While we've been fighting the Pandemic, another public policy battle surrounding health has been quietly fought in the shadows, the goal of which is to reduce or eliminate wine consumption by painting it as cancerous and unhealthy. This battle has been going on for a very long time, but the wine business hasn't responded or pushed back on the subject for 20 years.
Recent Warnings
I honestly had been living in the past with the belief that the French Paradox, the Mediterranean Diet, and Dr. Arthur L. Klatsky's extensive work on the cardiovascular health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption still maintained a place in the consumer's mind today. But I was shocked out of my sedated state in 2018 when I discovered the extent to which I was wrong, and started trying to get the industry's attention.
In the 2019 State of the Industry Report, I issued warnings about the rise in neo-prohibitionism; a loosely aligned movement with the World Health Organization as an axis, that has a goal reducing or eliminating alcohol consumption. They are well down the path executing their plan now.
In this blog in January of 2019, in a piece titled The Lost Wine Consumer of 2019, I spelled out how the message of the health benefits of moderate wine consumption that is scientifically proven in hosts of studies and adopted as part of the USDA Dietary Guidelines, had been removed from those Guidelines without public comment by the US Department of Health.
The anti-alcohol movement has moved off of the soundbite that wine in moderation created better total health outcomes measured in morbidity rates. They don't like it, so have spent time instead on studies that marginally link some cancers to alcohol. Nevermind that you will live longer and that consuming wine in moderation is healthy for you. Consumption could possibly cause cancer. That is the current playbook.
I addressed the issue in "I Can't Take the Lunacy" in March of 2019 after a 'scientific study' that had the stated goal of equating wine consumption to smoking cigarettes came out. The study's authors said, "Our estimation of a cigarette equivalent for alcohol provides a useful measure for communicating possible cancer risks that exploits successful historical messaging on smoking." (emphasis added). The goal of this study wasn't scientific. It was geared at providing consumers misleading connections to cancer using specious study assumptions with the goal of having wine consumers believe that consuming wine had the same health benefit as smoking cigarettes.
In September 2019 I published both, "Get Ready for Cancer Warnings on Wine Labels," and a second piece showing how trends and messaging had pushed milk into a long term state of decline "Wine & Milk in Decline due to Changing Science," the point of which was to draw corollaries between what's happened to milk and what's happened to wine in the media and culture.
Then in January of 2020 in the SVB Annual State of the Industry Report, I again called out the problem of neo-prohibitionism as a threat.
Not just limiting myself to writing, during the past two years I've had direct conversations with people in public policy roles within the alcohol beverage industry - wine, beer, and spirits. The beer and spirits folks seem to have made peace with a Drink Responsibly campaign and believe that approach long ago negotiated, would protect them against prohibitionist intent.