunately, this is not universally true anymore.
There are now beers brewed with extremely low-alc yeasts (which have a trait that makes them unable to digest maltose) that make <0,5% alc beers with good flavours. This combined with sour malts and good hops can give you great flavours. These low-alc yeasts remove the need to maltreat the beer for removing the alc. And it is often OK to have 0,5% alc -- maybe not during pregnancy, but to avoid the annoying 5% alc. It's most probably not the industry cheap shit though.
There's also the possibility to just stop the fermentation with normal yeasts at any point, e.g., at 1% alc. I've had a couple of very good beers like this, too.
Disclaimer: I lost my sense of smell due to a head injury, so that does muddle my ability to taste things. But I think with beer a sense of smell is less important
Now I only drink maybe once a month. It's great. Happy I kicked the mild habit.
There's a few things I miss about the UK, and one of them is easy availability of beer that's less than 5%. Unfortunately that seems to have been creeping upwards - the shift to craft keg (rather than cask) beer seems to have been accompanied by moving more in the direction of US-style stronger beers. Several breweries do still produce milds that are in the <3% range, but it's increasingly hard to find them, even in pubs that used to be reliable suppliers. It's interesting how cultural this is.
Might be a market issue. I grew up along beer drinkers and over the past few years, so many good alcohol free beers have entered the German market, that a lot of them shifted almost fully to alcohol free beers.
If you like pilsner, I do enjoy an occasional Kulmbacher Edelherb.
The Augustiner Helles Alkoholfrei is incredibly popular, but hard to come by even here in Bavaria.
Similarly popular and among my favorites is the Bayreuther Hell Alkoholfrei.
That being said, neither of these options is available at Lidl or Aldi in Germany, so I would assume they aren‘t internationally either.
And in terms of non alcoholic beer, “lucky saint” tastes great (0.5%) and is very popular in the UK, lots of pub have it on tap.
The UK's beer scene is wildly different to the rest of Europe, and not something that we've managed to export very well. Hell, we could even export cask ale (rare outside of the UK) to Paris without it spoiling these days, yet nobody really does. Whether it's due to taste or the awkwardness of casks I don't know, but I do think it would meet with success in Paris if someone did it properly. Not all beer has to be refrigerated and fizzy. We have so many varieties that you just don't get with fizzy keg beer, and much of it notably weaker in alcohol content. Some examples:
Mild at ~2.5% (made from reusing the materials used to make Bitter), Session at ~3.5%, Bitter at ~4%, Best Bitter at ~5% etc. IPAs are the hot thing even over here now but we get notably more variations in those than most places too.
I'd be curious to know from anyone in Germany if they have equivalents to these sorts of categories, as what we get from Germany over here tends to all be about the same strength.
Due to ADHD meds I do now have to drink less, and the best non-alcoholic beer I've found so far is Guinness 0%. I'm not a massive Guinness drinker, it's alright but there are other stouts I prefer, but the 0% version is surprisingly close to "real" Guinness and has none of those sock-y flavours that most non-alcoholic beer has.
It's a bit of a cliche but you really can split Europe into "beer country/wine country/spirits country". France, Italy, Spain and Germany west of the Rhine are wine country. Munich is clearly beer country. And Germany has focused on perfecting a very narrow set of light beers, if you want diversity of taste that's all in the wines. Similarly you're not going to get Parisians interested in beer diversity when they have French wine to argue about.
(It is possible that climate change will shift this; England is starting to produce a few pretty good wines)
Guinness 0% is fantastic. Unlike a lot of brewers the Guinness company were very keen to retain their standards rather than slop out an inferior product to tick a box.
I could probably tell it apart from normal Guinness in a blind taste test. But it is pretty good.
That's a rather broad claim. There is so many different variations non alcoholic beer nowadays.
It's delicious and alcohol free, it does have a lot of calories but mixing it with calorie free soda gets you a bit more bang for your calorie buck so to speak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federweisser
+
https://www.amazon.de/Federwei%C3%9Fer-selber-machen-einfach...
We would drink our share of Californian wines, but after the trump trade war, war on Iran, and everything he's done to destabilize the global economy... We decided to stop buying anything American.
Wine was an easy switch.
I feel for the farmers. I still miss a nicely chilled Margaret River Sauvignon Blanc now and then.
The thing is, over lockdown I stopped drinking socially. And then I realized I didn’t miss the feeling of intoxication. And then I realized my sleep got a whole lot better.
And then lockdown loosened, so some friends and I went out for drinks for old times’ sake, and I felt awful, both that evening and the next morning. My tolerance for alcohol is just gone, and I don’t have any particular desire to get it back.
Nowadays I'm older and not looking for sex so don't take part in that scene. I would say a few years ago when I would go out there was still some peer pressure to drink and I was considered odd going for non-alcoholic options. But nowadays it's not weird at all and the alcohol-free options are much more numerous and varied. Lime and soda was my go to for years but now I'll partake of an alcohol-free beer or cider.
I often wonder if there's a lot of national differences here, in the UK people for the most part wanted to reverse everything about the covid norms as quickly as possible after Partygate and all the political drama. People are still drinking less but it's because pints cost >£6 now in a lot of places, nothing to do with an outbreak of temperance.
Coming from Europe I'm used to see that every vineyard makes their own wine. Seeing grapes become such a commodified thing is a bit weird, I must say. Buyers of these will probably by definition make blended wines, which are not really held in high regards. People who drink wine are usually quite demanding about their drink.
So yeah, I'm surprised the farmers just let go of their produce instead of making a wine themself, if they think the vintage is so great.
It is true tho that regular wine has been in decline; nobody (aka the younger folks) wants that Monsanto-flavored and sulfured wine anymore, so natural wine has been a big craze and also more funky flavours are swiftly taking ground. Sure, the quantities are different, for many reasons - having less money in the pocket being one of them.
The highest regarded wines are blended. Bordeaux wine makers that have large estates may only use their harvests (still blending varietals from year to year), but many Burgundy wine makers will buy harvests from different parcels and blend. There are exceptions but that is not the norm.
Which is of course its own interesting thing given that almost every European vineyards is grafted from American vines following the wine blight. Like the number of vineyards in Europe that aren't grafted from American vines can be counted on one hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight
American vines being the cause and the "cure".
My observation is that gen-z spends less time socializing in real life, and drinking remains a social habit for the most part at a younger age. While they drink less, cannabis, vaping and psychedelics are on the rise.
It's a nice claim to say they are more responsible, but it tells an incomplete story.
When I was growing up, there were only a handful of channels and then cable. Compared to what we have now, that was the Dark Ages. There's so much you can do on a screen now that's compelling.
Infinite scrolling on Shorts, YouTube, video games, social media, hanging out with people online, chatrooms—combine that with Uber Eats, and you can do whatever you want.
