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mamonster 7 hours ago [-]
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.
vjk800 6 hours ago [-]
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.
darkwater 6 hours ago [-]
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!)
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rob74 2 hours ago [-]
While the origins may be religious, I'd say the high taxes on alcohol and most alcoholic beverages only being available in state-run shops (Systembolaget/Vinmonopolet/Alko/Vínbúðin) is by now a 100% Nordic phenomenon.
The most interesting situation is actually in Iceland: full prohibition introduced 1915, wine legalized 1922, all other beverages legalized 1935 except for (of all things) beer with more than 2.25% ABV, which had to wait until 1 March 1989 (since then celebrated as "Beer Day") - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Iceland
I believe this is common in Canadian provinces as well?
nephihaha 9 minutes ago [-]
No, more to do with health concerns and antisocial behaviour.
fisad 3 hours ago [-]
Denmark never had any kind of mild alcohol prohibitionist policies or restrictions
wvh 50 minutes ago [-]
I'd say that here in Finland, the decline in alcohol use has more to do with global trends, especially with the younger generations. The problem though is that there has not been any replacement for the social lubrication required here for people to attempt to be social. Purely based on my own experiences, people are less social, go out less, and therefore use less alcohol.
Feels as if the death of religion is followed by the death of bars, restaurants and other places to go out to in the evening, especially after Covid, leaving even fewer places to meet people.
It's true that people up here tend to get very drunk collectively as the evening drags on, which has always bothered me as somebody who doesn't drink alcohol... First everybody's very dry and awkward, then it's fun for an hour or so, and then things start getting over the top and pretty mental. Compared with central Europe, people don't slow down a few glasses in.
But all that is changing as it seems many people just stopped going out at all. So people might drink less alcohol, but I'm not sure that indicates an improvement of mental health or social coherence. The internet is making people lonelier.
Zolomon 37 minutes ago [-]
From my anecdotal experience in Sweden, I suspect it might have a lot to do with the lasting economic situation since Covid. People do not seem to be able to afford going out or having people over like they used to.
Prices have increased a lot, making the margins even harder to survive on for the majority.
TFNA 4 hours ago [-]
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.
motionlessveloc 4 hours ago [-]
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.
wvh 48 minutes ago [-]
Exactly, the younger generations just stay at home, on the internet. So social drinking has mostly disappeared. Those that really want to get totally drunk probably still do though.
cindyllm 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mhitza 4 hours ago [-]
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!
ToucanLoucan 45 minutes ago [-]
Of course we should be, but the line went down, therefore we need 600 think-pieces attempting to shame us for caring for our health.
Wife and I used to be avid drinkers but with the expansion of legal cannabis, it's just not as good of an option. I'll still make myself a negroni or an old fashioned on occasion, just because they're delicious, but I haven't drank-to-get-drunk in YEARS. If I'm actually trying to unwind (and who isn't given the sheer STATE of our world!) I'm spoiled for choices of substances that both don't interact with my depression nearly as badly as alcohol and, as a bonus, don't make me gain weight like an inflation fetish character.
The alcohol industry won spectacularly for decades a game of public policy and image where alcohol, a substance connected to industrial quantities of human death and suffering, was somehow the "accepted and normal" way to get fucked up when you wanted to be, even though again, numerous alternatives existed that were better for you. They're going to go through a similar process to tobacco I think, which is to say: it'll still be around, but it will shrink to an industry sized appropriately for the actual demand of it's product.
21asdffdsa12 3 hours ago [-]
No, no its not the Finns nor the russians. Its the latvian and estonian harbours :P
boelboel 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bko 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ethbr1 4 hours ago [-]
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.
criddell 2 hours ago [-]
I think smoking is going through a mini-resurgence right now.
I think back to my childhood and smoking was everywhere. My high school (graduated in 1989) had a smoking area for students. Cigarette smoke wafted out of the teacher's lounge. Kids would light up as soon as they got off the bus on a field trip. I don't have many specific memories of it, but people must have reeked.
Alcohol was also huge. We had a fifth year of high school (grade 13) and so there were plenty of 19 year old students and the drinking age was 19. Students would buy beer on their lunch period for the weekend and store it in their locker and nobody thought anything of it.
KoolKat23 5 hours ago [-]
This is sad to hear.
On the whole I think it's a terrible thing that people have started taking themselves too seriously.
HPsquared 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jareklupinski 3 hours ago [-]
> Everyone declined and the looks I got were the same as if I had offered them crack cocaine.
should have offered them some THC to chill them out :P
dlisboa 35 minutes ago [-]
> Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two?
That's really just a personal trait. I love going to my kid's friend's birthdays because we get to talk to the other parents who have become good friends as well, plus we don't have to look after the kids as much. "Adult time" and we know they're having fun. I don't have to drink in those.
I guess not everyone is that outgoing and not every parent group is as friendly as mine but it's hard to see getting drunk as a necessary counter to that.
> Turns out people suck at socialising without alcohol, and if alcohol disappears, people just stay at home and play video games or something.
Again, a personal trait. It's extremely common here in Brazil to drink but it's also very common to just not drink and have as much fun. Someone saying they need to have alcohol to enjoy themselves at a gathering is not going to be looked at very kindly, as if everyone else was just so boring they had to intoxicate themselves to bear through it.
petre 4 hours ago [-]
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.
chromatin 4 hours ago [-]
I started to correct you that the limit was surely 0.05%, but then I saw you snuck a per-mille sign in, instead of a percent sign. Nicely done
Tade0 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
nhod 1 hours ago [-]
At this exact moment there is another post [1] on HN from Derek Thompson talking about the >70% drop over the past few decades in having other people over to socialize for dinner. Correlation is not causation, and...
> 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.
motionlessveloc 4 hours ago [-]
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.
konart 2 hours ago [-]
> And often the parties are held in a McDonalds or something,
God, what a great childhood I had...
I can't even imagine a birthday party being held in some joint or something.
In my country a kid having a birthday always meant homemade food and fun (up to the age of 15 or something).
ethbr1 4 hours ago [-]
I'm sympathetic to parent (both ways) on this one. Acquaintances' kids birthdays are and should be mostly about the kids.
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.
rubzah 4 hours ago [-]
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.
12 minutes ago [-]
TFNA 4 hours ago [-]
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.
>> Democritus says: “One man means as much to me as a multitude, and a multitude only as much as one man.”
cpburns2009 2 hours ago [-]
Having a beer or two at a kids birthday party is a world away from getting trashed at a college party. Personally, I need a drink to loosen up and not be so uptight around casual acquaintances. I offer the same courtesy when I host birthday parties.
laughing_man 4 hours ago [-]
Having a drink or two is not the same thing as getting drunk.
bko 5 hours ago [-]
HR ruined everything didn't they?
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.
furyg3 4 hours ago [-]
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 :)
bko 3 hours ago [-]
> pensions, benefits, workplace safety, reintegration from sickness,
We use Justworks and they do that all for us. You're technically an employee of Justworks, and their name shows up on your paychecks. You hook into their health and 401k benefits, and they check all the workplace safety boxes. For instance, they'll mail you posters you legally have to put up in your office to ensure you're telling employees about overtime. HR plays literally no role in any of time apart from maybe selecting the health plans, something we do once a year and roll over every time.
> ensuring that staff is well trained for their role
What does an HR person know about training for your role? Is HR cross-trained in engineering for instance? Seems wildly different from my experience. HR would ineffectively screen candidates and ask you about buzz words. So they'll ask "do you have experience in Javascript" and I'll say "no, but I have a lot of experience in Typescript" and they'll just screen me out because they'll have no context.
And HR staff is also much more social so they'll pick up on awkwardness and screen there as well, when in many fields like engineering, the tolerance of awkwardness is much higher.
SaltyBackendGuy 1 hours ago [-]
Being from the US, I hadn't considered that HR could be anything other than employee hostile.
laughing_man 4 hours ago [-]
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.
tempest_ 3 hours ago [-]
> 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued
Which people would be wise to remember. HR is there to protect the company, not you or your co-workers. Sometimes these two things align but not always.
bko 3 hours ago [-]
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.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
> A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed
Yes. This is where all the rules come from. It's just like airline safety or workplace safety: for almost every rule, you can find the incident which caused it to be put in place.
The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem. There have been enough women bullied out of jobs they loved by harassment from male co-workers, over and over again, and enough of them have won their lawsuits or tribunals against the employers, that there are rules against this, which will be enforced.
And enough people will have used "I was drinking" as an excuse for harassment that companies feel the need to limit their risk by banning drinking.
People get annoyed at HR for being a "compliance" role, but it's the same phenomenon as hating the people checking the fire exits, the ladders, PAT testing all your electrical devices (this may be UK specific?), making you wear a hard hat and safety boots, or making you reconcile the cash in the register with the receipts.
bko 2 hours ago [-]
> The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem
???
Where do you get that from? I do think it's a problem and it becomes a problem because we accept mixed-sex work environments. HR isn't there to protect women from getting harassed, they're mostly there to protect management. Sexual harassment is still illegal, whether HR exists or not.
I don't think HR ladies are roaming factory floors making sure people are wearing hardhats. That's a managers responsibility and the company has legal obligations.
usrusr 11 minutes ago [-]
So when exactly has that non-mixed-sex workplace existed? It hasn't, the mixed nature was just buried under ungodly amounts of hierarchy full of gender defaults. With harassment just taken as a given. Partially held in check by, well, good guys who I guess have always existed, and the ones from the dark ages must have been very good given the lack of external checks, but those 20 or whatever percent who weren't must have made life quite miserable for those at the wrong side of the default imbalance. Yes, progress has happened but we should still have more of it, not less. And HR plays a role in this progress, even if at times it appears a little annoying or excessive.
pjc50 7 minutes ago [-]
The non-mixed-sex workplace was definitely a thing in the early 20th century that required explicit effort to change.
laughing_man 3 hours ago [-]
Drinking at lunch is a great example. The company can get sued for that.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
Not specifically for that, but if something does go wrong afterwards it makes the company much more likely to be liable for not preventing it.
ethbr1 4 hours ago [-]
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.
onion2k 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bko 3 hours ago [-]
Mixed workplaces are more problematic. Most industries were almost exclusively single sex and things worked well without HR
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
No you can't just give people free rein to sexually harass the female staff.
ninalanyon 5 hours ago [-]
Is that really HR or a reflection of the social environment in your specific country. I never found HR to be a problem in Norway.
zzzeek 1 hours ago [-]
if we can be in offices now without regressive troglodytes in positions of authority freely making loud racist (and completely personalized) insults directed at their non-white peers and subordinates, to the guffaws of all the other men in the room (this is an actual thing I witnessed as a young intern at a defense contractor in the late 1980s, and no I was not the victim. to get a racist incident so glaring that even in 1988, it stays in the mind of a young white 18 year old kid for 40 years, means it had to be pretty bad), HR probably didn't ruin exactly everything.
bell-cot 3 hours ago [-]
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.
(Yes, this pretty is US-specific.)
carefree-bob 4 hours ago [-]
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.
m_fayer 2 hours ago [-]
People are more neurotic now because of ubiquitous gamification and scoring. Health and aging and looks are scored, alcohol will cost you. Appearing controlled and on brand is a game, alcohol throws the game off. We’ve chosen a dry panopticon.
Cipater 4 hours ago [-]
Alcohol is a terrible drug. IMO it is a great thing that drinking at work is so frowned upon that it is basically verboten.
icantevenhold 1 hours ago [-]
Yea I don’t get all the moping in this thread about alcohol being in decline.
In my country it was wayyy to socially acceptable (almost required) to get blackout drunk every weekend; people fighting; drunk drivers; the amount of alcoholics destroying their life because it’s so accessible.
Don’t get me wrong i enjoy a drink once in a while, even getting drunk sometimes but overall it’s a terrible terrible drug.
Hendrikto 4 hours ago [-]
And for what benefit? 9/10 ”problems“ HR ”solves“ were created by them in the first place. HR is a net negative to society.
bahmboo 4 hours ago [-]
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.
socalgal2 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mrob 5 hours ago [-]
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.
