May 29, 2024
Fears are rising that health authorities in the US will label wine as unsafe to consume in any quantity.
If you think the wine business is bad now, its worst nightmare is looming: Next year, the US government's dietary guidelines might say that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.
The World Health Organization already made this statement last year, and analysts have linked it to declining wine sales. But few non-Islamic governments have called all drinking unsafe. The US is the world's largest wine market. To have its government look at alcohol the way Saudi Arabia does would be devastating for the industry.
The current US dietary guidelines say men can safely have two drinks per day, and women can have one. Wine Opinions did a survey of 2000 American drinkers last year. Wine Opinions CEO John Gillespie told Wine-Searcher that when asked if the dietary guidelines were to change to the new Canadian guidelines that recommend no more than two drinks per week, 66 percent of people aged 21 to 39 said they would cut back.
"The current guidelines are already pretty anti-alcohol," said Michael Kaiser, executive vice president of Wine America. "They recommend you don't start drinking if you have not started, and that alcohol can cause health problems. However, it also says that the current drink guidelines are okay for safe consumption for healthy adults. Now if the guidelines changed, we will see a drop in consumption, particularly at home. This will primarily be with younger consumers, which we already have issues with. I think you will see people view wine as something (only) for a special occasion."
Tom Wark, executive director of the National Association of Wine Retailers, revealed in his blog Monday that a "well-placed source" has seen the wording of the proposed recommendation of no safe level of alcohol for the 2025 dietary guidelines. Wark would not reveal his source but members of Congress believe it, and appear to be concerned.
Last month, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability sent a letter demanding the documents that are being used in reviewing the relationship between alcohol and health. The letter says that the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), which is supposed to review the alcohol dietary guidelines recommendations, is not following the science. Instead, it has delegated the review to the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD).
Temperance pressure
This is exactly how the WHO's anti-alcohol statement last year came to be. In Wine Business Monthly last month, journalist Felicity Carter showed how the WHO's communication partner on alcohol issues is an international temperance group named Movendi that was founded in 1851. Research proving that people who consume a moderate amount of alcohol are healthier than teetotallers (it's called the J-curve; you can look it up) has been ignored, while a misleading population study from the UK that emphasizes the ill health of alcoholics has been played up.
It works. When I started searching information for this article (I typed in "safe level of alcohol consumption"), Yahoo's first suggested link was an article headlined "There is no safe level of alcohol."
Just last week, an anti-alcohol conference held in a Washington DC suburb had a seminar entitled "Alcohol and Cancer: A New Litigation Strategy Against Large Producers." Translated, that means suing Gallo and Jackson Family Wines as if they are peddling tobacco, not wine.
Politicking about government food guidelines is nothing new. In 1981, the US Department of Agriculture under President Ronald Reagan attempted to classify ketchup as a vegetable so the federal government could cut $1.5 billion from the budget for funding public school lunches. That didn't end up happening, but the USDA to this day considers pickle relish a vegetable.
The politics of alcohol are unique, and make strange bedfellows. The alcohol industry should fear either presidential candidate, as both Joe Biden and Donald Trump claim to have never taken a drink in their lives. Moreover, both cite a history of alcoholism in their families: Trump's brother died from alcohol-related causes, and, as a child, Biden lived with an uncle who was a heavy drinker. Biden's son Hunter is notorious for his problems with substance abuse. It's easy to see either Biden or Trump signing off on draconian statements about alcohol.
Meanwhile, the two leaders of the House who sent the letter are Oversight and Accountability Committee chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) and Lisa McClain (R-Michigan), chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services. Comer you may have heard of – he has been attempting to impeach Biden for more than a year, without presenting any specific reasons. He represents the nation's most important whiskey-producing state.
McClain is a hard-right Trump acolyte, but she's also Catholic, and Catholics refused to give up drinking even during US Prohibition. The few wineries that survived America's disastrous attempt at outlawing alcohol did so by making sacramental wine for Catholic churches.
Comer has not responded by press time to a request for comment. But Mike Thompson (D-Ca), who represents Napa County and is co-chair of the Congressional Wine Caucus, said: "It’s concerning that the agencies in charge of researching and producing our updated dietary guidelines created a new scientific review process separate from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee to issue guidance on alcohol consumption for Americans. Any change to the dietary guidelines should be fully transparent and use the best science."
New dietary guidelines are not due until 2025. Source: Wine-Searcher, W. Blake Gray
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