What will the wine industry look like in 2040 if the World Health Organization gets its way? And what’s REALLY behind their statement this year that NO level of alcohol consumption is safe?

ANYTHING BUT WINE

The first tremors of anxiety began in January 18, 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank, shortly before collapsing in March, released the 2023 State of the US Wine Industry Report. The takeaway message? Consumers older than 60 are the only growth segment when it comes to wine. Oops.

Author of the report, Rob McMillan, wrote, “I had hoped to see trended information that would show that our industry’s engagement with the younger consumer was at least improving over time, even if it was disappointing nominally. But this information says the opposite. This large dataset shows that consumers younger than 60 are less interested in buying wine today than they were in 2007. This is telling us that whatever we’ve collectively tried to do to engage with the younger consumer in the last decade hasn’t been good enough. In fact, if we are doing something, the results are getting worse, so you could argue that we should immediately stop doing it.”

Wine is SO not cool with the kids.

McMillan continued, “As consumers, boomers are being replaced by younger buyers at a clip of 10,000 per day, each of those replacements possessing different tastes, values and desires than the older cohorts. One of the things that distinguishes boomers from all other cohorts is their affinity for wine. Those younger than 60 are less in love with wine than those older than 60. That means that we’re replacing consumers who are more committed to the category.”

Also in January, the World Health Organization published a news release based on a study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that those of us in the wine industry can’t help but see as a direct attack on our livelihoods. In the release, titled, “No Level of Alcohol Consumption is Safe for Our Health,” Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges, acting Unit Lead for Noncommunicable Disease Management and Regional Advisor for Alcohol and Illicit Drugs in the WHO Regional Office for Europe, stated, "We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is.”

When the latest Gallup poll came out, I was surprised to learn that more Americans than ever (39%) view moderate drinking (1-2 glasses of wine a day) as unhealthy. Hadn’t direct-to-consumer wine sales peaked during the pandemic? The data, as it turns out, was primarily influenced by Millenials and Gen Zers, whose negative view of moderate drinking rose 18 percentage points in the last few years.

Ideas, anyone? [Crickets…]

Some suggested that the wine industry needs to spend more on advertising. Only 4.8% of the the total amount of money spent on the advertising of alcoholic beverages is spent advertising wine, according to the SBV report. Beer ads account for 48.1% of spending. Maybe that explains why 35% of 21 to 29-year-olds who drink alcohol choose anything but wine. Meanwhile, sales of non-alcoholic wine and beer nearly doubled in the U.S. last year.

Gen Z’s favorite beverage? The soft drink.

Source: *The* *Business of Drinks* podcast

I didn’t study marketing in college, but I think learning more about those we’re trying to market to might be smart. So, what do we know about Gen Z? According to Restaurant Business Magazine, over 35 million Gen Zers are legal drinking age, and 85 million will be legal drinking age in 2030. Here are a few notes from a quick search.

Gen Z complains about being broke but spends big.
In an August 2022 New York Times article titled, “Starbucks Reports Record Revenue, Driven Mostly by Gen Z’s Love of Iced Drinks,” we learn that Starbucks made $8.2 billion in profits. Customers showed no signs of giving up nitro cold brews, despite higher prices. And in a survey by LendingTree, 48% of Gen Z and 39% of Millennials admit to overspending on delivery services like DoorDash.
A significant percentage of Gen Z identifies itself as “neurodiverse.” The CDC’s data shows an increase in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder from 1 in 150 children in 2000 to 1 in 36 children in 2020. Data on the drinking habits of neurodiverse people would be interesting to read.
Gen Z prefers marijuana to alcohol. Technomic surveyed 2,000 people over 21, half of them Gen Zers, and half Millennials. In states where recreational cannabis is legal, 65% of Gen Zers said they smoke marijuana and 51% drink cannabis-infused beverages. According to New Frontier Data, 69% of people age 18-24 prefer marijuana to alcohol.
42% of Gen Z has been diagnosed with a mental health condition, and 57% use prescription medication (for which drinking alcohol, even moderately, is contraindicated) to treat their anxiety. This is according to a recent study by Harmony Healthcare IT, which also reports that Gen Z spends an average of $44/month on pharmaceuticals to treat mental health conditions.

Artistic rendition of a grape soda bottle by Pella Anderson — I think we’re on to something now, folks.

Sober curious?

There might not be big money - or huge growth potential - in marketing wine to Gen Zers, a significant chunk of whom are taking pharmaceuticals for mental health diagnoses and therefore can’t drink alcohol, but who love soft drinks and cold brews and prefer using marijuana at home to meeting friends at a restaurant that serves wine. But you know where there IS a staggering money-making potential, one that might even command the interest of the World Bank, working in concert with the World Health Organization? Diagnosing more and more of the world’s population as mentally ill and prescribing more and more pharmaceuticals.

And to make matters worse, I can’t help but think the World Health Organization created the problem (anxiety and mental health problems) by offering only one solution to the pandemic (lockdowns). Now that younger generations are traumatized and anxious about the future, the WHO has yet another solution: pharmaceuticals.

This year, the World Bank and the World Health Organization co-hosted an event during the World Bank-International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings in order to “engage finance ministers, multilateral and bilateral organizations, the business community, technology innovators, and civil society” to invest in mental health programs. This sounds to me like an effort, but not a compassionate one. Not an effort to get to the bottom of the reason why younger generations are unhappy and suffering from anxiety, but rather to move more money around and into the hands of the powerful pharmaceutical industry.

.In an August 2022 New York TImes article, “This Teen Was Prescribed 10 Psychiatric Drugs. She’s Not Alone,” we learn from the mail-order pharmacy Express Scripts that antidepressant prescriptions for teenagers rose 38 percent from 2015 to 2019. While Prozac and Lexapro are the only medicines approved by the FDA for teens with depression, an increasing number of physicians are prescribing multiple psychotropic medicines in combination for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, anxiety, and other behavioral disorders, and the results of such combinations are unknown.

The article cites an example of a college-aged young woman who was prescribed multiple medications, including “lamotrigine, an anti-epileptic drug used for mood; hydroxyzine, gabapentin and propranolol for anxiety; escitalopram, an antidepressant; mirtazapine to treat major depressive disorder; and lithium carbonate, for general mood disorders, although it is also used to treat bipolar disorder.” That’s a lot of pills to swallow. I take almost that many, except that mine are olive leaf extract, quercetin, nitric oxide, black seed oil, and other natural supplements that I hope will keep give me mental acuity and a strong immune system in the post-COVID world.

Artistic rendition of a dead mouse holding a pharmaceutical by Pella Anderson — Big Pharma does not love you.

Nor does it have your best interests in mind.

Likely, trends are now so firmly underway that reversing them will be difficult. We see more of the large swallowing up the tiny, just as we did during the pandemic shutdowns, and tiny wine labels can’t compete with that economy of scale. I believe there will be fewer wineries and less diverse and unique winemaking by 2040. But who knows? Human are nothing if not resilient and capable of confounding expectations. If we grieve over the state of affairs, it is not because of a projected loss of income, the passing of a good and grounded way of life as winemakers living and working in harmony with nature, or the inability to pass on an honest career and business to our children. It’s because something that has sustained human culture for 10,000 years is under attack. Apparently, there is no place for wine, the most human of beverages, nor for the art and science of winemaking, in balance with the natural world, in the brave new world. It’s not that I want more 25-year-olds to spend $50 a week on wine rather than iced coffee. It’s that, one day, when a new generation reads about Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” if they read about Homer’s wine dark sea, they will have no reference point for the meaning. They will be missing out on a lot.

The Wine Industry's Nervous Breakdown