KoolKat23 5 hours ago [-]
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.
timroman 5 hours ago [-]
I have Claude for this now
ethbr1 4 hours ago [-]
Go home Claude, you're drunk.
ted_bunny 4 hours ago [-]
Uninvited
dofm 4 hours ago [-]
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.
binarymax 5 hours ago [-]
There is the mysterious Ballmer peak after all.
petre 4 hours ago [-]
Guess we'll have to ask Jackson Pollock. Wait, he died in an accident while drunk driving.
SecretDreams 3 hours ago [-]
While I don't agree or disagree, we had a rule with my grad school colleagues and prof that we couldn't have certain discussions if four people had a pint in hand and the fifth was there drinking water, taking notes lol.
papua_is_being_ 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
This doesn't work when you're a person being encouraged to drink in an asymmetric power dynamic and it turns out the people you're drinking with are monsters. You end up in a tragic story like what happened in the Dartmouth Predator Professor Gang and perhaps the recent Cornell case as well.
roncesvalles 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Alcohol is going the way of cigarettes.
ifwinterco 3 hours ago [-]
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
lab14 2 hours ago [-]
BS. They just replaced alcohol with weed and a bit of amphetamines.
meq1986 3 hours ago [-]
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.
KptMarchewa 4 hours ago [-]
>I still see construction workers drinking a can at 6:30pm however.
You mean AM, right?
jordanb 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
It's been like this in America for decades. Even places with "beer on tap" the expectation is you don't drink until after the work day. If you were pulling the tab at lunch you'd get a talk from your boss and eventually HR
More Americanization of Europe?
icantevenhold 1 hours ago [-]
I have the inverse experience in Europe; my former boss would almost force me to drink when we went out for lunch sometimes.
There was rarely a meeting with him where I didn’t come home buzzed.
Gud 6 hours ago [-]
It’s because alcohol fucking sucks.
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…
ssl-3 5 hours ago [-]
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?
But smoking a bowl will ruin them on those tests.
devilbunny 1 hours ago [-]
I have an acquaintance who works for Chevron in a normal office job. In California, only the refinery workers get regular drug tests. In Texas, everyone does. And this dude used to smoke a fair amount of weed. It’s a good job, so he stays clean, but there’s really no reason to require it of someone in his role - he has never even been to one of their refineries.
konart 1 hours ago [-]
I think this is very subjective.
The only time I smoked a joint I thought I was gonna die. Never fucking again, lol.
Nothing beats taste and effects of small dose of whiskey with some fruut or vodka with an appetizer. Or a few glasses of wine.
cromka 4 hours ago [-]
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?
efields 3 hours ago [-]
There's no studies, but a lot of anecdata.
disantlor 2 hours ago [-]
this is my experience, with very low dose edibles
brailsafe 6 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
iso1631 3 hours ago [-]
You're looking at covid. Look at the 25 year period from .90 in 2000 up to 9.3 by 2008, then flat until covid, then a bump during covid times before lowering at 9.5
Sure you can say it's reduced from a peak which happened to coincide with an unprecedented pandemic. Wake me when it's back to the 9.3 norm of the 2010s let alone the 9 it was around 2000.
Now it's quite possible that fewer people are drinking at all, but of those who are drinking, they are drinking more.
Or it's quite possible that annecdotes about who you see in the gym and on instagram are just annecdotes
(for what it's worth I have seen data showing under 30s are drinking less in 2025 than under 30s drank in 2005, or 1985, etc, which would imply over 30s are drinking more to make up for it, but I don't have it to hand and it may not have been US specific)
gib444 4 hours ago [-]
> Alcohol is just in a structural decline
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. :(
tialaramex 4 hours ago [-]
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
ethbr1 3 hours ago [-]
NORM!
mschuster91 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
BlobberSnobber 5 hours ago [-]
They meant a Feierabendbierchen, which is strictly required for construction workers by some DIN standard, I’m sure
tempest_ 3 hours ago [-]
Ah yes the the party end of day cute beer (I think?)
Some German compound nouns are funny.
icantevenhold 1 hours ago [-]
Nah it’s just a (small) drink (Bierchen) you’re having with coworkers at the end of the working day (Feierabend).
Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a party.
piker 6 hours ago [-]
At 6:30pm? It’s illegal for construction workers to drink after work?
blackguardx 5 hours ago [-]
20 years ago on a trip to Germany, I saw what I was told was a group of construction workers/laborers drinking beers in the morning before work...
motionlessveloc 4 hours ago [-]
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.
chopin 5 hours ago [-]
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.
icantevenhold 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe we live in different parts of the country but in bavaria it’s completely fine and common to have a beer at lunch, both blue and white collar workers
PyWoody 4 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing you don't know many roofers. I've watched roofers crush tall boys at 6AM more times than I can count.
ethbr1 4 hours ago [-]
Roofing's a helluva job. If I was a roofer, you'd damn well believe I'd have a beer+ before work.
People seek pain management where they can get it, and alcohol isn't the worst.
cucumber3732842 2 hours ago [-]
You misspelled meth. Roofers do meth. Outdoor trades do uppers. Indoor trades smoke weed. Everyone smokes cigarettes. Except the electricians, they smoke pole. Everyone knows that.
icantevenhold 1 hours ago [-]
Yea it’s definitely not gone in Bavaria. Plenty of people get a nice beer during lunch, construction workers and bankers alike.
miroljub 5 hours ago [-]
Declining usage of alcohol is one of the major reasons of declining birth rates and an epidemic of loneliness in white countries.
pjc50 5 hours ago [-]
I think the underlying causal factor of both is actually phones/social media.
MentalM 14 minutes ago [-]
I think they have practically unrelated causal factors.
About children the case is quite obvious. We created the cultural environment in which children are considered no less human than productive members of society and deserve if not the same amount of resources, then more. This order aligns well both with Western worldview and with human biological nature, so people are easily accepting and strengthening it.
But if we are spending on a child as many resources as on productive members of society, that means for fertility rate 2 we should forgo half of our resources. So on average to forgo half of your work for children are not very tempting, but to spend on children less is sociocultural unacceptable. The only solution? Less children.
I think fertility rate 1.5 is already pretty high for such environment and only show how strong biological drive to procreate for humans is. And government's attempts to increase birth rates by spending more seems like rather terrible idea: that only will increase cultural expectation on children costs and effectively will lower the birth rate even more.
psp99 4 hours ago [-]
yet muslims dont drink and are habitually on their phones, with no issues reproducing.
roncesvalles 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ethbr1 4 hours ago [-]
Muslims also, as a generalization, have richer regular socialization opportunities via religion.
If the bar was the primary Western common area ("Where everybody knows your name..."), then its disuse leaves nothing to replace it.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
The "Bangladesh Miracle" says otherwise: by intensive effort the birth rate was brought down from 6.7 to 1.89.
(people keep forgetting how much reducing population growth and teenage pregnancy has been an explicit policy goal for decades! Getting it down to replacement rate is good, now we're arguing about the other direction needlessly)
PunchyHamster 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Planktonne 5 hours ago [-]
It says nothing good about you that you leap at any opportunity to minimise and undermine sexual assault allegations.
PunchyHamster 3 hours ago [-]
I don't. I'm talking about unfair treatment of same case ("someone got drunk and did something they regretted") between sexes
It says A LOT about you that you immediately jump to arrogant conclusions
Planktonne 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not going to argue with you about what you pretend you're saying; you know what you are doing, and so does everyone else.
alkonaut 5 hours ago [-]
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).
werdnapk 4 hours ago [-]
Canada actually has quite a lot of domestic production across the country. BC and Ontario are the main producers and have many wineries.
giarc 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, but many of those wineries import their grapes from California (or other places).
My wife and I participate in this boycott and were drinking a sparkling white from Mission Hill Winery which is one of the biggest BC wineries. We noticed the label said something like "Produced in Canada" and then listed grapes imported from California.
Wines that are produced from 100% BC grapes are labelled "BC VQA" and only 19% of the wines in BC are BC VQA.
barbazoo 59 minutes ago [-]
I think this is temporary and related to crop failures when a lot of BC berries froze. AFAIK they grow their own grapes otherwise. Who knows for how much longer and if the climate will allow growing grapes sustainably at all in those places.
misiti3780 40 minutes ago [-]
The wine from Canada is not good, unless you like dessert wine/icewine. Maybe there are some exceptions for riesling but it's too cold to grow nice vines there.
juujian 3 hours ago [-]
Even Ontarians don't speak kindly about wine from Ontario lol
AlanYx 1 hours ago [-]
That's because the LCBO has a monopoly on wine sales in Ontario and it's very difficult for Ontario wineries to get their good wines into the LCBO. It's a combination of shelf fees, minimum volume requirements, and an idiosyncratic evaluation system where their participation costs are not covered.
Spend some time at wineries on the Niagara escarpment and you'll find some great wines, especially whites that benefit from the limestone heavy soils. Even the large producers that have a poor public reputation for quality (Trius, Iniskillin, etc.) have much better wines available on site that never make it to the LCBO. For the most part (some exceptions), the people who run these wineries are wine enthusiasts who genuinely care about quality. Prices for that quality are higher than other wine regions with more favorable climates, higher production, and lower labour costs though, that is true.
1over137 3 hours ago [-]
Depends. Ontario ice wine is great.
misiti3780 39 minutes ago [-]
because it sucks lol
MadrasThorn 31 minutes ago [-]
More vineyards around the world are being built and the field is getting more crowded amid a shrinking market.
carefree-bob 5 hours ago [-]
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.
rickdeckard 4 hours ago [-]
When looking at the actual wine export-volume as factual reasoning [0], it draws a different picture and shows a drop of almost 50% from 2020 to 2025.
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.
huxley 3 hours ago [-]
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.
toyg 4 hours ago [-]
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).
khriss 4 hours ago [-]
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.
carefree-bob 4 hours ago [-]
No one measures exports by "tonnage".
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.
rickdeckard 2 hours ago [-]
You're misreading the data you shared
> "68 billion dollars worth of sales each year"
TOTAL Retail value (includes markups by wholesalers, retailers and restaurateurs), NOT Sales Revenue.
> "only about a billion dollars of California wine is sold abroad"
That's Sales revenue [1]
> "So 98% of California wine is sold within the US. Only 2% is exported."
The data is right on the page you shared.
Total shipments 2024 [0] (in millions of 9-liter cases):
California wine shipments to US and export: 232.3
California wine shipments to US: 203.5
--> Export: 28,8
So the export volume in 2024 appears to be >12%, not 2%
There's no data for 2025, but wine exports fell by ~20% in 2025 [1], if TOTAL wine shipments fell equally this is quite a strong dent in volumes already in 2025. So 2026 doesn't look rosy to begin with before any trade-war being added...
> "It's pretty funny if you think about it, you have some Bosnian dude [..]"
the op was from sweden, not bosnia though; and surely if there's no impact of the trade war and tariffs why to put them up in the first place?
bregma 4 hours ago [-]
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.
carefree-bob 4 hours ago [-]
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.
alkonaut 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
invalidusernam3 3 hours ago [-]
That looks like inflation.
api 4 hours ago [-]
Are those inflation adjusted numbers? Inflation tends to hide all kinds of problems, which is why politicians love it.
cuttysnark 4 hours ago [-]
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?
herval 3 hours ago [-]
Tobacco has never been more lucrative. Between Zyn and vapes, they’re swimming in cash
TheSkyHasEyes 2 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Synthetic nicotine has been around for awhile as well, which is much cheaper than sourcing the old fashioned way.
thinkingtoilet 3 hours ago [-]
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.
locusofplenty 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
specproc 9 minutes ago [-]
You. Yes you, alcohol-consuming Californian. Go buy some grapes whilst they're cheap and make some wine.
I barely drink these days, but wine production is great fun and pretty damn easy. I've done it a couple of times, it was super rewarding.
It's much more straightforward than most booze (e.g., beer). You just need clean gear and mashed up grapes, and some sulphites on hand if things get a bit wonky. There's very little else to it.
I think anyone who drinks should make wine once in their life.
