The State of Wine in the USA Special

Star Wars, Soundgarden and My Chemical Romance? Wine-Searcher's US Editor W. Blake Gray talks to Don and Olly about the current state of wine in the United States.

Blake looks at the state of the Californian wine industry (with a particular focus on Silicon Valley Bank's Direct to Consumer Wine Report which just came out); the state of Ohio's appeal to the US Supreme Court (which could see a ruling on interstate shipping in the not to distant future); and the struggle to get facts through in the wine and health debate.

ABOUT THE WEEK IN WINE

The Week in Wine goes out every Monday morning so that you can turn up to work with great talking points from the latest news across the world of wine.

Hosted by wine-searcher editor Don Kavanagh with wine writer Olly Styles – who also produces the podcast – nearly all of the stories we discuss can be found on https://www.wine-searcher.com/magazine

You can get in touch with us at editor@wine-searcher.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Right then, hello everybody, and welcome to another Week in Wine podcast. Today we're very lucky. Your usual suspects, myself, Don Kavanaugh, editor of Wine Searcher, and Ollie Styles, Point Searcher writer and contributor. We are joined, we're very lucky today, in fact, because we're joined by our US editor, the one and only, live from San Francisco, W. Blake Gray. Hello, Blake, and how are you? Hi, Don, I'm great. Glad to be here. Fantastic. We're very glad to have you, let me tell you. I thought we'd talk today about some topics American. America is, of course, a very important market for us at Wine Searcher. Most of our readers and most of our users are based in America. So it's always nice to catch up every now and again and find out what's happening in the market over there. Now, you've written a few stories for us recently that I think we should look at more closely because they have quite a large impact on the market. And first of all, I think we should probably talk about today's story, which has just gone live in the last hour and a half or so. So anybody who hasn't read it, I would advise you to get it up now and start reading it. But this is about fees and visitor numbers falling in wine country.

SPEAKER_04 1:18

Yeah, there is a so there was a report, Silicon Valley Bank does a report on direct to consumer, everything about direct to consumer. And that includes tasting rooms and wine clubs and all of that. And it's uh it's a voluntary report for wineries, but they've got 450 wineries from all over the country. And uh, you know, one of the things I think that's interesting, so uh I'll skip to to as you say, the the the takeaway is that tasting fees are finally coming down for a lot of wineries. 30% of wineries in Napa and Sonoma announced that they uh reduced their tasting fees in the past year. Of course, they have to because the average tasting fee in Napa Valley is still $79 just to taste. Wow. Yeah. Um but you know, numbers are down. So uh the report and some of the things I didn't put in the story is that they asked the wineries that reduced their tasting fees, did it help bring up visitor numbers? And about one-fourth of them said that it did not. About one fourth of them said that it did, and half of them say it's it's too early to tell. But it's a time when DTC, because of the bizarre complexities of the U.S. wine market, where a winery can't easily, in most states, just sell its wine directly to a shop or directly to a restaurant. They have to go through a distributor. And the distributors are consolidating with having fewer of them. So a lot of wineries don't really have any way to get their wine to people except by selling it directly. And it's obviously more profit when you cut out the middleman. So this is just a very important channel for small wineries, and it keeps small wineries alive. And the good news from this report is that a quarter of the wineries that were surveyed uh said that they increased their revenues in the past year. So that's nice. But it's some good news is lost. I'm glad to see some. In a sense, though, if you think about that who responds to these surveys, I mean, Silicon Valley Bank has a lot of clients, but nobody has to respond to the survey. And so there's probably some self-selection going on. And I would have frankly expected numbers to be a little better. I would think that that wineries that are doing well would respond to the survey and say, hey, we're doing great. So it's just another sign. Now the good news is if a quarter of them increase the revenue, some people are doing some things right. Some wineries are still, you know, making money in the wine business. But it's it's we're just in this long grip of malaise. We have a grape glut. Uh there's a bet between our two leading analysts that I mentioned in this story. John Moore Marco and Robin Miller are the two guys I go to when I want to know what's going on in the California wine market. And these guys had a bet in January that the wine harvest was the smallest, California's wine harvest was the smallest it's been in 31 years. Not because we don't have a lot of vines in the ground, but because people farmers didn't have place for the fruit to go, so they weren't going to harvest. So Mora Marco thought this was so extreme that wineries would be looking for grapes by June. But he was wrong because people harvested on hope, basically. That and now those farmers have these grapes they couldn't sell. They may have made bulk wine that they can't sell. A lot of the the struggles in the wine industry have hit farmers harder than anyone because we have this backlog of inventory everywhere along the system, you know, at retail stores, at the wholesalers, at the wineries. And, you know, with the backlog of inventory, people don't want to make new wine, so they're not buying grapes. So it's just another. I feel like I write this story all the time. I look forward to us coming out of it. Like I look, I hope my career lasts long enough that you know I'll be writing the story. Hey, why another recovery story? You know, because I this is not why I got into wine. I get into wine, writing about wine to do your typical, hey, I had these eight cabernets, and here are the three I like best kind of story. Not like, wow, nobody's buying cabernet anymore, which is what I ended up writing.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Well, the the thing is in in this podcast series, we've had two kinds of attitudes towards the wine industry generally. Um, Ollie has been a little bit on the downside, thinking not a little bit, not a little bit, not a little bit. I I'm I'm I'm understating that hugely. Let's let's forget about your English reticence. Um let's let's just let's just talk like I'm an Irishman, right? He's been appallingly depressed about the whole thing. Yeah he thinks that the world is collapsing and that it hasn't for the roof hasn't finished falling in on us all yet. Myself, I've been I've been slightly more Pollyanna-ish about it, in that um I'm clutching at any upbeat story and thinking surely this is a sign of recovery. So, where do you stand on it from the American point of view, from the US wine market point of view? Do you see any signs of recovery? Do you see any green shoots, or is is the light at the tunnel just the oncoming train?