The one thing that will make you want to go out is, of course, meeting someone to have sex with, but that's become weaponized, especially for young adults.
Boys being called creepy and predatory for making the wrong move was always an issue, but now you can be shamed online with a video as proof. Why take the risk when you can meet somebody online?
In an environment like that getting drunk just isn’t very good for your life/career. Even something as small as going to the dance floor when you are not really good at it takes a lot more from you when there is 5 cameras recording you the moment you look stupid/funny dancing.
This is why the memes of some guy talking to a coworker is considered sexual assault, where if Tom Brady does it, it’s considered cute flirtation
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1663497-hello-human-resource...
As an outside observer, could it be that manosphere influence has an undue effect on young mens behavior, which (if true) would indeed be creepy for a lot of (most?) women, regardless if the execution is awkward or not.
I was certainly awkward in my teens/young adulthood, but in my singular experience, the maturity and confidence didn't come from acting cocky or showing off, but just treating anyone I had an interest in as a person first and foremost, and being comfortable and even open about my awkwardness and shortcomings.
That did wonders. Also accepting that a rejection doesn't mean a personal slight to you, nor a failure in appreciation of you from her, but merely a lack of mutual interest, which is also fine.
It is never ending cycle of "they do not understand social", "you are infantilizing them by explaining them social explicitly" while the same guys are perfectly charismatic to anyone with actual power or friends.
If I were young I would stick to dating apps exclusively, since everyone on the app has already signaled a receptiveness to advances.
Getting Gen-z to even get close enough to the glass to smell a nice red is a challenge. And when they do, they seem to recoil rapidly.
Anecdata only.
if you played hooky on a high school field trip in 80s or 90s you would probably not lose your college admission to harvard
this police state attitude completely sterilizes young people socially, their parents regulate behaviour and monitor people with airtags and life360
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cornell-university-stud...
There’s also the implication that the repercussions are worse.
Born in 1999, I qualify as GenZ. All my peers drink beer, which is unsurprising given the strong cultural presence. But more and more people have been moving to alcohol free beer, which is becoming more and more widespread. Loads of breweries reacted and started with alcohol free beers, even the ones you would have never expected, like Augustiner Bräu in Munich.
Pretty much all surveying data for my home country for the last few years suggests that GenZ is just drinking less alcohol overall. While there probably are some shifts within the consuming population, that does not fully explain the shift away from the alcoholic staples.
Not surprising, sweetness literally mutes palate sensitivity. Genzers are the most sugar addicted generation, from a very young age. It would not surprise me to see research in some future that this massive early life sugar exposure comes with muted development of taste.
There's untold levels of chemicals in wine. Organic wine is BS in Europe, organic vineyards actually use more chemicals like giant quantities of copper sulphate. The US is actually a lot better than Europe in this regard.
Source: My father owned a vineyard in France before he keeled over with a subarachnoid haematoma after drinking 3 glasses of Rose at lunchtime.
I used the anecdote to illustrate I have some experience in the wine industry, having worked hands on for a few years. My father studied chemistry at Cambridge so his understanding of wine chemistry is, or was, expert level.
I’d say the burden of proof is on you though, can you supply epidemiological evidence that wine isn’t harmful to health, if you’re going to advocate for the alcohol industry?
Apologies; that was not my intention; I was reacting to your chemicals claim only.
I am not advocating; I am saying that I don’t believe it’s the other chemicals, it’s just alcohol, which is the poison in wine. They have 0.0 wine here which is just real wine with the alcohol removed after; that has then, I assume, the same chemicals and drinking that is harmful?
I do not think anyone would argue that alcohol consumption is good for your health, regardless of what kind of alcohol.
https://www.winespectator.com/articles/us-and-europe-have-di...
They're making a far stronger counter claim:
> there are plenty people who drink a bottle of white, red and/or rose for lunch here their entire lives to old age.
No one doubts that, but statistics are pretty clear, that those who do not do that, have a longer life.
I didn't draw any conclusions or make a link, you assumed the link.
Let's look at some evidence instead. There are very high levels of TFA in wine:
https://www.pan-europe.info/press-releases/2025/04/study-rev...
It'll be decades before we know the true effects of the chemicals other than alcohol that are evidently present in wine, but TFA is known to pose serious health risks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifluoroacetic_acid
I find there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in people who are partial to a bottle or two, they tend to hang on to the myths that it's good for them.
But I do raise my eyebrow at the suggestion that US wine is somehow in a better situation and am not inclined to believe it unless someone provides sources.
[0] "Alarming’ increase in levels of forever chemical TFA found in European wines"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/23/alarming...
https://www.winespectator.com/articles/us-and-europe-have-di...
Most notably the chemical alcohol is known to cause all sorts of health problems and is present in wine.
If you are going to talk about "chemicals", you should be more specific. Most chemicals are harmless, some aren't. Most likely alcohol is the most toxic chemical in wine by a wide margin.
You could also have just glanced at the rest of the thread where I've given far more specific evidence.
I'm rather glad I've drawn people's attention to the issue, despite having to endure extremely patronising comments like yours.
Second, I clearly have skin-in-the-game here because you did read the first comment, so everyone that thinks it's OK to make jokes like the dihydrongen monoxide one (well done that was clever in 2015) can go forth and multiply.
The “source” you do mention seems rather anecdotal, and linking it to the discussed topic requires a fair number of other assumptions, too.
My purpose was to draw people's attention to some lesser known aspects of the wine industry which I think are consequential, and I was illustrating I have some insignts into this that people that haven't worked in the industry probbaly don't.
But I do raise my eyebrow at the suggestion that US wine is somehow in a better situation and am not inclined to believe it unless someone provides sources.
[0] "Alarming’ increase in levels of forever chemical TFA found in European wines"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/23/alarming...
Of course, this was decades ago and today would be called "artisanal" wine making.
Partly. There is some natural level of sulfites present in wines - very dependent on the terroir, and then the rest comes during the manufacturing process; some sulfites may be added directly so the wine does not spoil.
There are wines that do not contain any added sulfites and even then may cause trouble to the sensitive persons if the sulfur content of soil is naturally high. Some manufacturers therefore also add info about total measured sulfite content to the label.
And nowadays, not only demijohns or wooden barrels are used to hold wine; of course stainless steel vessels, but also concrete vessels and even things like the Georgian qvevri underground clay vessels or amphorae are having a comeback.
Such as dihydrogen monoxide?
Copper sulphate is a fungicide used for centuries and is pretty safe (so safe that my chemical engineer father was willing to use it in his otherwise completely sans-chemicals garden). Organic wine not only does not use (other) fungicides and herbicides; it also does not use other chemicals and processes in later stages of winemaking.