5ersi 9 hours ago [-]
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).
mkesper 6 hours ago [-]
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.
aitchnyu 5 hours ago [-]
My sleep tracker registers terrible deep sleep and sometimes I jolk awake after the buzz wears off.
adastra22 4 hours ago [-]
Get yourself checked for sleep apnea.
seer 5 hours ago [-]
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.
voidmain0001 5 hours ago [-]
I take your list of reasons and add empty calories to it. I’m training and want muscle mass, not a beer belly so no alcohol for me.
dgan 9 hours ago [-]
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
beeforpork 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kuerbel 6 hours ago [-]
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
shoobiedoo 6 hours ago [-]
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
King-Aaron 6 hours ago [-]
We have some legitimately excellent options here in the Australian market. The Heaps Normal XPA is definitely worth a crack.
gmurphy 3 hours ago [-]
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.
aweiland 56 minutes ago [-]
The US market is having a boom of craft NA beers and many are really good. Athletic, Go Brewing, and Sober Carpenter are my main go tos. Guinness 0.0 scratches an itch, but I find it a little sweet. The NA Corona with a lime slice is almost indistinguishable from the original. Strangely I find the Stella NA very good (I don't normally drink the regular Stella).
If you like sour beers my experience is they are nearly identical to their native counterparts.
I generally find the breweries that focus completely on NA beer better than existing players who are adding NA to their line up.
moooo99 8 hours ago [-]
> non alcoholic beers taste terrible
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.
robotmay 7 hours ago [-]
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).
jillesvangurp 3 hours ago [-]
I like Störtebeker Atlantic Ale, IPA style beer. Very drinkable. Available in most super markets and Späti's (late night shops). Here in Berlin there's also the Brlo Nakid which is similar in taste.
If you want a pils style beer, Jever Fun is pretty hoppy. Krombacher has a decent 0.0 beer as well. A bit on the sweet side for me but I have that sometimes. I also recall seeing a beer that was labelled as Feinherb at some point that was pretty tasty. The exact name escapes me.
Several of the Bavarian beer hall style helles beers now also come in alcohol free versions. Very drinkable. They taste very similar. Bayreuther is one that you might find in some shops.
Many of the Hefeweizen varieties also exist in alcohol free versions and are pretty drinkable. Most places will have that available.
Not German but some bars now have Guinness 0.0 in cans. Haven't seen that in the supermarket but it's a near drop in replacement for normal Guinness as far as I'm concerned and I tend to order that when I see it available.
I stopped drinking alcohol a few years ago but I still enjoy going out with friends who do drink. Mostly people barely notice what other people drink. And the lack of a hangover after a good night sleep is a nice bonus. Although you can overdo it. I always joke about all of the downsides of drinking beers without any of the upsides.
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
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.
icantevenhold 1 hours ago [-]
This is the best one out of all mentioned in this thread by far
moooo99 5 hours ago [-]
I am not sure about international availability, so your best bet are probably very large breweries.
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.
gryzzly 4 hours ago [-]
I like "light" Warsteiner 2,5% on a hot day.
ekzy 8 hours ago [-]
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.
eszed 37 minutes ago [-]
One of the things I miss the most (on a daily basis the most) about the UK is the beer. What you're suggesting just doesn't exist in the USA. Really and truly doesn't.
(Though, as others in this thread point out, NA beers are more common, and better, than they used to be. They're not the same thing, though.)
citrin_ru 6 hours ago [-]
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.
stasomatic 2 hours ago [-]
So how come there are so many rowdy drunks inside and outside pubs in London? Perhaps they are just drinking more of that 3.4%.
I like the taste of Heineken 0:0. Not the same but pleasant regardless.
Meanwhile, in the States I see more and more 8/9/10% IPAs from major brewers.
dukeyukey 5 hours ago [-]
My local Morrisons has a few decent 3.4% ales for £1-£1.25, I am a loyal customer.
Steve16384 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not a fan of Morrisons, but they do have a great range of booze.
dgan 7 hours ago [-]
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
robotmay 7 hours ago [-]
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.
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Kubuxu 7 hours ago [-]
If it is 30sqm local store, then get to know the owner and ask them to stock it for you.
toolslive 7 hours ago [-]
get a "Stella 0.0" and tell me it tastes terrible.
antonvs 6 hours ago [-]
Stella - the Belgian equivalent to Budweiser.
toolslive 6 hours ago [-]
In Belgium, Stella is fully accepted, contrary to fe "Cristal" or "Maes".
Of course, it's no "Jupiler".
King-Aaron 7 hours ago [-]
lol that stuff is absolutely awful
10729287 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mjg59 7 hours ago [-]
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.
thorin 1 hours ago [-]
Real ale has plenty of lower alcohol percentage options:
My faves are Harvest Pale 3.8% and Our House 3.4%
I also like mild which is often <=3%
0% Guinness is the only beer I would say that matches the taste of alcohol based beer. The others can be ok, but taste too malty, the flavour is off somehow. Also having 2 or more none alcohol beers seems to also make me feel "hungover" in a way, maybe due to additives.
ce4 8 hours ago [-]
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
WarmWash 2 hours ago [-]
I think the trend has been a small (and making shrinking) contingent of alcoholics/"beer enthusiests" that are the backbone of the beer industry, and they always lean towards favoring higher alchohol
amenghra 7 hours ago [-]
Corona zero and Guinness Zero aren't that bad. A Guinness Zero on draft is pretty much the same taste as the regular stuff.
smnplk 6 hours ago [-]
Wow, didnt know Guinness Zero existed. Now that stuff might actually be good 4 you :D
Poacher5 5 hours ago [-]
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.
coldpie 4 hours ago [-]
Others have me ruined that NA beers are pretty decent these days. 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.
HeadlessChild 8 hours ago [-]
> non alcoholic beers taste terrible
That's a rather broad claim. There is so many different variations non alcoholic beer nowadays.
jeltz 6 hours ago [-]
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.
hermitcrab 5 hours ago [-]
The non-alcoholic beers have improved a lot in recent years. Even the non-alcoholic Guiness tastes pretty close to normal Guiness.
dukeyukey 5 hours ago [-]
My local supermarket sells 3.4% ales for £1 each, it's fantastic.
kubb 7 hours ago [-]
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.
parkersweb 6 hours ago [-]
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.
hermitcrab 5 hours ago [-]
>I’m also told that Guinness 0% is pretty good
I could probably tell it apart from normal Guinness in a blind taste test. But it is pretty good.
hutattedonmyarm 7 hours ago [-]
There are some excellent non-alcoholic ones, but also some terrible ones. Maybe see if you can find a few different brands
burnished 7 hours ago [-]
Get into radlers and shandys! Even do for yourself at home, go 50/50 beer and lemonade. Very refreshing.
sfn42 5 hours ago [-]
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.
2c2c2c 7 hours ago [-]
NA guinness tastes the same
librasteve 7 hours ago [-]
coors light
petre 4 hours ago [-]
> 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 on 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.
jll29 6 hours ago [-]
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.
jt2190 22 minutes ago [-]
Technically yes, but it would be unprofitable to pivot. (Presumably whoever you bought your juice from was planning to make juice, and budgeted accordingly.)
podocarp 5 hours ago [-]
Aren't grapes for wine different from those for eating? Probably tastes bad if you eat it directly?
znpy 5 hours ago [-]
Nah, they still taste like grape and sugary. It wouldn’t ferment without sugar after all.
gryzzly 4 hours ago [-]
I have never had grapes that tasted better than wine grapes in Georgia (the country). Like a juicy caramel.
ptero 4 hours ago [-]
Aren't Georgian wine grapes very different from Californian? I love Georgian wine, but some of my friends in the US shudder after trying it.
petre 4 hours ago [-]
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.
FinnKuhn 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Alcohol consumption was already in decline before the massive increase in GLP-1 drug use. As someone who used Mounjaro, I think that's only the tip of the iceberg.
When on these drugs, you simply have no desire for such things, and I'm a beer and wine lover. Now that I've stopped, I'm slowly drinking again, but I feel my taste has changed.
I don't know if it was the drugs or the time that passed, but I simply can't drink or have the same desire as before (it could be my age, too, lol).
intothemild 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Wine was an easy switch.
jnaina 13 hours ago [-]
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.
bunderbunder 12 hours ago [-]
Millennial here, and it was the same for me.
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.
globular-toast 9 hours ago [-]
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.
BoxOfRain 5 hours ago [-]
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.
kkotak 13 hours ago [-]
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.
boobsbr 6 hours ago [-]
I just drink at home now. It's cheaper and I can find different beers I want to taste rather than the meager selection available at a pub.
12 hours ago [-]
breezybottom 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mikeg8 12 hours ago [-]
To imply that the global pandemic and lockdowns didn’t effect social norms going forward is incredibly ignorant. A little more than “getting old”
breezybottom 3 hours ago [-]
It's not a social norm if you're the only one doing it.
kelnos 12 hours ago [-]
It's both. We got older, but COVID hastened a change in behavior and helped lock it in (if you'll excuse the expression).
dceddia 13 hours ago [-]
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.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5 hours ago [-]
> 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 organism is practically hacking the plant in a multiphase process. It is interesting how selection forces are working at every stage, hardening the hack.
sushibowl 4 hours ago [-]
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.
MaxScheiber 3 hours ago [-]
> Coming from Europe I'm used to see that every vineyard makes their own wine.
This isn’t strictly true. Europe has négociants, who buy grapes from smaller growers to make wine from (to be fair, often alongside their own vineyard holdings).
> But then again, who cares for American wine (certainly not the Euros).
Huge fan of Old World wine here. With that said, the Americans are producing remarkable wines these days. For my palate, I enjoy Sonoma and Willamette Valley. Even tasted blind, top critics have preferred California to France — look up the Judgment of Paris!
frutiger 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
gilrain 3 hours ago [-]
This comment is extremely ignorant across several of its statements. Ignore.
adastra22 4 hours ago [-]
You clearly don't know anything about American wine but just want to spew stereotypes and ignorance.
locusofplenty 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
alexandre_m 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thefourthchime 9 hours ago [-]
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?
doikor 8 hours ago [-]
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.
VerifiedReports 8 hours ago [-]
There are chatrooms again?
Y-bar 8 hours ago [-]
They moved to places like WhatsApp and Discord I believe.
jeltz 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, they are on Discord.
VerifiedReports 58 minutes ago [-]
Ah OK.
watwut 8 hours ago [-]
If there is a creepy video as a result, the "move" was likely creepy.
thefourthchime 8 hours ago [-]
The move is only creepy if the interest is one way.
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
gilrain 3 hours ago [-]
Actually, most women don't like being assaulted, regardless of the attractiveness of the assaulter. Additionally, this is true of humans generally, not just women.
It's really gross that you think of women as so alien and inhuman.
watwut 7 hours ago [-]
Except you made that up.
Mountain_Skies 7 hours ago [-]
It's a common meme. You can disagree with the validity of the meme but not with the existence of it.
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.
kortilla 8 hours ago [-]
The reality is that most awkwardness comes across as creepy. Lots of people are awkward, especially young people. They shouldn’t be shamed for it.
norome 7 hours ago [-]
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.
croon 5 hours ago [-]
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.
watwut 7 hours ago [-]
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.
laughing_man 4 hours ago [-]
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.
matkoniecz 8 hours ago [-]
Selective editing can achieve very impressive effects, add some lying to it and you can have utterly misleading video with very limited effort.
BLKNSLVR 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Anecdata only.
DaedalusII 9 hours ago [-]
roy lee, the founder of cluely got lost his spot in harvard because he was caught "sneaking out" of a high school field trip
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
a_bonobo 8 hours ago [-]
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 :)
timoshishi 8 hours ago [-]
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
Is there an independent source for this story? The guy is not exactly a reliable narrator.
vasco 8 hours ago [-]
What does police have to do with a field trip? What are you guys doing in the states?
jonasdegendt 6 hours ago [-]
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.
moooo99 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
friendzis 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
willtemperley 9 hours ago [-]
I'm not surprised.
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.
anonzzzies 9 hours ago [-]
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.
willtemperley 9 hours ago [-]
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?
anonzzzies 9 hours ago [-]
> 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?
chopin 5 hours ago [-]
It's harmful as it tastes awful. At least compared to a good traditional wine.
moooo99 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
tsunamifury 7 hours ago [-]
The burden is never on the person not making the claim. Come on man.
willtemperley 7 hours ago [-]
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.