SPEAKER_04 6:11

Well, I'm gonna cite the two analysts I just talked about, Rob McMillan and John Moramarco, who really know more about the California wine market than anybody else. And I find them both to be positive right now. Now, their definition of positive is basically to say, you know, Rob McMillan is always saying, well, things are, you know, the the bad news is slowing down, basically. Um but but he's a banker, and that's the way bankers look at things. If he's seeing a turnaround, and it it is his job to decide whether to lend money for, you know, vineyard acquisition or whatever, he thinks the recovery will start roughly next year or 2028. Moro Marco is about the same. Moro Marco calls it bouncing around the bottom. He thinks that things have we he thinks Moro Marco thinks we're essentially at the bottom and we're not ready to turn around yet. But again, it depends. When you're desperate for good news, the fact that you can't sink any lower, in addition to being a fantastic lyric from a heavy metal song I like. Which one? Which one, right? It's from it's from Soundgarden. It's I'm looking California but feeling Minnesota. Uh I I can't get any lower still, I think I'm sinking. You know, that I think about that song all the time when it comes to the to the US wide market. I can't get any lower still, I think I'm sinking. But no, if we're not sinking, then yay. Uh, I mean, this is a it's a mild form of good news. My own personal take, and you know, those guys are business guys, I'm a writer. You know, I'm a writer who interviews business guys. But my own personal take is that everything comes around when I first started writing about whiskey in the early 90s, people were saying whiskey was dead. No one was drinking whiskey. There were no whiskey drinkers. There was a joke between distillers that a lot of people have probably heard this already. But whenever a corpse wagon went down the street in uh Louisville, someone would say, Oh, there goes another bourbon drinker. Um, you know, that that that's you know, the now, you know, whiskey, actually, whiskey it blooms off the roads on super expensive whiskey, but whiskey, as we know, had a tremendous boom since then. And I think wine's gonna have that. It may not be this Gen Z, it may be whatever comes after Gen Z, Gen A or whatever you're gonna call them. But everybody likes to do something than what other than what their parents did. So if your parents are a bunch of teetotaling boars, which I feel like a lot of millennials are right now, uh, you know, helicopter, helicopter parenting, you know, millennial boars, you just might think, hey, let's go out with my friends and split a bottle of Prosecco. Yeah, I really think that that's going to happen, that there will be a cultural because wine is so much more than just alcohol, as whiskey is too, but wine even more so. But uh so this is my culture-based belief, but you know, is that gonna take five years or is it gonna take 15 years? That I can't tell you.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

That's true. It's um it always reminds me of the terrible dread I felt when I realized that each generation comes up with music that will offend the previous generation. And my generation, my generation, I grew up during punk and the um like the like uh the original punk, proper punk. So the clash, the pistols, the damned, you know, stiff little fingers, x-ray specs, crass, brilliant, brilliant music, and incredibly anti-establishment music. But I I had this horrible feeling about the age of 25 that dear god, when I had my first child, dear god, they're gonna come up with something that I'm gonna find utterly appalling.

SPEAKER_02 9:46

And sure enough, they gave it to phone skills, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Oh Lord, it was everything, trust me. I grew up when my daughter was growing up, she had this mad um affection for Avril Levine, for God's sake, and and and bands like um oh, what was that crowd called? My chemical romance. Dear Lord, dreadful, dreadful derivative tripe. But anyway, um, but indeed, yes, deeply offensive to me, of course. But uh anyway, yeah. So maybe perhaps culturally this is what we do, isn't it? We we kick back against what's come before and and just let's hope that the whatever as you call them, whatever this upcoming generation is, they actually reach for the bottle a bit quicker than uh than their parents did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:37

Is there is there any um indication that what the next vintage is gonna be like? I assume we're talking the 26th vintage in California, right?