Before 2004 Germany had a %vol limit for selling alcohol to 16 year olds. In 2004 they changed the law such that it is not based on percentage, but whether it contains distilled alcohol to prevent under 18 year olds from drinking sweet alcopops, which apparently was a big thing back then.
Alcohol tax would have been a simpler and much less destructive means of achieving such a goal, but I guess breweries can't lobby when everything else is collapsing too.
But that doesn't apply when we are talking about society wide shifts in behavior. It isn't like people suddenly got genetically better or worse at taking personal responsibility. If suddenly a lot fewer people are making healthy decisions, that isn't because we just happened to birth a bunch of people who don't take personal responsibility. Something has changed. Individuals have a lot of control over their own lives, but at a society level all of those individual decisions average out, and you are left with a representation of the effect of society.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
Individuals have personal responsibility, but the behaviour of a group of humans regresses towards the mean as it gets larger.
You can't assume someone will get fat just because you offer highly addictive processwd food, but you can assume the population as a whlle will.
If there's a fight between you and a multinational corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees and trillions of dollars, and they're willing to devote more money that you'll ever see in your life towards manipulating you, lying to you, addicting you, removing alternatives, and making it harder for you to resist them, do you seriously think you're going to hold out? And even if you manage to do it, how long can you keep that up?
We do need people to try to act responsibly, but we need corporations to act responsibly as well. Regulations make that possible. Until we get them, sure, resist all you can, while you can, but you will slip up or be worn down eventually. If not in one area of your life, then in another and another. You can't stay hypervigilant 100% of the time, and the stress of being hypervigilant for long periods is hurting you. The attacks on us come from all directions. They target us in different ways. They learn all they can about us and they tailor their tactics to target us when and where we're at our weakest.
If you're having success avoiding screen addiction that's great! I've had some success limiting my use of cell phones too, but I can't say that it doesn't cost me or that everyone can do what I do. For now, I'm able to resist, but that could change. It can be too easy to look down on someone for failing and say they should have tried harder but you don't know how long they've fought or what else they're fighting. Some people can naturally fight harder and longer than others. Some people have to devote their limited resources to fighting other battles. As long as companies can continue to assault our well-being for their profits totally unchecked we're all fighting battles, and for most of them we might survive but we can't ever really win. Have some grace for the people who are struggling, and some compassion for the fallen. Eventually, in one way or another, you lose too.
Since we're at the legal stage, I hope we can finally get to a stage where such algorithms are treated as seriously as cigarettes. But society moves slowly, because the powers that profit from this pay to push back on regulation.
A barkeeper from a prestigious, world class cocktail bar around the corner told me that it really is more about health/alcohol.
He had a group the other day of 20 young people and 18 of them ordered non-alcoholic drinks. He is desperate about his profession.
Now, how can I be so sure? Because I’ve been starving at some of these events, whereas others can seemingly call a single slice of pizza dinner.
There’s most definitely a health aspect in there too, but I don’t think it paints the whole story.
It's just not related to drug consuming acts and more about sports, poker, board games, etc.
I believe that drug-related communications are flawed and closer to animal level than to actually joyful ones. It's better to have a maturity and social skills to communicate, joke and maintain a conversation with interesting people without stimulators.
I'm not from the US though so it's not about the US social scene which is mainly discussed here.
That's exactly the point. To experience animalistic joy, rather than the socially-conditioned one.
> It's better to have a maturity and social skills
That's a very silly argument because it doesn't take into account the fact that a day has 24 hours and also people have different natural abilities. Imagine telling a kid with Down Syndrome "come on, you can do it, PhD in physics ain't that difficult".
I disagree.
Communication is a skill like everything else. Having a constant workaround just reduces your ability to be good at it. Why would a healthy young adult make his own skills worse?
You can either get short-term gains with long-term worsening of your daily life by being incapable of new connections and genuine communications or cut the short-term low-level improvements, suffer for a year or two, learn a bit and have a better life for years to come.
It's like going to gym or do other sports. It's often hard and unpleasant at the start, but the more you're doing it, the fitter you are and the more benefits you bring to yourself in the long-term.
In the 90s, MDMA got senators’ panties in a twist. Now, there are multiple 100k+ MDMA-focused events in the western USA annually.
I would be more willing to bet on someone trying Prohibition 2.0 again.
This might be an odd fluctuation to do with the first primarily social media generation? Don't know but that is just how I have seen it.
You are probably right about banning weed/vapes. They don't have anywhere near the same indoctrination into the structures of commerce and power that alcohol has.
I never understood this logic. It can absolutely change. Tastes and habits do change in society sometimes forever. Just because people did a thing a long time ago and a tradition has lasted for thousands of years doesn't mean it will continue.
This is far from the first fluctuation of alcohol consumption rates we have data for. This is a major trend that will last decades but not a march to long term 0.
On the other hand, alcohol has already survived prohibition.
The grocery-store bottle lost to seltzers and stuff that comes in a can. That's a worse problem for a grape grower than people being sober.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmLO69c_fyw
I'm using night life as a stand in for drinking, but I think it's closely related.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
I guess I just wrote a much longer variation of "candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker", eh?
(this is not drinking advice, folks: you'll do plenty more damage plenty faster with liquor, too)
I'm skeptical. I don't see how there can be a meaningful difference between a regular-strength sixteen ounce beer and one shot of regular-strength vodka mixed in with slightly less than sixteen ounces of water. [0]
I do agree that -because you're drinking far less fluid- it's far easier for those who aren't monitoring how much they drink to get massively intoxicated when drinking liquor rather than beer or wine.
[0] ...other than taste, that is. Sixteen ounces of dilute vodka-water wouldn't be a joy to drink.
Also, like, what the hell do you think a Screwdriver is?
Sure, I read your second paragraph, but as I pointed out in my own post, you might as well express skepticism that people harm themselves faster with beer than with shandy whilst treating not mixing beer with four parts water as edge case irresponsibility rather than how people actually drink it. Every drink is equally safe, diluted down enough...
It was just outright more cost effective and as college students we just didn't have money for the alternative so most of the time it was hard liquor and maybe once a week we'd go out to drink and then it was mostly rail liquor mixed drinks or outright shots and shooters.
Effectively every non sleeping minute of your life monetized by tech.
And if "people be watching videos" was the wet dream of tech monetization, we wouldn't need to be worried about tech monetization.
The number of these jobs is constantly shrinking, and a lot of jobs actually have people training AI models to replace them.
Born 1940s, about 14u/week. 1960s about 12u, By 1980s dropped to 10u, and by 2000 down to about 7-8.
Or are we saying that wine drinking is significantly more social than beer drinking?