> there are plenty people who drink a bottle of white, red and/or rose for lunch here their entire lives to old age.
lukan 9 hours ago [-]
" Because there are plenty people who drink a bottle of white, red and/or rose for lunch here their entire lives."
No one doubts that, but statistics are pretty clear, that those who do not do that, have a longer life.
jjgreen 6 hours ago [-]
Do they? Or does it just seem like it?
anonzzzies 9 hours ago [-]
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.
willtemperley 8 hours ago [-]
> GP seem to imply it was the other chemicals
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:
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.
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.
sillyfluke 8 hours ago [-]
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.
bawolff 6 hours ago [-]
> There's untold levels of chemicals in wine
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.
willtemperley 5 hours ago [-]
You are correct of course.
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.
bawolff 21 minutes ago [-]
> You could also have just glanced at the rest of the thread where I've given far more specific evidence.
You have not. Maybe you think you have, but just linking to the name of a chemical is not a cogent argument that that chemical in the quantities present in wine, are harmful in any way, and certainly not an argument for it being more harmful than the primary ingredient.
> having to endure extremely patronising comments
Apparently not patronising enough...
> so everyone that thinks it's OK to make jokes like the dihydrongen monoxide one
You really believe that alcohol is equivalent to water in its toxicity?
Look, i'm sorry for your loss. However you are basically spreading pseudo-science here. Doing so has potential to harm a lot of other people too.
froddd 9 hours ago [-]
Do you have a source for those claims?
The “source” you do mention seems rather anecdotal, and linking it to the discussed topic requires a fair number of other assumptions, too.
willtemperley 8 hours ago [-]
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.
sillyfluke 8 hours ago [-]
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.
tpm 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
TeMPOraL 9 hours ago [-]
That's true of organic food in general.
GJim 7 hours ago [-]
> There's untold levels of chemicals in wine.
Such as dihydrogen monoxide?
tpm 8 hours ago [-]
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.
hiimkeks 7 hours ago [-]
[always_has_been.jpg]
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.
silisili 12 hours ago [-]
That's what big tech wanted, looks like they succeeded. Hard to shove targeted ads into the eyeballs of people socializing with one another.
popularonion 12 hours ago [-]
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.
californical 11 hours ago [-]
More than half of Gen Z is over the legal drinking age now, I’m not sure teen drinking is it
TeMPOraL 8 hours ago [-]
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.
kortilla 7 hours ago [-]
Eh, 21 limit was in place for all millennials and most of Gen X. And millennials drink like fish.
NewJazz 11 hours ago [-]
But lower teen drinking can lead to lower lifelong drinking. Habits formed during those years have inertia.
seizethecheese 11 hours ago [-]
It might be policy but it’s not that new. Millennial here, we had no trouble getting alcohol under 21.
johnnyanmac 10 hours ago [-]
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.
FlowingRiver 10 hours ago [-]
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.
jeltz 6 hours ago [-]
You see the same trend in countries without a crashing economy. The economy is not the main reason.
teitoklien 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cortesoft 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
wredcoll 10 hours ago [-]
Man, this was a really good response to that type of argument. I'm going to save it for later.
landdate 12 hours ago [-]
Classic "personal responsibility" argument used to subjegate the masses.
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.
teitoklien 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
autoexec 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
specialist 11 hours ago [-]
I prefer the notion of shared responsibility.
johnnyanmac 10 hours ago [-]
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.
fzeindl 10 hours ago [-]
> My observation is that gen-z spends less time socializing in real life…
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.
Xirdus 9 hours ago [-]
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.
refactor_master 9 hours ago [-]
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.
dmantis 6 hours ago [-]
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.
anal_reactor 4 hours ago [-]
> 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".
dmantis 3 hours ago [-]
> That's a very silly argument
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.
anal_reactor 1 hours ago [-]
You don't understand my core premise that given finite lifespan and finite attention, one can learn only a finite amount of things. People have shit to do and they cannot fit one more responsibility into their calendars. Not to mention that it takes two to tango so if you want to be fun and interesting while sober, you also need to convince your friends to also be sober so it's not all awkward.
It's really difficult to square the circle that being sober improves your communication skills long-term yet somehow young people have worse communication skills and less friends that previous generations of alcohlics.
dmantis 1 hours ago [-]
> somehow young people have worse communication skills and less friends
I have a feeling that many young people sit behind the screen all the time.
My point doesn't work if you don't even try to socialize. Still have to make an effort and go through the uncomfortable awkward stage when you are shy or lost for words in most interactions.
I know enough no-drinkers who are just fine even with drinking people, that's the matter of empathy and being able to relax and being open without stimulators which is something not a given to people without a practice.
anal_reactor 33 minutes ago [-]
> My point doesn't work if you don't even try to socialize.
Yeah exactly. Alcohol makes it easier to start and then continue.
whiteblossom 8 hours ago [-]
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
CTDOCodebases 9 hours ago [-]
I would agree with his opinion. You can see it with the increase of non-alcoholic wine and beer.
Majikujanisch 8 hours ago [-]
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.
sneak 9 hours ago [-]
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.
WheelsAtLarge 12 hours ago [-]
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.
AngryData 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pjc50 5 hours ago [-]
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.
FlowingRiver 10 hours ago [-]
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.
aprilthird2021 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
hx8 11 hours ago [-]
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.
margalabargala 10 hours ago [-]
On one hand, tobacco smoking in the US has dropped to tiny amounts among youth.
On the other hand, alcohol has already survived prohibition.
llarsson 9 hours ago [-]
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.
cortesoft 10 hours ago [-]
Sure, but we see traditions that have lasted for centuries die out, too.
theholygrail 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and a lot of them still drink. They just don't buy wine.
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.
eastbound 9 hours ago [-]
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.
TJSomething 9 hours ago [-]
There could be a link there. I've known people with eating disorders who only drink spirits because of the calorie content.
littlecranky67 8 hours ago [-]
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.
hunterpayne 6 hours ago [-]
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.
lwansbrough 10 hours ago [-]
About Here did a good video on what they think the "problem" is with Gen Z (hint: they're a product of the environment they have inherited)
I'm using night life as a stand in for drinking, but I think it's closely related.
hunterpayne 6 hours ago [-]
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".
Uneducated guess: wine is seen as more of an "older people's" drink making it uncool for gen-Z?
klardotsh 10 hours ago [-]
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)
TeMPOraL 8 hours ago [-]
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.
asdff 8 hours ago [-]
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.
simoncion 9 hours ago [-]
> ...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.
notahacker 8 hours ago [-]
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.
simoncion 7 hours ago [-]
...did you bother to read my second paragraph?
Also, like, what the hell do you think a Screwdriver is?
notahacker 4 hours ago [-]
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...
simoncion 3 hours ago [-]
> One or more shots mixed with a small quantity of orange juice...
I used to be a serious drinker and remain an abstinent alcoholic, but your description obligates me to ask "What the fuck is wrong with kids these days?".
> What the hell do you think a Screwdriver is?
One shot of vodka in a standard-breakfast-sized glass of orange juice.
> Sure, I read your second paragraph...
I -uh- think that whomever you tend to drink with is way more hardcore than I was... and that's frightening.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5 hours ago [-]
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.
simoncion 3 hours ago [-]
> Tbf I don't know many young people who'd pound screwdrivers. ...
Exactly. If you want to get fucked up, you drink it straight, or with minimal flavoring. If you want to drink on the cheap, you prep it in one of many "sane drinking" preparations, like a Screwdriver.
whatever1 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Dylan16807 10 hours ago [-]
Doing a job that can't be automated sounds like the exact opposite of "monetized by tech" to me.
And if "people be watching videos" was the wet dream of tech monetization, we wouldn't need to be worried about tech monetization.
mschuster91 6 hours ago [-]
> Doing a job that can't be automated sounds like the exact opposite of "monetized by tech" to me.
The number of these jobs is constantly shrinking, and a lot of jobs actually have people training AI models to replace them.
hdgvhicv 11 hours ago [-]
U.K. figures of amount drunk at aged 25 has fallen
Born 1940s, about 14u/week. 1960s about 12u, By 1980s dropped to 10u, and by 2000 down to about 7-8.
tonyedgecombe 9 hours ago [-]
It does feel like young people are more likely to go to a coffee shop than a pub if they want to socialise.
tarkin2 10 hours ago [-]
Is beer drinking also on the decline?
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
distances 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, beer is down too, and these are global trends.
In Germany beer is down 20% in a decade, and 33% since 2000.
I wonder also if Covid exasperated that for some too.
watwut 9 hours ago [-]
Afaik, they also commit less crimes and get less pregnant as teenagers. They are overall more responsible then the generation that complains about them.
TeMPOraL 8 hours ago [-]
Question is, is it being responsible, or apathetic and lethargic? How do you distinguish responsible character from clinical depression?
erxam 22 minutes ago [-]
> How do you distinguish responsible character from clinical depression?
By how much work you get done. That's it. You can be the saddest sack of shit in the whole wide world and, as long as you keep being productive, nobody will notice.
At my worst, I kept grinding even though I was one step away from jumping off the nearest bridge so nobody could tell I was this depressed.
1-6 13 hours ago [-]
I may be old-fashioned but the substitute mind-altering drugs you're mentioning does not sound like a more responsible pathway.
kelnos 12 hours ago [-]
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.
hunterpayne 6 hours ago [-]
Yea, but the currently popular drug with kids is a tranquilizer normally given to horses. I'm not sure you have these things in perspective.
sfn42 5 hours ago [-]
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?
tsunamifury 10 hours ago [-]
No. As much as everyone wants to cheer on weed it’s long term biochemical and mental effects are very real.
FlowingRiver 10 hours ago [-]
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.
rcxdude 5 hours ago [-]
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)
asa123 13 hours ago [-]
it's really not
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 ...
iambateman 13 hours ago [-]
I’m in the same age group and I agree but I feel frustrated that our grandparents went with “marijuana is the gateway to hell” as the social message.
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.
literallywho 10 hours ago [-]
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.
WalterBright 12 hours ago [-]
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.
bunderbunder 12 hours ago [-]
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.
hattmall 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Karrot_Kream 8 hours ago [-]
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.
WalterBright 12 hours ago [-]
I recall a "60 Minutes" segment on it asserting that cannabis today is much stronger.
literalAardvark 11 hours ago [-]
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.
bunderbunder 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, more or less. From what I can tell few people really want to just smoke the plant anymore. That makes the THC concentration in the plant itself less relevant to a discussion of potential harm of cannabis consumption. Because there’s some amount of remove between the production yield of the raw material and the potency of the finished consumer product.
You can make an argument in the other for alcohol. Yeast can only ferment up to a certain alcohol concentration and then they die. But that doesn’t tell us much about the potency of consumer alcohol products because we have a variety of manufacturing processes for controlling alcohol concentration. These it’s less common, outside of home production, to just accept whatever unpredictable thing the yeast are doing and call it good.
hirvi74 12 hours ago [-]
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.
superkuh 13 hours ago [-]
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.
djtango 13 hours ago [-]
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.
The_Blade 12 hours ago [-]
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
FlowingRiver 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think we will give it up in the next 20 centuries.
cgio 12 hours ago [-]
Cannabis was the same to some extent. Psychedelics too in the context of rites.
djtango 7 hours ago [-]
Yes but not nearly in the way alcohol is.
Alcohol used to be safer than water to drink for a period in time.
superkuh 12 hours ago [-]
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.
landdate 12 hours ago [-]
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.
sampullman 10 hours ago [-]
That's a very slippery slope. What are you going to ban next, extreme sports? Running too fast? Eating french fries?
landdate 12 hours ago [-]
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.
hdgvhicv 11 hours ago [-]
People have been drinking wine for 8000 years. Grapes ferment in the 10% abv range.
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.
adrianN 12 hours ago [-]
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.
