Archive for March, 2011

Forget Red States and Blue States, now there are Wine States and Beer States. While alcohol of choice isn’t exactly going to be the best way to demarcate political affiliation at any point, apparently there are some pretty clear differences when you look at the political donations from alcohol producers to legislators.

I know this will come as a shock, but…

Democrats = wine
Republicans = beer

Of course, it’s not completely black and white, but that’s the general trend. According to the web site OpenSecrets.Org, which is run by the Center for Responsive Politics, Democratic lawmakers get more contributions from wine companies than beer and spirits companies, and Republican lawmakers are just the opposite.

The question is, why does this not come as a big surprise? Because I’m a democrat and I love wine and I live in California which is both generally Democratic and the country’s largest producer of wine? I’m not sure that it’s quite that easy, but that might have something to do with it.

For the most part, the largest political contributions made by the wine industry come from California, and so it stands to reason that they would tend to support Democratic causes more. And while it’s not quite so consistent, a lot of the big breweries come from states that tend to be Republican controlled (Coors in Colorado, for instance).

The biggest wine and spirits companies tend to spread money around across parties, it seems. Anheuser-Busch InBev contributed equally across party lines last year, according to the report.

So why should we care about this? Well for starters, it may be relevant in the upcoming fight over the heinous piece of legislation called HR1161, which you should contact your congressional representative about, and make sure they vote against it if it comes up for a vote.

Second, it’s also worth noting what a puny little amount of money wine producers in particular, and alcohol producers in general spend in Washington compared to other industries. Alcohol producers in aggregate give a few paltry million dollars, compared to say $38 million by the National Association of Realtors. Perhaps someone with more math skills than I could normalize the contributions by size of each industry and see whether, as I suspect, the wine and spirits industry isn’t working the American system quite as well as it could be.

Read the full article.

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Where All That Wine is Going

Wednesday 23 March 2011 @ 3:03 am

I swear I’ve seen something like thirty news headlines in the last two weeks announcing “Americans Now Drink More Wine than Anyone Else.” This is clearly not true. But what is true, apparently, is that for the first time ever, more wine was shipped into this country (and/or shipped within our borders) last year than any other country in the world.

What this actually means, well that’s a complex answer. Anyone looking to simplify that complexity (and who wouldn’t when you’re trying to make generalizations at the scale of the global economy) could reasonably say that America consumed more wine last year than any other country.

I gave my own little cheer when I read the news stories, but then I started to wonder at the real story behind the numbers. Certainly, shipping volume can’t be denied as an indicator of commercial activity, and a derivative of commercial demand. But where are all those boxes of wine going? And are they really being consumed when they get there?

What has happened to wine inventories in the past year in all those big warehouses around the country where the boxes end up when they cross our shores? According to some folks I know who spend time in those warehouses, they’re not exactly emptying out at the rates they were several years ago.

And then there’s the little problem of per-capita consumption in this country, which is still dismally low compared to almost all other countries in the world. We Americans drink only 9.6 liters of wine a year per-capita. That’s less than Macedonia, and only a bit more than the United Arab Emirates, where alcohol is pretty much illegal.

The good news is that our consumption, no matter how you measure it, is on the rise. Our per capita consumption in 2008 was up 14% (thank you recession), and I expect it to keep on rising, though it will take us a long time at even a 14% annual increase to approach the per-capita consumption of France, at 53 liters of wine a year.

This of course means that some of us (we know who we are) seem to be responsible for vastly more than our fair share of wine consumption in this country. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but that’s a gap not unlike the income inequality gap in this country. Sobering. Or just the opposite, as the case may be.

So forgive me if I don’t get too excited about this recent milestone in our country’s history of global wine commerce. It’s an achievement to be sure, but there’s much more to be done to get wine on more tables in this country, more often. And of course, there’s much more wine to be drunk.

See the official press release.

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