It's "interesting" that this new isolationist culture we've built for ourselves is causing economic problems
In Germany beer is down 20% in a decade, and 33% since 2000.
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/4628/umfrage/...
Used responsibly it's perfectly safe. Much less harmful than alcohol. I don't know why people assume that something is unsafe just because we give it to horses. Do you think people want to harm their horses?
No, weed is not a one way path to a death sentence as you become a raving Satanist! But it also isn't harmless and there are things to keep an eye on, just because it doesn't kill you doesn't mean it gets the all clear.
If you want to do it, go for it, but please be aware of the potential issues.
looking from the tail end of the generation, many of my friends ( and also I ) were led to believe somehow that things like marijuana, psychedelics, non-Alcohol have such low consequences that are entirely a rounding error compared to alcohol. which is ...
I don’t know if there is responsible weed or psychedelic use (not my area) but I’m confident that responsible alcohol consumption exists.
Though I doubt any of it is a net benefit to society.
But that's only because alcohol is so incredibly dangerous. There is real risk with inhaling particulates and burning gases into your lungs. And it should not be ignored. It's just that compared to the lives ended by alcohol it is a rounding error and that makes it seem safe. Neither are.
While it may be rational to try to lump it with other newer dangerous substances, removing alcohol from humanity would be full on cultural erasure for many places. Not to mention to total destruction of entire industries that people's livelihoods depend on.
I guess a way to think of it is - if it was part of culture for 1000s of years it'll probably take at least 100s of years to phase out.
we've been collectively alcoholic for 15000 years, turning the body's chemical filtration plant into the body's largest organ that is literally called the liver, and we're supposed to give it up in 20 years? bosh. flimshaw
Alcohol used to be safer than water to drink for a period in time.
Your comparing 1-2% alcohol consumed because the regular drinking water was not accessible and unsafe to 7%+ alcohol consumed for recreation. Disengenuous.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1714728114
Some Roman wines were drunk undiluted in the 14% range
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/vint...
Extract a sugary liquid from fruit or malted grain, expose it to the pervasive and random yeast in the air around us and if it doesn't mold over first you'll probably get something in the 8% ABV range before the alcohol waste product inhibits the yeasts' metabolism. With some deliberate cultivation, which humans thousands of years ago figured out, you can selectively breed the yeast slurry in your vessels up to a 11-14% alcohol tolerance. They didn't know the science but they knew the process.
Leave it exposed and you'll eventually get a random acetobacter infection and ta-da, now you have a vat of vinegar. Which would still have utility, but is much less fun.
The 1-2% alcohol drinks were called "small beers" and were the second runnings off the grain that was used to make full-strength beers or barleywines. Humans liked variety.
And people drank water, not just alcoholic small beers, there are depictions of water filters dating back at least 3500 years, and a long history of water purification techniques, and a ton of ancient wells which were dug.
https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/...
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/index.html
if you want to fix the most things with the least effort, you optimize the hot paths. in this case, thats alcohol and tabacco. they have the biggest opportunity
Cannabis today is much stronger than it was in the 70s.
The people I know who are using it are buying it as tablets and gummies that come in 1mg increment doses, and taking exactly as much as they want to have, which typically isn’t much.
Vape pens are presumably also more consistent and predictable, and seem to be taking over. I can’t even remember the last time I smelled actual weed smoke.
It actually strikes me as much more healthy than alcohol culture, where dose control can still be a problem because it’s hard to tell how many units of alcohol the bartender put in your cocktail, and driving home afterward is still quite normalized.
While I don't drink that much anymore, when I do I just kinda have a murky mental binder of how strong a drink is at a given venue I've visited before but even then it's very unsophisticated.
Also, there are high grade derived products that do exactly what's on the label.
For an example of reasonable use: if you want to lower anxiety a bit, which is a primary driver of alcohol use, you can now reliably get a high CBT strain, or CBT gummies, or CBT vapes, and they are generally less dangerous and less addictive than other chemical solutions.
This would also hold for decriminalising party drugs. Most of the fentanyl deaths for instance are in people that didn't even know they're having fentanyl.
Cannabis, the literal plant, is strong than the 70s, but it's not like humans haven't been making concentrates (hash, resins, etc.) for 1000s of years.
Not only that, alcohol's main mechanism is through depleting oxygen in the blood, which in essence means the feeling you get from drinking is brain damage.
Notice how like 90-95% of the tkme when skmeone does something uncharecteristically horrible such as rape, murder of passion, or assault, they are drunk. Is that a coincidence?
That's not even talking about drunk driving, one of the leadings cause for all major traffic accidents in the US.
Prohibition literally started because drunkards were beating their wives, wasting their entire paycheck at the saloon (free lunch), and other savagry so much the women, who couldn't even vote at the time, were so pissed off they created the the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Let's be clear here too, most temperance groups were the biggest supporters of abolition. Only reason abolition didn't work is the government was too lax on enforcement and allowed written doctors notes for alcohol use the basis for evil organizations like CVS and Walgeens that have devestated this country as the distribution arm of the highly lucrative pharmecuetical drug trade.
Blood oxygen is quickly and cheaply measured with a pulse oximeter, which shows this to be false. The primary mechanism of action of ethanol is increasing the sensitivity of some GABA receptors (similar to benzodiazepines and barbiturates). But ethanol has very complex pharmacology, which a huge number of other targets. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol
A personal anecdote. My extended family has a long history of substance abuse and addiction. Of course, historically the substance so abused has mostly been alcohol (and tobacco, but that is less harmful in this kind of sense), and I saw [both first-hand and second-hand] a lot of direct and indirect effects of it that were very harmful and destructive. But recently, with another family member, I also saw first-hand the effects of addiction to another drug, methamphetamine, with induced psychosis, and I would choose dealing with an alcohol addict over this a thousand times. At least an alcohol addict is unlikely to suddenly decide to murder you, or to jump out of window, or any such mad move, just because some demons tell them or they suddenly realize that you have been an alien or a reptilian all along, or any similar crazy thing [which is actually pretty horrific when you face it in a real life from a close person]. A drunk person is also much more easily defeated physically than somebody who is high on meth and has some psychotic episode. [Though I am aware that alcohol caused or catalyzed many violent attack and murders too, I am not trying to trivialize that.]
Drunk driving is a conscious decision, not an accident.
You’re regurgitation of propaganda here is so laughably missing the point.
Downvote me if you want but look it up. The temperance movement and prohibition that followed was run by wealthy women who filled their time judging the lower classes and factory owners who wanted to end labor union meetings and continue to underpay workers in horrid conditions while blaming alcohol as the problem.
Easily one of americas worst decisions and propaganda people like you still believe to this day.
But it is much cheaper. And Gen Z by necessity is more price sensitive than other generations.