8note 12 hours ago [-]
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
hattmall 12 hours ago [-]
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.
literalAardvark 11 hours ago [-]
Alcohol is consistently more dangerous statistically than most other things, I doubt lowering consumption is the driving factor behind the patterns you're mentioning.
lobf 8 hours ago [-]
What is “active marijuana?”
laurencerowe 7 hours ago [-]
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?
All recreational drugs, legal or otherwise, are mind-altering.
landdate 12 hours ago [-]
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.
mrob 4 hours ago [-]
>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:
Yup. That original post had several factual errors.
I am not a supporter of alcohol, but I find it kind of funny when some people demonize alcohol (which I agree is bad for one's health and has many negative externalities, but which has been used by our societies for millennia and its effects are relatively well understood, at least phenomenologically from extensive experience) and drop it in favor of much less understood and often much more dangerous drugs.
lh712 6 hours ago [-]
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.]
qmr 8 hours ago [-]
Stop saying accident when you really mean crash. Especially in the context of drunk driving.
Drunk driving is a conscious decision, not an accident.
adventured 12 hours ago [-]
The parent is clearly implying the more reponsible pathway is: neither.
landdate 12 hours ago [-]
i replied to wrong person my fault
EA-3167 12 hours ago [-]
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.
tsunamifury 10 hours ago [-]
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.
onthrowaway457 13 hours ago [-]
I think that is the point parent is making
13 hours ago [-]
johnnyanmac 10 hours ago [-]
It's a tiny bit "healthier" (high people are much less dangerous than drunk people), but it's still not particularly responsible.
But it is much cheaper. And Gen Z by necessity is more price sensitive than other generations.
aprilthird2021 12 hours ago [-]
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.
mschuster91 6 hours ago [-]
> 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...
breezybottom 13 hours ago [-]
Your anecdote is meaningless. And you're the only one who said "responsible". It doesn't appear in the quote.
s1artibartfast 12 hours ago [-]
They didnt say it was in the article
jjk166 10 hours ago [-]
> It's a nice claim to say
kinda implies the claim was said
smolder 10 hours ago [-]
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.
askjdfksdbfhk 10 hours ago [-]
>Wine is also sweet and sweetness is unhealthy.
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.
infinite_spin 8 hours ago [-]
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.
pm90 3 hours ago [-]
Possibly to do with research showing that no amount of alcohol is healthy/beneficial and even small quantities are bad. I think overall this is a good thing for society: its one of the leading causes of death and destruction backed by a powerful Government lobby.
djmips 14 hours ago [-]
Perhaps demand is going down abroad due to people eschewing US products.
mcintyre1994 7 hours ago [-]
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.
dleslie 10 hours ago [-]
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.
crummy 12 hours ago [-]
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.
helsinkiandrew 10 hours ago [-]
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
_spduchamp 12 hours ago [-]
This.
ltbarcly3 10 hours ago [-]
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.
m4ck_ 4 hours ago [-]
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...
ltbarcly3 28 minutes ago [-]
Yes, you need evidence lol. Yes.
Thank you for confirming my point though.
Do you really go through life seeing confirmation of all your beliefs everywhere, without ever checking?
US consumers spend about $115 Billion annually on wine. Exports to canada are less than 1% of that. I don't see how Canada matters much to the US in general, and specifically it doesn't make sense that a 70% reduction in half a percent of wine sales (that's like 0.4% reduction overall) is a major factor in putting the industry out of business, but you are welcome to look it up yourself or correct me. Keep in mind that US wine sold in canada will have gone through several hands and be heavily taxed, so the amount per bottle getting back to grape growers is a very small percentage of that already tiny percentage.
But of course you won't bother to look it up, you will just roll your eyes and assume US grape growers are being forced out of business because Manitoba's liquor stores are finally flexing their international influence!
3 minutes ago [-]
Hugsbox 3 hours ago [-]
Where I live in Canada, it's not even a case of the consumers boycotting the products... they've been ordered to be removed from the shelves by the government. They're not even an _option_ to purchase. I think it's fair to say there's a bit of a cause-and-effect thing going on there when it comes to the impact on American alcohol producers. And when/if they do return to shelves, the general sentiment seems to suggest they still won't sell very well.
alkonaut 5 hours ago [-]
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.
fcanesin 1 hours ago [-]
One weird thing when living in the US is how hard it is to find pure grape juice - it is usually not something sold in supermarkets like orange or apple juice is. In the remainder of the west world this is not the case and normally it replaces the role cranberry juice has in the US.
BorgHunter 1 hours ago [-]
Where in the US do you live? I've lived in Florida and Chicago and every supermarket sells 100% grape juice. Costco too. Welch's and Kedem are the two big brands. There's also grape-flavored "100% juice" that's primarily apple and pear juice with grape flavoring, but the actual grape juice is on the shelf next to it.
maximegarcia 7 hours ago [-]
Have you seen the price of wine in Napa Valley? Crazy expensive.
Ok to good wine in Europe is 5-10€.
legitster 17 hours ago [-]
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.
TheJoeMan 13 hours ago [-]
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.
bradfa 13 hours ago [-]
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.
boringg 12 hours ago [-]
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.
jppope 10 hours ago [-]
Espaliers and different pruning techniques can have you up and producing fruit in 3-5 years. Totally popping under 10.
WalterBright 12 hours ago [-]
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.
NegativeLatency 12 hours ago [-]
Possibly you know this but there are pruning techniques to get a good yield of also good tasting apples
WD-42 10 hours ago [-]
Get the fruit off the tree. I had one blow over and die because it was too heavy in strong wind
WalterBright 9 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a good idea.
Dylan16807 10 hours ago [-]
Of course you don't replace everything old with new.
But when the specific varietal always sucked, that's a good reason to replace it.
Der_Einzige 12 hours ago [-]
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!)
asdff 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ikr678 9 hours ago [-]
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.
asdff 8 hours ago [-]
No one wants to wrangle a cord or locate a plug evidently. I don't mind it but people have made their choice.
luqtas 11 hours ago [-]
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
adwn 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
lazide 11 hours ago [-]
I literally can’t think of the last time I had laundry that didn’t clean up perfectly fine with normal laundry detergent.
WTF?
This just sounds like yet another thing that can give me a rash or some kind of weird cancer in 20 years.
AlanYx 40 minutes ago [-]
A lot depends on what clothes you're washing. Modern enzymes are most useful with modern synthetic material blends, especially underwear. If you've ever had that type of thing stay stinky after washing, that's what's missing.
If you're wearing mostly cotton, normal detergent is largely fine unless it's heavily soiled/stained.
astrange 10 hours ago [-]
Ever tried getting curry or blood stains out of anything?
reverse_list 5 hours ago [-]
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.
lazide 56 minutes ago [-]
That is where the enzyme cleaners might help. It’s a protein stain.
They sell little cleaner sticks (look like deodorant sticks or the like). Most dry cleaners will have someone who specializes in stain removal.
lazide 10 hours ago [-]
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.
djtango 12 hours ago [-]
Is that why apples just taste like sugary water nowadays and barely taste of apples?
stickfigure 12 hours ago [-]
I have no idea what you are talking about. The honeycrisp revolution made me like apples again. Maybe your taste buds have changed?
nullisland00 13 hours ago [-]
Cosmic Crisp was marketed to growers as a replacement for Red Delicious with a similar shipping toughness and a long shelf life.
lelandbatey 9 hours ago [-]
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)
I guess I’m out of the loop. What’s with the Red Delicious hate?
raddan 12 hours ago [-]
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.
chihuahua 13 hours ago [-]
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)
phoghed 13 hours ago [-]
Honeycrisp is still the king, and afaik farmers hate growing it.
chihuahua 12 hours ago [-]
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.
FpUser 12 hours ago [-]
>"Honeycrisp " - it was my love until it was not. over the years the taste and texture have completely changed
mandevil 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Dylan16807 10 hours ago [-]
Are there any rules about labeling that can distinguish the old and new Honeycrisps?
Based on this a big problem is overlong storage, which could be avoided with some effort into local purchasing.
mandevil 9 hours ago [-]
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.
phoghed 2 hours ago [-]
smdh even my apples are getting enshittified
10 hours ago [-]
joquarky 7 hours ago [-]
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.
TheJoeMan 2 hours ago [-]
The Red Delicious has been optimized for the growers, packers, and grocery stores, and not the consumer. The priorities are thick skin so they can be roughly handled, and bright red because they believed that's what would make people purchase them. "Cosmic Crisp" is their answer to the Honeycrisp, by trying to tweak the Red Delicious instead of abandoning it. I see it as the equivalent of "a faster horse" dilemma.
randycupertino 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mohaine 13 hours ago [-]
The original Red Delicious wasn’t even bred, but was just a chance seedling found by chance.
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.
bluGill 12 hours ago [-]
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
lazide 11 hours ago [-]
Normal Apple trees will have wildly different flavors on even individual branches.
Specific varietals are from cloning specific branches widely, but at some point it often gets ‘lost’ due to natural imperfect cloning.
throwaway7783 11 hours ago [-]
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.
mohaine 13 hours ago [-]
Well, they kind of suck these days, at least compared to how we remember they used to taste.
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.
phyzome 12 hours ago [-]
I remember Red Delicious being kinda gross in the early 90s. Bitter and cardboardy.
However, it seems there are multiple things with that name. I've had one that looked different and tasted... less bad.
happymellon 13 hours ago [-]
No. They kept trying to push it over here.
It was always grim, bitter, but "oh so pretty".
giardini 13 hours ago [-]
While the red delicious are a good usually-large American apple that ships easily the newer varieties are much tastier.
hedora 13 hours ago [-]
Wait for climate change to really get started.
dorfsmay 13 hours ago [-]
Why has the seasonal workforce shrunk?
Usually most staffing issues can be solved with higher wages. Could it be a solution here?
I’d imagine many of them are immigrants that either fled, were deported, or decided not to return for the picking seasons.
mandevil 13 hours ago [-]
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.
linuxftw 11 hours ago [-]
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.
AngryData 10 hours ago [-]
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
aprilthird2021 11 hours ago [-]
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
s1artibartfast 12 hours ago [-]
Depends on the staffing issue, but many cant be solved by raising wages without going out of business.
Not every industry has tech level profits.
pfdietz 13 hours ago [-]
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.
aprilthird2021 12 hours ago [-]
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)?
kyleee 14 hours ago [-]
Trees?
mandevil 13 hours ago [-]
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.
King-Aaron 14 hours ago [-]
If you have to argue about nomenclature then your argument is probably not worthwhile.
anigbrowl 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, fruit grows on trees. Did you assume the comment was necessarily about grapes?
mathgeek 14 hours ago [-]
While technically incorrect, tree is informally used to describe grape vines in some regions. Similar to “tomato plants” which is a more common example.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> not just the trade war
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.
landdate 12 hours ago [-]
Good. Let this nasty industry and its parasites die.
1-6 13 hours ago [-]
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.
alkonaut 5 hours ago [-]
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?
magicalhippo 8 hours ago [-]
> it tastes bitter and not enjoyable
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
Bitter? I’ve never found that with wine. Definitely beer is quite bitter, and coffee can be too. I find wine has more like a sour flavour.
seiferteric 12 hours ago [-]
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.
deathanatos 10 hours ago [-]
> it tastes bitter and not enjoyable
Try a sweet wine, or if that's still too bitter, try a dessert wine. Wine has a huge range of sweetness.
nottorp 8 hours ago [-]
> Wine has a huge range
Yeah, that's another problem with wine. Too many options and you never know what to expect.
roryirvine 5 hours ago [-]
Learning the basics is fairly easy and many people find the process to be quite enjoyable...
8 hours ago [-]
nmeofthestate 4 hours ago [-]
Sour is the word they were going for I think. Wine isn't bitter IME.
frutiger 12 hours ago [-]
I like the sentiment but wine has been made for thousands of years, with famous stories of kings and emperors enjoying them.
ajam1507 12 hours ago [-]
I think beer is even more of an acquired taste, but it doesn't stop the breweries from outselling the wineries.
pknerd 6 hours ago [-]
> to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
So, is it due to the economy or health factors?
PS: The article is blocked in my country so could not read it
dn3500 6 hours ago [-]
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.
werdnapk 4 hours ago [-]
Firefox has a built in VPN now... give it a try.
znpy 5 hours ago [-]
> health factors
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) ?
derpyzza 5 hours ago [-]
oh neat, another pakistani on hackernews
pknerd 5 hours ago [-]
Yo!
There are a few others
smetj 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Hugsbox 5 hours ago [-]
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.
balderdash 2 minutes ago [-]
I'd characterize it differently - america makes lots of medicore wine and whiskey, but it also makes some fantastic wine and whiskey - my problem has always been that the good stuff in the US is stupidly overpriced why pay 2x-3x+ for an american bottle of wine when you can have one of similar quality for a fraction of the price from south africa, spain, france, germany etc.
cr1895 5 hours ago [-]
>The same can be said for their whiskey.
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..
Hugsbox 4 hours ago [-]
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.
toyg 3 hours ago [-]
IMHO it's not an affinity as much as fearlessness.
weberer 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe you're operating at a higher price bracket, but in Finland 10 euro bottles of Barefoot are pretty popular.
adastra22 4 hours ago [-]
American wine does absolutely terribly in Europe in every situation except blind taste tests.
- Tariffs so less international demand for US wine
- 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
alkonaut 5 hours ago [-]
> - Tariffs so less international demand for US wine
> - Canadian boycots of US products due to tariff wars
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.
ortusdux 18 hours ago [-]
- Legal pot
reactordev 18 hours ago [-]
- The economy
sublinear 14 hours ago [-]
???
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?
mathgeek 14 hours ago [-]
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.
sublinear 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jasonwatkinspdx 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
0cf8612b2e1e 12 hours ago [-]
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.
tokioyoyo 13 hours ago [-]
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.
NewJazz 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Maybe don't just think about pot smokers.
mathgeek 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Brian_K_White 12 hours ago [-]
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.
randycupertino 13 hours ago [-]
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.
kelnos 12 hours ago [-]
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.
zug_zug 14 hours ago [-]
I think gummies are a superior (more pleasant, healthier, safer) social lubricant than alcohol and I’m sure I’m not alone
sublinear 14 hours ago [-]
> I think gummies are a superior (more pleasant, healthier, safer) social lubricant than alcohol and I’m sure I’m not alone
Yes, exactly you're proving my point. You see this as a slot to fill and are making it a wedge issue.
kelnos 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think anyone's making anything into a wedge issue in this discussion, except perhaps you.
boringg 12 hours ago [-]
Equivalent risk. No way is THC healthier than alcohol - both in moderation not at excess.
Then its a personal preference thing.
NewJazz 10 hours ago [-]
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?
boringg 1 hours ago [-]
harm to major organs >> at high doses not at low doses but agree there is an increased risk to liver on alcohol.
Gummies put a cognitive burden. If you are smoking that puts a fair burden on the cardiovascular system. High dose THC run a risk of psychosis.
Look im not pro either I'm however not in this lala land of believing there isn't any negative effects of THC especially over time.
MrDrMcCoy 12 hours ago [-]
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.
boringg 1 hours ago [-]
I said in moderation please read my comments.
dfxm12 13 hours ago [-]
There are definitely people who prefer it instead of alcohol
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.
mc32 14 hours ago [-]
Before it was legalized people went down to the 7-11 to buy beer/wine all legal, maybe a bum to steer around.
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.
YcYc10 4 hours ago [-]
> Canadian boycots of US products due to tariff wars
Not just Canada
philipallstar 17 hours ago [-]
> - Tariffs so less international demand for US wine
Why's this?
legitster 17 hours ago [-]
I feel like this is a trolling question. Demand for US exports has never been lower in recent history.
philipallstar 17 hours ago [-]
Feelings aside, I was just asking a question because I didn't understand the link.
Borealid 17 hours ago [-]
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.
mc32 13 hours ago [-]
That seems odd since the EU lowered tariffs on US ag products. They also took back some previous retaliatory tariffs that were in place.
ashdksnndck 13 hours ago [-]
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.
k12sosse 11 hours ago [-]
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.
hedora 13 hours ago [-]
I’m in the US, and won’t buy booze from red states. I’m really getting to know our local (and also Scottish / Irish) distilleries.
I don’t imagine I’d buy any American imports if I was overseas.
Borealid 13 hours ago [-]
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.
intothemild 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hattmall 12 hours ago [-]
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.
askjdfksdbfhk 9 hours ago [-]
>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.
johnnyApplePRNG 12 hours ago [-]
Don't count on it.
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.
vlovich123 11 hours ago [-]
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.
NewJazz 10 hours ago [-]
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.
jjk166 10 hours ago [-]
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.
bruce511 9 hours ago [-]
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.
toyg 2 hours ago [-]
> it keeps really well
Eh, not really true for the cheap end of the market. A lot of wine sold in supermarkets, for example, is meant to be consumed a couple of years after bottling, tops. And storage can be a significant problem.
dluan 12 hours ago [-]
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.
linuxftw 12 hours ago [-]
Many wines are already well under $10/bottle. Plenty of cheap wines already, I don't think there's room for prices to go down much farther.
SoftTalker 11 hours ago [-]
Even at $10/bottle, food is too expensive now for a lot of consumers to splurge on wine. I drink water with my meals almost exclusively now.
It's nothing to do with health concerns. It's the economy.
brewdad 12 hours ago [-]
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.
aprilthird2021 12 hours ago [-]
No
hiddencost 11 hours ago [-]
Who is giving you the idea that trade makes things more expensive?
Is it just me or why don't people just eat the grapes?
gffrd 11 hours ago [-]
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.
wewewedxfgdf 11 hours ago [-]
They don't taste the same as eating grapes.
gostsamo 11 hours ago [-]
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.
eszed 27 minutes ago [-]
Raisin grapes are a whole different thing, too. Wine and eating grapes don't make good raisins.
tim333 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder if clickbait / online entertainment is replacing booze as the opiate of the masses? People have mentioned weed but I see few stoners and like 90% of people staring at screens.
runamuck 58 minutes ago [-]
I meet a lot of parents who say "I never drink" but then say they pound THC gummies.
bdavbdav 9 hours ago [-]
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!
LarsKrimi 8 hours ago [-]
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
cromka 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jordanb 2 hours ago [-]
Brand USA was hip during the Obama years.
cromka 4 hours ago [-]
Binges are substantially worse for you, though, than that same amount spread out in time
bdavbdav 4 hours ago [-]
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!
mvkel 9 hours ago [-]
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.
austin-cheney 4 hours ago [-]
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.
schnitzelstoat 2 hours ago [-]
I find it odd that people don't complain about all the water these guys use, but apparently data centers are the Great Satan.
dwroberts 8 hours ago [-]
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
jeltz 5 hours ago [-]
Consumption of cheap alcohol is going down too and we can see the same trend among young people even in countries experiencing decreases in CoL.
toyg 2 hours ago [-]
My pet explanation is the transition to a knowledge-based economy. You might be ok laying bricks or pulling levers while nursing a slight hangover, but you can't stare into a screen or keep hold of a complex coding flow.
Maybe the AI revolution will "help" in that area too...
ungreased0675 3 hours ago [-]
Are there industry forecasts that predicted (or didn’t) this? I wonder how volatile the market is, and how much risk the growers thought they were taking.
hn_throwaway_99 10 hours ago [-]
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.
gherkinnn 8 hours ago [-]
You see, I am a prime l33tcoder, now system designer, now LLM harnesser. I breathe first principles.
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.
epolanski 9 hours ago [-]
The people commenting are also consumers, as are their families and friends.
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.
11 hours ago [-]
pluc 3 hours ago [-]
Well you've just tarriff-banned Canadian alcohol from your country so that should help your sales
hermitcrab 5 hours ago [-]
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.
momento 5 hours ago [-]
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.
SenHeng 4 hours ago [-]
I had that moment while puking up my nth beer, wtf was I paying all that money for this?!
weberer 4 hours ago [-]
When I was in college, that's also what I told my parents.
hermitcrab 32 minutes ago [-]
LOL. I have reason to believe he is being honest.
solfox 2 hours ago [-]
Great. Maybe we can do something productive with that land now.
misiti3780 36 minutes ago [-]
Unsurprising. As a US-based wine drinker, California wine feels overpriced and inferior to European imports. Add in Huberman convincing Gen Z that all alcohol is harmful, and the trend makes complete sense.
cladopa 5 hours ago [-]
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.
pseudony 3 hours ago [-]
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.
grahar64 9 hours ago [-]
In my area there are lots of wine growers who are adding bubbles and canning their wine. It is way better, sweeter, still tastes like wine.
neom 18 hours ago [-]
Wasn't SGMA always the big long term problem for them anyway? I recall reading some time ago many are looking to pivot to solar farms.
They can sell them to me instead, I could be eating grapes all year long.
kelnos 12 hours ago [-]
Most grapes good for winemaking are not good for eating. (And vice versa.)
merry_flame 8 hours ago [-]
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.
asdff 8 hours ago [-]
Not in my experience. The best eating grapes are wine grapes by far.
skyberrys 12 hours ago [-]
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.
iharuya 17 hours ago [-]
I don't mean to dismiss wine as something people can appreciate almost like art, but sometimes the pricing does feel a little absurd.
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.
0xB31B1B 13 hours ago [-]
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.
programmertote 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Starman_Jones 17 hours ago [-]
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.
MassPikeMike 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Did I just get lucky? Anyone else do this?
dehrmann 13 hours ago [-]
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.
asdff 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ac29 13 hours ago [-]
I've eaten wine grapes and while they taste... winey? I also quite like them
blueg3 13 hours ago [-]
Labrusca makes terrible wine, it's too foxy. There are some hybrid varieties that make okay wine.
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.
jasonwatkinspdx 13 hours ago [-]
The varieties used for win are generally not good for eating and vice versa. Not universally so but generally.
17 hours ago [-]
Padriac 13 hours ago [-]
I know a duck who might be willing to buy some.
colechristensen 1 hours ago [-]
Over and over I'm seeing markets collapse for products that gradually got more expensive over decades and then folks on the sell side surprised when the market is gone rather than just capped at some price.
Commercial real estate is the same, it got so expensive with such a bad experience for people using it that folks discovered they don't need it.
You can't have a market for alcoholic beverages when the default cost is 2 or more hours of minimum wage work.
hadlock 11 hours ago [-]
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.
smileson2 8 hours ago [-]
I stopped buying my once in a while bottle since wine prices are crazy high, like 30-50 for a standard bottle now at my local store
Not worth it to me at least
vondur 13 hours ago [-]
It’s amazing how much more land in the central coast area is now dedicated to growing grapes.
jjk166 9 hours ago [-]
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.
cameron467 6 hours ago [-]
Is Californian wine a thing?
taywrobel 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jcattle 6 hours ago [-]
Yes
13 hours ago [-]
d_finch 11 hours ago [-]
Seems like the craft beer and cocktail scene is really eating into wine's market share these days. Tough pivot for growers.
classified 2 hours ago [-]
So the war on drugs has finally borne fruit?
panny 2 hours ago [-]
This is reminiscent of 90s Japan. Whisky consumption dropped during the economic hard times. Whisky manufacturers were forced to scale back production because of it. When demand came roaring back in the 2010s, they had no whisky to sell and a decade long runway to get production restarted. Whisky doesn't happen overnight. It's know as the Japanese Whisky Armageddon.
bokkies 8 hours ago [-]
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.
KoolKat23 4 hours ago [-]
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).
jnmandal 12 hours ago [-]
Certainly not declining consumer spending. Couldn't be that
1970-01-01 17 hours ago [-]
If demand is down globally, sell the land already. People will do everything except the hardest thing.
floatrock 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jjk166 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ltbarcly3 10 hours ago [-]
People generally do find that the hardest thing to do is ... the hardest thing. You might say that this is a tautology.
10 hours ago [-]
s1artibartfast 11 hours ago [-]
And do what with it?
otikik 8 hours ago [-]
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?
asdff 8 hours ago [-]
Californian wine can be $400 a bottle or $4 a bottle.
toomuchtodo 18 hours ago [-]
If you’re a domestic US wine lover, now is a great time to be buying if you have the space to store it.