All of these are cheap. As long as you got a garden and it's legal, growing weed is ridiculously easy - it's literally called weed because it thrives pretty much anywhere. Vapes are much cheaper than cigarettes (eh, we'll see how long that lasts and authorities crack down on shops selling smuggled / greymarket vapes...).
In contrast, going out and getting drunk to the point of getting decently hammered can easily cost you 100€ and more here in Germany, and we have low alcohol taxes...
kinda implies the claim was said
Scrunching up my face trying to figure out how to respond to this...
I think you are right that a lot of the wine which people consume, the mega industrial mass volume stuff sold in supermarkets, is a bit sweet, although often not by a lot--Josh and Bota Box, two of the biggest brands, have like 5-10 g/L of sugar. Stuff like La Marca Prosecco and Barefoot Pink Moscato is noticeably sweeter.
However, in general, I don't think it's fair to say "wine is sweet". Wine in general is not sweet outside of certain styles that are intended to be so. If you grow grapes, crush them, and ferment them, the fermentation will generally run until the yeast run out of sugar, leaving only trace amounts behind.
I've noticed that a lot of people who don't have that much experience with wine will tend to mis-identify things as sweetness when they're really noticing some other aspect of the wine.
Fine if you're not a fan of American whiskies or bourbon but it's a strange take to generalize it all as low quality..
So, is it due to the economy or health factors?
PS: The article is blocked in my country so could not read it
There are a variety of forces driving the decline in wine sales. Baby boomers are aging out of the market while young people are drinking less alcohol due to health and financial concerns. Wine faces competition from craft beer, liquor and canned cocktails as well as cannabis.
“The kids just aren’t drinking as much,” Berryhill said. “And it’s not just wine, it’s whiskey and beer and everything. And then you’ve also got the competition with all the seltzers.”
Tariffs have reduced exports, particularly to Canada, which was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.
A lot of people are on ozempic and similar drugs nowadays, isn’t some of the side effects a reduction in cravings (alcohol, nicotine etc) ?
There are a few others
For my part, I loved a few Californian wines, but ever since Trump threatened to invade my country, I haven't bought a single bottle, and I never will.
I think that mirrors others here, those bottles seem to be going out of rotation entirely - and we generally mark whether a product comes from inside the EU now. Which, curiously, started when relations went sour.
I suspect wine is extremely susceptible to this effect too. It’s basically always stocked alongside produce from many other countries, the origin is most of the marketing, and there aren’t really any stand out brands. I’ve probably had a Californian wine before but couldn’t name a single one.
If you own a venue or store and decide to stop stocking American alcohol, someone will probably notice you don’t have Jack Daniel’s but not that you’ve stopped selling Californian wine.
America doesn't need anything from the rest of the world, or so is claimed, so the rest of the world should not burden itself with purchasing American exports.
If you want a cheap bottle of wine it would be New Zealand, Chilean or Spanish
You have your pet theory, you, without evidence, decide that every fact you see is confirmation for that theory, so now you believe your theory even more.
I want to say something to make you feel bad about this, but you think I'm telling you that you were right all along.
As usual the reason overall wine sales would be down e.g. 10% and US wine sales down 20% in a country will be a combination of multiple factors. My pet theory though is that at least for some countries, the boycott factor is the big one.
The knock on effect is massive. The seasonal workers supported a large permanent workforce - and more importantly tax revenues in the county are collapsing.
But the really important thing to understand is that once the industry is gone, it's gone for a long time. The other markets competing with the US are already expanding their industries to fill the void. Once those trees are planted, they produce fruit for several decades to come.
But when the specific varietal always sucked, that's a good reason to replace it.
I have to deal with this crap right now in the world of laundry and adjacent world of cleaning. We've had new Enzymes finally hitting the market en-mass for the first time in decades (DNAse/Lipase) which when combined in full spectrum with all other known enzymes leads to truly superior cleaning results. Literally no one has any excuse anymore for smelly clothes as a result of these innovations, and it's probably going to take another 5 years minimum for anyone outside of the nerds on r/laundry and other enthusiast communities to take advantage of these new innovations. For now, the so called "gold standard" Tide laundry detergent people are buying is straight up incomplete and could be tomorrow reformulated with both enzymes to radically improve its performance and isn't for... reasons???
Where else have we straight up regressed on technology? Vacuum cleaners were better in the 1980s when a higher percentage of America used central vacuums, an objectively superior technology. Guns were often made to higher metallurgical standards, CRT vector displays (Vectrex) to this day get better effective refresh rates, brightness, and glow effects than existing displays (OLED) and peaked in the 1980s.
"Worse is better", literally, and all because of idiot consumers voting wrong with their wallet. They deserve contempt.
Oh, and Americans refusing to embrace bidet toilet seats, or air purification (both important circa covid, fecal plums and poor indoor air quality were a significant infection vector!)
I knew a number of people whose home had central vacs but funny enough, none of them worked anymore. It was a sort of "what's that weird plug thing" conversation that lead to that somewhat underwhelming finding. I get the sense it is one of those things where if you want it fixed, you'd have to call a technician who will probably give you a quote you don't want to hear. Then you just forget about ever getting it fixed.
i'll start by having my OLED smartphone dying after many years and the one i got used LCD. much worse and it felt like plastic. colors, brightness, even if my screen now refreshes twice as fast as the previous - fast forward 2 years i don't think i ever thought about the difference, nor saw it after 1 or 2 weeks with my phone
totally valid critique on durable products and better substances for cleaning although
Except that they're absolutely huge and heavy for any halfway decent screen size and resolution. If I were to replace my two 24-inch screens with CRTs, I'd need a second desk for them alone.
WTF?
This just sounds like yet another thing that can give me a rash or some kind of weird cancer in 20 years.
I can’t remember the last time I had curry stains on anything, and I lived in central India for a year. I just used the typical local detergent and did my own laundry. Always cold though, well as cold as it would ever get - 80F was typical.
See this as a list of merely the most popular varieties you can find at stores: https://waapple.org/varieties/all/
One weekend we stumbled on a local apple orchard doing a cider making demonstration. We were the only people there so the orchardist (he called himself a “pomoculturist”) personally showed us around, picking an occasional apple, telling us about it, and then encouraging us to take a bite.
At one point he picked a deeply dark purple, almost black, apple and handed it to me. “Black Oxford” The flavor was intense: acidic, sweet, floral. Then another, dark red and fragrant. “Winesap” Then “Belle de Boskoop”. And on and on.
None of these apples are sold commercially except at small scale directly from orchards. The flavors, appearances, and aromas of apples is truly astonishing. So I think that’s why Red Delicious gets all the hate. The world of apples is amazing and huge.
I prefer to see Red Delicious as yet another miracle of apple genetics, just one that I don’t personally care for. But if you have the opportunity to visit an heirloom orchard, please do.