JumpCrisscross 18 hours ago [-]
:D
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.
alistairSH 18 hours ago [-]
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.
intrasight 13 hours ago [-]
I spent a month in Italy and drank many fine wines. The most expensive sold at supermarket was 15 euo. Most were like 6.
chihuahua 13 hours ago [-]
Have you bought wine at Trader Joe's? It used to be famous for its "2 buck chuck" aka Charles Shaw. And many other well-regarded wines for under $10.
alistairSH 3 hours ago [-]
I have, and their prices have gone up. Their reserve wines are $20 now. Still a good buy for bottles that are usually very drinkable. Bit similar wine in Italy would still be about half that price.
_jwr 16 hours ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 18 hours ago [-]
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).
nkrisc 18 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a great deal, but that’s quite a lot of space required to store them, no?
harvey9 17 hours ago [-]
'a lot' depends on how much you had to begin with.
toomuchtodo 18 hours ago [-]
Not really, takes up a large wall in a residential detached single family home basement somewhere in the Midwest. Everything is relative.
vehemenz 17 hours ago [-]
Don’t even need that. If they’re packed in wine boxes they take up hardly any space.
8n4vidtmkvmk 8 hours ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago [-]
The bottles I've received are in large boxes that hold ~20 bottles each, delivered via Fedex. Each box goes in a spot on industrial shelving, and is cataloged into an inventory system when received.
Ancalagon 18 hours ago [-]
Do you just buy barrels at that point?
JumpCrisscross 18 hours ago [-]
Large-format bottles are criminally underappreciated this side of the Atlantic.
toomuchtodo 18 hours ago [-]
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!
vrosas 18 hours ago [-]
I feel for the wine growers, but as an avid wine consumer I'm looking forward to better deals.
egl2020 14 hours ago [-]
...and less variety. Growers are not going to stay in business by lowering their prices.
10 hours ago [-]
EPWN3D 17 hours ago [-]
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.
jandrewrogers 13 hours ago [-]
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.
vehemenz 17 hours ago [-]
I’ll believe it when wine prices go down. Prove it!
charles_f 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, maybe if a bottle of crappy wine is less than $30, people will buy it.
fithisux 5 hours ago [-]
Can't they sell for ethanol?
Wine is also widespread for cooking or marinating.
bamboozled 5 hours ago [-]
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.
anovikov 9 hours ago [-]
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.
diogenescynic 10 hours ago [-]
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.
7 hours ago [-]
13 hours ago [-]
bitwize 2 hours ago [-]
They might be forced to... (gasp!)... sell wine before its time.
driverdan 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 14 hours ago [-]
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.
tomhow 11 hours ago [-]
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.
13 hours ago [-]
legitster 17 hours ago [-]
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.
twright 17 hours ago [-]
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.
legitster 16 hours ago [-]
This is an unhelpful generalization.
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.
kelnos 12 hours ago [-]
> (and have been sorely mistaken)
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.
rizzom5000 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
You aren't going to escape the association with President Donald John Trump. He is the present and future of the Republican party.
14 hours ago [-]
watwut 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wat10000 13 hours ago [-]
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.
what 11 hours ago [-]
> because they thought he was better than the alternative
There has to be a large number of these? Or how do you explain voting him out and then back in?
wat10000 11 hours ago [-]
His 2020 loss was all about turnout among the opposition. He got more votes than in 2016.
domh 9 hours ago [-]
Same as UK farmers voting for Brexit whilst being beneficiaries of EU subsidies for farming.
gonight 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
apparent 17 hours ago [-]
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.
epistasis 12 hours ago [-]
> Tariffs have reduced exports, particularly to Canada, which was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.
And it links to a Feb 2025 article titled "Canada Tariffs Paused, but California Wineries Fear a Trade Dispute Would Be Crushing"
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.
apparent 11 hours ago [-]
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.
sn0n 10 hours ago [-]
Boo. Fucking. Hoo.
locusofplenty 1 hours ago [-]
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WorseIsBetter 5 hours ago [-]
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yunicc 13 hours ago [-]
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intergalactic_g 7 hours ago [-]
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thot_experiment 18 hours ago [-]
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rayiner 17 hours ago [-]
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m4ck_ 14 hours ago [-]
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.
kelnos 11 hours ago [-]
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.
The empirical evidence (which can be found at any grocery store) says otherwise.
OkayPhysicist 17 hours ago [-]
Huh? We've got the best farmland in the US, possibly the world. It'd be a terrible shame not to take advantage of it.
rayiner 16 hours ago [-]
It has no water. That’s why it was worthless to Mexico before the U.S. annexed it and the Army Corps of Engineers terraformed it.
OkayPhysicist 16 hours ago [-]
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.
trollbridge 13 hours ago [-]
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.
m463 13 hours ago [-]
I sort of laughed when the california bottling companies are made out to be water-wasting-villains.
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)
opinion-is-bad 11 hours ago [-]
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.
wat10000 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jleyank 17 hours ago [-]
Bit short of water, though…
Teknomadix 16 hours ago [-]
No, that's Colorado.
jleyank 16 hours ago [-]
SoCal has water?
rabidheuristics 14 hours ago [-]
SoCal grows grapes?
gensym 14 hours ago [-]
Temecula resident checking in... yes, it does.
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).
kelnos 11 hours ago [-]
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.
dumpHero2 17 hours ago [-]
why not?
shmoil 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lukeify 18 hours ago [-]
You realise to grow table grapes, you need to rip out the current vines you have right?
EdwardDiego 18 hours ago [-]
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?
bigwheels 18 hours ago [-]
This is a totally different variety of grape compared to what they're setup to grow now.
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.
neom 18 hours ago [-]
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.
ScoobleDoodle 18 hours ago [-]
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.
onlypassingthru 17 hours ago [-]
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!
dylan604 18 hours ago [-]
Why put something on sale when it is selling just fine at the current rates?
shmoil 18 hours ago [-]
I guess I am an outlier, I did not have any grapes until September, when Ontario grapes became available.
It did not feel right to buy murican grapes at full price in the middle of the summer.
jongjong 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ltbarcly3 10 hours ago [-]
Gen-Z and GLP-1. This is great news. I hope people stop drinking and everyone producing alcohol has to find a new job. It would be a golden age.
jan_m_savage 12 hours ago [-]
simple: dry them into raisins, export.
crummy 12 hours ago [-]
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.
SwellJoe 17 hours ago [-]
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.
pfdietz 13 hours ago [-]
This thread reminds me: I need to make a concord grape pie. It's the season for it.
throw03172019 10 hours ago [-]
Everything about GenZ makes me nervous for their future.
MiroslavPokorny 9 hours ago [-]
California grapes have no taste.
Sure they look big, round, juicy and shiny, but they are tasteless, so why would anyone buy them ?
echohack5 11 hours ago [-]
Am I supposed to feel bad for the cancer juice people?
beej71 13 hours ago [-]
An NA wine that wasn't completely horrible might ease the burden a bit.
Alien1Being 9 hours ago [-]
People in my life just do not drink when we get together.
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".
DoingIsLearning 7 hours ago [-]
> In many non-Anglo-Euro countries, drinking is seen as moderately aberrant behaviour akin to frequenting sex workers or doing drugs.
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.
cr1895 4 hours ago [-]
>In many non-Anglo-Euro countries, drinking is seen as moderately aberrant behaviour akin to frequenting sex workers or doing drugs.
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.
The most interesting situation is actually in Iceland: full prohibition introduced 1915, wine legalized 1922, all other beverages legalized 1935 except for (of all things) beer with more than 2.25% ABV, which had to wait until 1 March 1989 (since then celebrated as "Beer Day") - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Iceland
I believe this is common in Canadian provinces as well?
Feels as if the death of religion is followed by the death of bars, restaurants and other places to go out to in the evening, especially after Covid, leaving even fewer places to meet people.
It's true that people up here tend to get very drunk collectively as the evening drags on, which has always bothered me as somebody who doesn't drink alcohol... First everybody's very dry and awkward, then it's fun for an hour or so, and then things start getting over the top and pretty mental. Compared with central Europe, people don't slow down a few glasses in.
But all that is changing as it seems many people just stopped going out at all. So people might drink less alcohol, but I'm not sure that indicates an improvement of mental health or social coherence. The internet is making people lonelier.
Prices have increased a lot, making the margins even harder to survive on for the majority.
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!
Wife and I used to be avid drinkers but with the expansion of legal cannabis, it's just not as good of an option. I'll still make myself a negroni or an old fashioned on occasion, just because they're delicious, but I haven't drank-to-get-drunk in YEARS. If I'm actually trying to unwind (and who isn't given the sheer STATE of our world!) I'm spoiled for choices of substances that both don't interact with my depression nearly as badly as alcohol and, as a bonus, don't make me gain weight like an inflation fetish character.
The alcohol industry won spectacularly for decades a game of public policy and image where alcohol, a substance connected to industrial quantities of human death and suffering, was somehow the "accepted and normal" way to get fucked up when you wanted to be, even though again, numerous alternatives existed that were better for you. They're going to go through a similar process to tobacco I think, which is to say: it'll still be around, but it will shrink to an industry sized appropriately for the actual demand of it's product.
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.
I think back to my childhood and smoking was everywhere. My high school (graduated in 1989) had a smoking area for students. Cigarette smoke wafted out of the teacher's lounge. Kids would light up as soon as they got off the bus on a field trip. I don't have many specific memories of it, but people must have reeked.
Alcohol was also huge. We had a fifth year of high school (grade 13) and so there were plenty of 19 year old students and the drinking age was 19. Students would buy beer on their lunch period for the weekend and store it in their locker and nobody thought anything of it.
On the 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's really just a personal trait. I love going to my kid's friend's birthdays because we get to talk to the other parents who have become good friends as well, plus we don't have to look after the kids as much. "Adult time" and we know they're having fun. I don't have to drink in those.
I guess not everyone is that outgoing and not every parent group is as friendly as mine but it's hard to see getting drunk as a necessary counter to that.
> Turns out people suck at socialising without alcohol, and if alcohol disappears, people just stay at home and play video games or something.
Again, a personal trait. It's extremely common here in Brazil to drink but it's also very common to just not drink and have as much fun. Someone saying they need to have alcohol to enjoy themselves at a gathering is not going to be looked at very kindly, as if everyone else was just so boring they had to intoxicate themselves to bear through it.
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49891295
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.
God, what a great childhood I had...
I can't even imagine a birthday party being held in some joint or something.
In my country a kid having a birthday always meant homemade food and fun (up to the age of 15 or something).
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.
>> Democritus says: “One man means as much to me as a multitude, and a multitude only as much as one man.”
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 :)
We use Justworks and they do that all for us. You're technically an employee of Justworks, and their name shows up on your paychecks. You hook into their health and 401k benefits, and they check all the workplace safety boxes. For instance, they'll mail you posters you legally have to put up in your office to ensure you're telling employees about overtime. HR plays literally no role in any of time apart from maybe selecting the health plans, something we do once a year and roll over every time.
> ensuring that staff is well trained for their role
What does an HR person know about training for your role? Is HR cross-trained in engineering for instance? Seems wildly different from my experience. HR would ineffectively screen candidates and ask you about buzz words. So they'll ask "do you have experience in Javascript" and I'll say "no, but I have a lot of experience in Typescript" and they'll just screen me out because they'll have no context.
And HR staff is also much more social so they'll pick up on awkwardness and screen there as well, when in many fields like engineering, the tolerance of awkwardness is much higher.
Which people would be wise to remember. HR is there to protect the company, not you or your co-workers. Sometimes these two things align but not always.
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.
Yes. This is where all the rules come from. It's just like airline safety or workplace safety: for almost every rule, you can find the incident which caused it to be put in place.
The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem. There have been enough women bullied out of jobs they loved by harassment from male co-workers, over and over again, and enough of them have won their lawsuits or tribunals against the employers, that there are rules against this, which will be enforced.
And enough people will have used "I was drinking" as an excuse for harassment that companies feel the need to limit their risk by banning drinking.
People get annoyed at HR for being a "compliance" role, but it's the same phenomenon as hating the people checking the fire exits, the ladders, PAT testing all your electrical devices (this may be UK specific?), making you wear a hard hat and safety boots, or making you reconcile the cash in the register with the receipts.