For me, it was a life-changing event: I now have a small heirloom orchard of my own.
But the U.S. has created new, much better apples, like Cosmic Crisp (2020)
Cosmic Crisp is much easier to grow, at least in the climate it was developed for/in. Those 2 varieties are somewhat similar, although I find Honeycrisp a bit more subtle in flavor and enjoyable, while Cosmic Crisp has just a strong sweet/tart flavor.
And so the food scientists went to work, and figured out how to cross-breed in the ability to grow in a wider variety of places. And adding in the capability to grow in large numbers like the Red Delicious turned the Honeycrisp into an apple that tasted more like the Red Delicious.
The US is really amazingly good at growing food, but it is because the physical reality- not just transportation but growing conditions- trumps taste in the main.
Edit: https://www.seriouseats.com/how-honeycrisp-apples-went-from-...
Based on this a big problem is overlong storage, which could be avoided with some effort into local purchasing.
In upstate New York, I would recommend Autumn Crisp, Blondee, Macoun and Shizuka. I haven't picked apples in Virginia in about a decade, so I'm probably out of date on the right types to get there, but I remember loving Stayman apples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious
No idea if this is still true of what is currently sold under the name. All apple verities are clones so the they should be (mostly) the same but the verity is old enough to not have anyone protecting the name.
Specific varietals are from cloning specific branches widely, but at some point it often gets ‘lost’ due to natural imperfect cloning.
Who know if they are actually the same, plain genetic drift, or they have been selected to be more shelf stable at the cost of taste.
However, it seems there are multiple things with that name. I've had one that looked different and tasted... less bad.
It was always grim, bitter, but "oh so pretty".
Usually most staffing issues can be solved with higher wages. Could it be a solution here?
Something like this for oranges: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2026/04/florida-oran...
The thing about the "wages are low because of immigrants" is that it neglects that all of those immigrants are consumers just as much as they producers. They need food, medical care, places to relax, places to live, and so these immigrants employ plenty of native born people, people who would not have jobs if those immigrants weren't there consuming. Even if you could get higher wages to draw other native born people in from another part of the country, then you are just stealing the people and all of this sort of consumption from another part of your same country.
You also lose a significant amount of productivity from first-timers in any process, and other full-time jobs taking away your expe
Not every industry has tech level profits.
And I know that some Washington apple packing and Florida citrus packing companies have declared bankruptcy in the past year, so those would be my guesses.
I just got back from Italy where I bought several cases and large formats of wine that, even after shipping, cost less than the non-plutocratic greats from California. Wildly, I got charged zero duties. Not even MVN. (I suspect it’s because I’m in a red state.)
Given how much of American farming went hard MAGA, it’s really difficult to feel compassionate for their struggles. Maybe after bankruptcy the new owners will be better.
I really like wine, and a $8.50 bottle of good quality French bubbles isn't a luxury good or a status symbol it's just life.
But it's definitely acquired - and the fewer that acquire that taste, the less you'll sell. And people I guess often establish that taste in the 20-30 year age, and if people go out less and drink less, perhaps they'll not grow up to be wine-drinking 50 year olds?
Clearly haven't tasted Eiswein[1]. That said, can be too sweet for my tastes.
I'm not a wine drinker but when eating with work we usually get the wine menu, and a good wine pairing really can elevate it I find
But yeah casual drinking is not for me.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_wine
Try a sweet wine, or if that's still too bitter, try a dessert wine. Wine has a huge range of sweetness.
Yeah, that's another problem with wine. Too many options and you never know what to expect.
https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/wine-related-produ...
- Canadian boycots of US products due to tariff wars
- Boomer wine buyers dying off
- younger generations drinking less overall and being less into wine
- everyone on GLP-1s drinking less
The tariff wars and "boycott US wine" goes way beyond Canada. I (in Europe) completely stopped buying US wine during this admin. Polls support this.
Not just Canada
THC has never been an alternative to alcohol. There are definitely people who prefer it instead of alcohol and there are people who use both.
I don't know anyone who thinks they're interchangeable unless they're solely looking at it as a political/functional slot to fill.
If you force a drunk who hates pot to switch and vice-versa, they genuinely might want to murder you, but why make this a wedge issue?
If you feel this way about pot, have you not also considered that similar already occurred with alcohol roughly a century ago (in the USA)? Why do you think cops avoid overpolicing bars when they'd be entirely in their right to do so?
Personal use of drugs is the clearest example in all of criminal justice where people of all beliefs have to admit there really is a much bigger and widespread mental health problem at the root of it. This is very very far from a new topic. There's nothing special about pot.
I know plenty.
Generally they fit the pattern of being familiar with it from exposure a few times as teenagers or such and liked it, but it wasn't a big enough deal for them to want to find and maintain a relationship with a drug dealer, concerns that if they pulled it out at a party it might lead to consequences within their social or professional circle, etc.
Maybe don't just think about pot smokers.
For the pot smokers who care about legality, it does matter for folks who have to take drug tests for their jobs. Several of my good friends stopped using it when that was a concern.
So that means very infrequently. Depends how many and what kinds of parties I found myself at that year.
I totally like it, will not hesitate if conditions are right, and the only reason I stayed away not doing any more than that was it wasn't worth the risk.
Even today I don't risk it because sometimes I drive across many state lines and I don't want to worry about keeping track of where I might possibly get in trouble if I piss off a cop at a traffic stop, which I am likely to do.
I don't think it's so crazy that there are pot smokers that can take it or leave it. Merely, you would probably never have realized I was a pot smoker, because I don't talk about it all the time for no reason, or even think about it. We'd have to be not merely aquaintances, but we'd have to sometime be at the same party at the same time with the other conditions met. You can't count these people that you have no way to know to count.
Not everyone is a hardcore binge drinker or an all-day-every-day pothead. There are lots of occasional-to-moderate users of both, and legalization of weed has increased availability for the casual user. There are many casual users nowadays who have never interacted with the illegal side of things, and never had a relationship with a dealer.
Weed is not a direct replacement for alcohol, but it can be a preferred alternative sometimes, for some people, and legalization has made that more attractive.
Yes, exactly you're proving my point. You see this as a slot to fill and are making it a wedge issue.
Then its a personal preference thing.
Consider that these people may not want to break the law or didn't know what their preference until they were legally able to try it.
They didn't want to get to know scuzzy dudes selling pot or driving to areas of town where at night they have street takeovers to score some pot.
Now those scaredy cats have legal dispensaries from which to obtain their MJ legally. So they might opt for pot these days.
Why's this?
Tariffs raise the consumer-visible price of those goods. This then, due to demand elasticity, causes consumers in those non-US countries to buy fewer of those products.