???
Where do you get that from? I do think it's a problem and it becomes a problem because we accept mixed-sex work environments. HR isn't there to protect women from getting harassed, they're mostly there to protect management. Sexual harassment is still illegal, whether HR exists or not.
I don't think HR ladies are roaming factory floors making sure people are wearing hardhats. That's a managers responsibility and the company has legal obligations.
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.
In my country it was wayyy to socially acceptable (almost required) to get blackout drunk every weekend; people fighting; drunk drivers; the amount of alcoholics destroying their life because it’s so accessible.
Don’t get me wrong i enjoy a drink once in a while, even getting drunk sometimes but overall it’s a terrible terrible drug.
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.
This doesn't work when you're a person being encouraged to drink in an asymmetric power dynamic and it turns out the people you're drinking with are monsters. You end up in a tragic story like what happened in the Dartmouth Predator Professor Gang and perhaps the recent Cornell case as well.
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
You mean AM, right?
It's been like this in America for decades. Even places with "beer on tap" the expectation is you don't drink until after the work day. If you were pulling the tab at lunch you'd get a talk from your boss and eventually HR
More Americanization of Europe?
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.
The only time I smoked a joint I thought I was gonna die. Never fucking again, lol.
Nothing beats taste and effects of small dose of whiskey with some fruut or vodka with an appetizer. Or a few glasses of wine.
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?
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.
Sure you can say it's reduced from a peak which happened to coincide with an unprecedented pandemic. Wake me when it's back to the 9.3 norm of the 2010s let alone the 9 it was around 2000.
Now it's quite possible that fewer people are drinking at all, but of those who are drinking, they are drinking more.
Or it's quite possible that annecdotes about who you see in the gym and on instagram are just annecdotes
(for what it's worth I have seen data showing under 30s are drinking less in 2025 than under 30s drank in 2005, or 1985, etc, which would imply over 30s are drinking more to make up for it, but I don't have it to hand and it may not have been US specific)
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. :(
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.
Some German compound nouns are funny.
People seek pain management where they can get it, and alcohol isn't the worst.
About children the case is quite obvious. We created the cultural environment in which children are considered no less human than productive members of society and deserve if not the same amount of resources, then more. This order aligns well both with Western worldview and with human biological nature, so people are easily accepting and strengthening it.
But if we are spending on a child as many resources as on productive members of society, that means for fertility rate 2 we should forgo half of our resources. So on average to forgo half of your work for children are not very tempting, but to spend on children less is sociocultural unacceptable. The only solution? Less children.
I think fertility rate 1.5 is already pretty high for such environment and only show how strong biological drive to procreate for humans is. And government's attempts to increase birth rates by spending more seems like rather terrible idea: that only will increase cultural expectation on children costs and effectively will lower the birth rate even more.
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.
(people keep forgetting how much reducing population growth and teenage pregnancy has been an explicit policy goal for decades! Getting it down to replacement rate is good, now we're arguing about the other direction needlessly)
It says A LOT about you that you immediately jump to arrogant conclusions
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).
Wines that are produced from 100% BC grapes are labelled "BC VQA" and only 19% of the wines in BC are BC VQA.
Spend some time at wineries on the Niagara escarpment and you'll find some great wines, especially whites that benefit from the limestone heavy soils. Even the large producers that have a poor public reputation for quality (Trius, Iniskillin, etc.) have much better wines available on site that never make it to the LCBO. For the most part (some exceptions), the people who run these wineries are wine enthusiasts who genuinely care about quality. Prices for that quality are higher than other wine regions with more favorable climates, higher production, and lower labour costs though, that is true.
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.
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).
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.
> "68 billion dollars worth of sales each year"
TOTAL Retail value (includes markups by wholesalers, retailers and restaurateurs), NOT Sales Revenue.
> "only about a billion dollars of California wine is sold abroad"
That's Sales revenue [1]
> "So 98% of California wine is sold within the US. Only 2% is exported."
The data is right on the page you shared.
So the export volume in 2024 appears to be >12%, not 2%There's no data for 2025, but wine exports fell by ~20% in 2025 [1], if TOTAL wine shipments fell equally this is quite a strong dent in volumes already in 2025. So 2026 doesn't look rosy to begin with before any trade-war being added...
> "It's pretty funny if you think about it, you have some Bosnian dude [..]"
Let's not do that please.
[0] https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/california...
[1] https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/us-wine-ex...
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.
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.
I barely drink these days, but wine production is great fun and pretty damn easy. I've done it a couple of times, it was super rewarding.
It's much more straightforward than most booze (e.g., beer). You just need clean gear and mashed up grapes, and some sulphites on hand if things get a bit wonky. There's very little else to it.
I think anyone who drinks should make wine once in their life.
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.
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.
If you like sour beers my experience is they are nearly identical to their native counterparts.
I generally find the breweries that focus completely on NA beer better than existing players who are adding NA to their line up.
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 want a pils style beer, Jever Fun is pretty hoppy. Krombacher has a decent 0.0 beer as well. A bit on the sweet side for me but I have that sometimes. I also recall seeing a beer that was labelled as Feinherb at some point that was pretty tasty. The exact name escapes me.
Several of the Bavarian beer hall style helles beers now also come in alcohol free versions. Very drinkable. They taste very similar. Bayreuther is one that you might find in some shops.
Many of the Hefeweizen varieties also exist in alcohol free versions and are pretty drinkable. Most places will have that available.
Not German but some bars now have Guinness 0.0 in cans. Haven't seen that in the supermarket but it's a near drop in replacement for normal Guinness as far as I'm concerned and I tend to order that when I see it available.
I stopped drinking alcohol a few years ago but I still enjoy going out with friends who do drink. Mostly people barely notice what other people drink. And the lack of a hangover after a good night sleep is a nice bonus. Although you can overdo it. I always joke about all of the downsides of drinking beers without any of the upsides.
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.
(Though, as others in this thread point out, NA beers are more common, and better, than they used to be. They're not the same thing, though.)
I like the taste of Heineken 0:0. Not the same but pleasant regardless.
Meanwhile, in the States I see more and more 8/9/10% IPAs from major brewers.
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.
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.
My faves are Harvest Pale 3.8% and Our House 3.4%
I also like mild which is often <=3%
0% Guinness is the only beer I would say that matches the taste of alcohol based beer. The others can be ok, but taste too malty, the flavour is off somehow. Also having 2 or more none alcohol beers seems to also make me feel "hungover" in a way, maybe due to additives.
That's a rather broad claim. There is so many different variations non alcoholic beer nowadays.
I could probably tell it apart from normal Guinness in a blind taste test. But it is pretty good.
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.
Have you tried lighter wines or prosecco? I've had some summer wine from a grape variety called Inzolia in Sicily. Quite light on 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federweisser
+
https://www.amazon.de/Federwei%C3%9Fer-selber-machen-einfach...
When on these drugs, you simply have no desire for such things, and I'm a beer and wine lover. Now that I've stopped, I'm slowly drinking again, but I feel my taste has changed.
I don't know if it was the drugs or the time that passed, but I simply can't drink or have the same desire as before (it could be my age, too, lol).
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.
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".
This organism is practically hacking the plant in a multiphase process. It is interesting how selection forces are working at every stage, hardening the hack.
This isn’t strictly true. Europe has négociants, who buy grapes from smaller growers to make wine from (to be fair, often alongside their own vineyard holdings).
> But then again, who cares for American wine (certainly not the Euros).
Huge fan of Old World wine here. With that said, the Americans are producing remarkable wines these days. For my palate, I enjoy Sonoma and Willamette Valley. Even tasted blind, top critics have preferred California to France — look up the Judgment of Paris!
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.
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
It's really gross that you think of women as so alien and inhuman.
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.
You have not. Maybe you think you have, but just linking to the name of a chemical is not a cogent argument that that chemical in the quantities present in wine, are harmful in any way, and certainly not an argument for it being more harmful than the primary ingredient.
> having to endure extremely patronising comments
Apparently not patronising enough...
> so everyone that thinks it's OK to make jokes like the dihydrongen monoxide one
You really believe that alcohol is equivalent to water in its toxicity?
Look, i'm sorry for your loss. However you are basically spreading pseudo-science here. Doing so has potential to harm a lot of other people too.
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.
It's really difficult to square the circle that being sober improves your communication skills long-term yet somehow young people have worse communication skills and less friends that previous generations of alcohlics.
I have a feeling that many young people sit behind the screen all the time.
My point doesn't work if you don't even try to socialize. Still have to make an effort and go through the uncomfortable awkward stage when you are shy or lost for words in most interactions.
I know enough no-drinkers who are just fine even with drinking people, that's the matter of empathy and being able to relax and being open without stimulators which is something not a given to people without a practice.
Yeah exactly. Alcohol makes it easier to start and then continue.
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...
I used to be a serious drinker and remain an abstinent alcoholic, but your description obligates me to ask "What the fuck is wrong with kids these days?".
> What the hell do you think a Screwdriver is?
One shot of vodka in a standard-breakfast-sized glass of orange juice.
> Sure, I read your second paragraph...
I -uh- think that whomever you tend to drink with is way more hardcore than I was... and that's frightening.
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.
Exactly. If you want to get fucked up, you drink it straight, or with minimal flavoring. If you want to drink on the cheap, you prep it in one of many "sane drinking" preparations, like a Screwdriver.
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/...
By how much work you get done. That's it. You can be the saddest sack of shit in the whole wide world and, as long as you keep being productive, nobody will notice.
At my worst, I kept grinding even though I was one step away from jumping off the nearest bridge so nobody could tell I was this depressed.
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.
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.
You can make an argument in the other for alcohol. Yeast can only ferment up to a certain alcohol concentration and then they die. But that doesn’t tell us much about the potency of consumer alcohol products because we have a variety of manufacturing processes for controlling alcohol concentration. These it’s less common, outside of home production, to just accept whatever unpredictable thing the yeast are doing and call it good.
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.
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.
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
https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/...
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/index.html
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
I am not a supporter of alcohol, but I find it kind of funny when some people demonize alcohol (which I agree is bad for one's health and has many negative externalities, but which has been used by our societies for millennia and its effects are relatively well understood, at least phenomenologically from extensive experience) and drop it in favor of much less understood and often much more dangerous drugs.
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.
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.
Thank you for confirming my point though.
Do you really go through life seeing confirmation of all your beliefs everywhere, without ever checking?
US consumers spend about $115 Billion annually on wine. Exports to canada are less than 1% of that. I don't see how Canada matters much to the US in general, and specifically it doesn't make sense that a 70% reduction in half a percent of wine sales (that's like 0.4% reduction overall) is a major factor in putting the industry out of business, but you are welcome to look it up yourself or correct me. Keep in mind that US wine sold in canada will have gone through several hands and be heavily taxed, so the amount per bottle getting back to grape growers is a very small percentage of that already tiny percentage.
But of course you won't bother to look it up, you will just roll your eyes and assume US grape growers are being forced out of business because Manitoba's liquor stores are finally flexing their international influence!
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.
If you're wearing mostly cotton, normal detergent is largely fine unless it's heavily soiled/stained.
They sell little cleaner sticks (look like deodorant sticks or the like). Most dry cleaners will have someone who specializes in stain removal.
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.
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
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..
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.
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.
Gummies put a cognitive burden. If you are smoking that puts a fair burden on the cardiovascular system. High dose THC run a risk of psychosis.
Look im not pro either I'm however not in this lala land of believing there isn't any negative effects of THC especially over time.
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.
Not just Canada
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.
Eh, not really true for the cheap end of the market. A lot of wine sold in supermarkets, for example, is meant to be consumed a couple of years after bottling, tops. And storage can be a significant problem.
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
The next profitable use of land will show itself soon enough.
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
Maybe the AI revolution will "help" in that area too...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Commercial real estate is the same, it got so expensive with such a bad experience for people using it that folks discovered they don't need it.
You can't have a market for alcoholic beverages when the default cost is 2 or more hours of minimum wage work.
Not worth it to me at least
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.
Wine is also widespread for cooking or marinating.
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.
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/
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 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.