Some impact may be badwill as well but quite a bit is first-order impact of second-order tariffs.
I don’t imagine I’d buy any American imports if I was overseas.
Question: what is the percentage increase in tariff amounts on wine between the pre- and post-USMCA state of play between the US and Canada?
Sometimes seeing why something has happened requires considering wider context, which is why it's usually good for a nation to ensure primary education includes solid economics, history, media literacy, etc curricula.
His whole rhetoric is America should make more stuff right... Well, we can certainly stop buying that stuff since the choices he's made have hurt us. I'd prefer to buy closer to home thanks.
Not the only one I'm guessing.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports
Old world has always been able to be flexible, eating these kinds of punches by pivoting into NA or brandy during gluts, and demand has less fluctuations. This contraction, like a lot of everything else happening in the US, maybe was already coming because of some trends overlapping, but policy threw gasoline onto a combustible and fragile situation.
The actual answer is yes, at least when it comes to wine (although I will note that the trade war stuff is only part of the picture--it has certainly hurt a number of wineries that previously relied on exports, but the wine industry is experiencing a much broader downturn than just this).
Not all wine, of course, but some wine is indeed seeing prices drop. There have been some great deals to be had in the past few years in certain corners, both big and small. Costco has had increasingly good deals on wine lately and other large retailers are having more and more as well.
There's a lot of price stickiness with wine, with wineries not wanting to lower sticker prices (since price is closely tied to branding and market positioning), so there's also been this fascinating trend of wine increasingly being bulked out to online retailers that operate on a rotating flash sale model (companies like Last Bottle or Wine Access), or to third parties who relabel it and sell it under an NDA on the original brand. These segments of the market are only going to continue to grow in the coming years as the glut of wine continues.
Prices and costs generally increase as the quantity sold decreases.
If they're buying fewer bottles for example, bottles will cost them more per bottle.
And if they're "losing money on international sales", often times they'll try to recoup that elsewhere. Like jacking up their own prices in justification.
Very likely wine demand was not going up, and price increases were instead due to increasing costs and inflation.
So when demand softens it may be advantageous to hold back the excess rather than lower prices. Yes, there are cash flow issues when this approach gets out of hand, but financial interests can cover a lot of that as well.
You can see it happening in real-time, right this moment. Go to your local Costco wine section, look for the clearance markdowns where the price ends in $0.97. That means it's marked for clearance and won't be coming back, and there's some screaming deals right now.
It's nothing to do with health concerns. It's the economy.
Kind of like the Super Bowl and other major sporting events. Normies can make that their "major trip" for the year but mostly they want to sell their multi-thousand dollar tickets to folks who will be at the next big thing the following month.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
- Getting older, it affects me for longer. I don’t want to write off feeling tip top the next day. Too high a price to pay. - I try and train (exercise) hard most days - I can’t train anywhere near as well after alcohol. - Kids - when you’re trying to fit work, hobbies, training, learning / self development and kids / family in, there’s not much room for slack. (Which could be considered a bad situation in itself…)
Has just become not worth it regularly. Fortnightly binges work better!
But I don't drink my go-to Zinfandel anymore as it has a big ass flag printed on the box. It's embarrassing feeling the cashier's judgemental gaze. They know I'm a drunk of course but I don't want them thinking I support the US
Tell the wine makers to stop putting that flag on there and maybe exports may pick up again
Some of those friends disappeared almost immediately. The only thing we really had in common, after all, was drinking together. But what was most notable was that, within a few short years, the vast majority of that group of friends was stone-cold sober.
I’m now in my mid-to-late 30s, and I don’t have a single friend who drinks anymore. My wife and I never started drinking again, and we’ve even seen some of our older family members stop drinking too.
At least in my anecdotal experience and within my bubble, it’s becoming increasingly normalised to be sober. When I quit drinking, people questioned the decision, asked me if I had a problem, and were generally quite hostile the idea. When my sister-in-law quit drinking last year however, people celebrated the decision.
Times are certainly changing.
Sidenote: the amount of money I have saved by not drinking is astounding. I mostly funnel anything I don't spend into index funds and the returns have been staggering.
A lot of places in the world are going through huge increases in cost of living, their choice of alcohol is going to be a cheaper buzz as a result, not expensive ‘prestige’ alcohols
The next profitable use of land will show itself soon enough.
How hard is it to say you just don't know? The reason we have researchers and sociologists examine this stuff is to look at actual data and come to a better conclusion than rando Internet person that pulled it out of their ass.
I am very smart.
https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
So anybody may have their own take from their experience of what's happening.
I myself drink much less wine as is my inner circle so I have an opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Groundwater_Manage...
I once had a red from Franciscan, made from a vineyard right next to Opus One. To me it tasted remarkably similar, yet it cost more than 30x less.
Not worth it to me at least
Did I just get lucky? Anyone else do this?
Vinifera makes a perfectly fine table grape and grape juice, depending on the varietal.
For example, Thompson Seedless, an incredibly common table grape, is vinifera.
Wine is also widespread for cooking or marinating.
That's fine if you believe this is a long-term trend and creative destruction needs to replace it with something. Maybe it will even be more economically productive than a strip mall or a subdivision. (Maybe...)
That's less fine if you think this is due to temporary fluctuations in demands, such as say decreased demand of american goods due to either economic status or perception of american goods in global markets. That framing is one where some stupid national-level moves may have destroyed or consolidated american economic might. And whether consolidation is the same thing as destruction, it at least decreases competition and increases mediocrity, which reading between the lines on your tone is something I suspect you in theory might support.
That said, American wine—and California wine in particular—has a bit of an IPA problem inasmuch as there is a lot of overpriced, overproduced swill being priced exceptionally high by international standards.
Quick poking around Google... Italy, France, and Germany all have mid-tier bottles of their own domestic wine for far less than we (in the US) get any wine, domestic or import.
Often times, wealthy people buy wineries as a hobby to dabble in, but end up selling and calling it a day before it drains their cash. If you want to buy wine for cheap that is made in California, buy mass-market wine.
Smaller brands are generally expensive because that price is necessary to sustain operations, but most of the time that fails, and the owners end up selling.
Please always observe the guidelines when participating here, which include avoiding political/ideological battle and off-topic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It does suck for everyone else who didn't vote for this and I feel for them.
> Should I have worded it in a different way?
You shouldn’t have raised it at all. It’s a weak, tangential point, almost completely substance-free, and is in clear breach of the guidelines. HN is only a place where people want to participate because most people try to make solid points, and avoid posting junk like this.
Both political parties are made up of constituent cohorts. All Republicans are not anti-immigrant, anti-trade junkies in the same way all Democrats are not anti-work socialists. I think you'll find farmers in particular are generally much more pro-trade and pro-immigrant than the rest of the party.
The story is these farmers voted for Trump despite him tilting against their best interest. But the reality is they probably put up with his views on immigration and trade hoping they would be more than offset by his views on land use and tax policy (and have been sorely mistaken).
I know that people really want to make schadenfreude out of this But when the shoe is on the other foot and Republicans make these same kind of ad hominem attacks they equally fall flat. No, just because someone voted for Joe Biden doesn't make them a police-hating communist.
It's a little hard to feel bad for these people when they already saw how Trump didn't actually push their interests during his first term, and yet they voted for him again.
Meanwhile, the Project 2025 handbook was there for everyone to read, and Trump's rhetoric was based on cracking down on immigration (bye-bye, seasonal labor), beating up our trade partners (need to import farm tools? pay more!), and slashing federal government spending (haphazard and largely a failure to actually save money or tackle deficits or debt).
The 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act was a fine preview for more of the same in 2025, so I'm not sure what these voters were looking for when it comes to tax policy.
Land use is generally a state-level concern, so I'm not sure what they think Trump would be doing for them there.
Democrats are not anti-work socialists and never were. They never had rhetoric that would imply so. However, republicans do have anti-immigration, anti-trade rhetoric and politics.
> No, just because someone voted for Joe Biden doesn't make them a police-hating communist.
Of course, because Biden was not hating police and was not a communist. Republican party however is exactly what it is accused of being here. And Trump is its ruler and champion.
There is a good amount of research that suggests people do not vote using reason, or necessarily consider their own best interests. Rather, it is suggested that most people who vote affiliate themselves with a political party that appeals to their interpretation of morality; and then they vote on tribal lines.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5120865/
There has to be a large number of these? Or how do you explain voting him out and then back in?
And it links to a Feb 2025 article titled "Canada Tariffs Paused, but California Wineries Fear a Trade Dispute Would Be Crushing"
https://www.kqed.org/news/12025404/canada-tariffs-paused-cal...
Some of the best and most versatile farmland in the US is in California, and the northern half of the state is flush with water. Before the current system of watersheds was built, there was regular flooding. Some of us in NorCal get to experience some of the tastiest, cleanest drinking water in the country.
What an uninformed take...
All of which is irrelevant to the wine conversation, because the relatively dry climate is exactly what makes the Napa and Livermore valleys some of the best in the world to grow grapes. You've got good soil, dry summers allowing for control over how much water the grapes get that make them grow more flavorful, and very few frosts. The fact that the region gets almost all of their rainfall during the winter also helps avoid the grapes going to mold.
They have to pump water OUT of their fields and pay for the privilege of doing so as opposed to pumping it in from an irrigation canal.
Nothern California has no shortage of water whatsoever, and indeed it’s a regular news item whether or not to divert a few million extra gallows into the ocean to sustain some variety of fish that likes to swim around in the delta.
Even if there was an extreme drought, putting water in people's bodies via drinking should never be curtailed.
(though maybe stop watering crops with brawndo)
It gets hot here, but Temecula gets a breeze from the ocean that makes it somewhat tolerable for growing grapes. The wines were tend to be the high-alcohol variety (think cabs and zins) because those are what grow better in the heat.
Most of the wines here aren't that good, but the wineries are more the attraction because they're beautiful and a short drive from LA, SD, or Palm Springs. Popular for weddings and bachelorette parties.
(There are some wineries here doing interesting things but if I'm buying wine to consume at home I'm usually looking for other regions than my backyard).
I was thinking along the same vein, though - what about special varieties of grape juice?
It is objectively good if demand for alcohol goes down.
An interesting variety of grape juices would be very cool.
It did not feel right to buy murican grapes at full price in the middle of the summer.
The global financial infrastructure is set up for this to happen.
It's like how they're trying to put protein in everything now. People are eating less meat and quality natural proteins and instead eating cheaper, low quality, synthesized proteins. Companies can slash production costs while branding it as 'healthy' and charge a premium... Let media brainwashing fill the gap and create the profit margin out of nothing. An extreme case I saw was cheese; the other day my wife bought some horrible cheese with '50% more protein' which tastes like plastic... Paid premium for it. I suspect the protein is from whey which is usually a waste byproduct from cheesemaking; they usually remove the stuff because it makes the cheese taste worse... But now they leave it in slap on a '50% more protein' and charge a premium for it. Then when you watch YouTube, you see all these food influencers using the word 'Protein' all the time when referring to beef or chicken... Brainwashing you into thinking that they are equivalent because they want to sell the cheap stuff to you through a different channel as a premium product!
As for synthetic proteins like beta-lactoglobulin which they feed animals to substitute whey powder (which they now simply leave in the cheese as discussed)... Guess what they use to produce these? Yeast + Sugar! Now you know why all the media has ganged up against sugar! Sugar is the new villain now because they don't want people eating it and drive up the price. They want sugar to be cheap so they can convert it to artificial proteins... Which can be sold directly at a premium.
Basically, the waste byproduct which used to go into animal feed is now fed to humans instead... And the animals we raise for meat now consume synthetic crap made from quality products that are being suppressed by the media.
And guess what; some of the new proteins and chemicals used to feed livestock are difficult and hazardous to produce and so the companies behind those have an oligopoly.
It's kind of insane how the entire economy turned into a pure manipulation play.
Anyway this is on a bit of a tangent from the topic of grapes and wine but the culprit is also media manipulation driven by the design of the financial and political system which produces and supports media monopolies.
But, also, the income of younger generations has been crushed so much, the ones that do still drink can't afford expensive luxury booze. Decent wine is an expensive way to drink alcohol.
Sure they look big, round, juicy and shiny, but they are tasteless, so why would anyone buy them ?
In many non-Anglo-Euro countries, drinking is seen as moderately aberrant behaviour akin to frequenting sex workers or doing drugs.
I remember that everyone would whisper about an uncle of mine who "drank".
The poor man had around 5 or 6 drinks a week and has a moderately successful career as a lawyer at my country's Supreme Court.
But he was still the one who "drank".
That was your experience but is simply untrue as a generalization.
Arguably what is frowned upon is uncontrolled binge drinking and asocial behabiour of people who cannot hold a drink.
Wine and beer culture are still very much a part of social and family life in quite literally the whole of Europe.
You've gotta give some examples here.
The consequence is that the Homer Simpsons do not feel the need to drink alcohol anymore.
We created a system for measuring future trends for a food company and the trend of people avoiding sugars and alcohol is the strongest now.
For people outside the US to understand, you need to know that all foods in the US supermarkets are flooded with sugars in a way that is hard to comprehend unless you come from outside. You have the highest obesity levels in the world.
Those drugs have secondary effects but obesity has too, and they work very well.