SPEAKER_04 10:44

Uh well it's it's gonna be early. It was a very, really wild winter with an early onset of spring. Um, we had a great frost risk, but here on the west coast we didn't have big frost. The New York region was almost and not and the areas around New York, but New York New York is the only one part of that that part of the country that makes quality wines, and they were almost wiped out by frost.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

Yes, that was famously. Yeah. And in terms of production, sorry, in terms of production, is it gonna be as the same as it was previous year? Is it gonna be still quite low, even lower? A bit what do you think?

SPEAKER_04 11:16

It'll be the same issue where we have more vines than we need, and even though some have been taken out, it'll be the exact same issue that we were talking about with the DTC report that not everyone should harvest, and we'll see if they do. You know, uh uh I looked into you can't just if you don't want to harvest, you you also just can't leave the vines alone. And uh I will know more about this than I do, but you've still got to if you if you want to keep the vine, if you want to skip this year and then harvest next year, you've still got to do some work in the vineyard. And so I, you know, that's it's really hard to predict and and to get a sense of what growers are gonna do, but they know, you know, they know what the market is. Um, and it's not it the the grape market's not so big that I I think fewer people will harvest this year, but I stink think there's still gonna be enough. Uh John Moore and Marco made the point too that all of our wines are gonna be better because people are gonna harvest these grapes that they think are good. And then if there's no market for them, they'll go into cheaper wines. So there's a there's at least some good news for consumers in the offing that's Yeah, I would think I mean I I would I think California wines and not just California wines, West Coast, I mean, because Washington has these business problems even greater than California since uh Chateau Saint-Michel, their flagship, has never been the same. But yeah, I I think the quality of wines out here has never been better. You know, we had the issue with obviously climate change is if for a region that's already pretty warm, climate change is a challenge. But something that we don't have 10 years that we did have 10 years ago is we don't have people thinking that let's just leave them on the gr on the vine and pick them as ripe as they can. And if the wine has 16.8% alcohol, we don't care. You know, the people don't do that either. So they are having to fight climate change, but they are fighting it, and that's that's a big change from 10-15 years ago. So I think you know the quality of wines out here has never been better. There's no reason for anybody you can go buy quality bulk wine. I mean, I could go buy make Blake wine tomorrow because I, as a writer who don't make wine, I get emails to my personal email all the time offering me bulk wine for sale. You know, so I could go out and release the Cabernet tomorrow and it would be excellent. There's just that much good wine out there. Um, so you know, for consumers, I mean that's the good news. That I I know that why one of the interesting things about wine is that you and I, and uh probably all of our listeners are willing to spend, I don't know how much, 50% more for a wine that's 5% better, whatever your equation is. And that's always been true. And I and I'm in the business of writing about that. I'll tell you, you know, hey, this this $150 wine is delicious, but right now that $25, $30 wine is going to be better than the $25-30 wine was, you know, 10 years ago. So the gap between these really expensive wines and the bottom shelf is still bottom shelf, but the gap between really expensive wines and sort of the upper middle class of wines is is it's not there really.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Yeah. Well, well, let's let's move on from California and take a look instead at Ohio. Because this decision in Ohio to apply to the Supreme Court to decide on yet another case that might see a start to interstate shipping that may be the start of the start of the start of something that might lead to an easing up of interstate shipping laws in the US. So, first of all, I suppose though, would you be able to give us a very quick rundown on the state of play? I mean, that you we know about the three-tier system in the states, but I'm not sure everybody's aware of it. Is it possible to do that quickly? Sure.

SPEAKER_04 14:47

I mean, the thing the main thing you have to understand about the U.S. market is it's 50 markets. Actually, 50 plus plus, you know, Washington, D.C. is its own market, and so is Guam. But uh every state has their own laws. And whereas we order everything now uh from Amazon online, you can't easily order wine online from wherever you want to order it to. Uh, some states don't allow you to order from retailers in other states. And uh the the the reason for this these laws, in a nutshell, is that the U.S. Constitution has something called the dormant commerce clause, which means it's not actually in there, but the Supreme Court's recognized it for more than 200 years that one state can't discriminate against the products or services of another state. Uh that's what makes us a nation. When the U.S. decided to get rid of prohibition, we passed the 21st Amendment, and there's a a phrase in there that says that the that says that the states, the laws of the states will be respected. So that makes alcohol laws a little bit different from every other product in the country. That state laws do not supersede. You know, California has had problems with this, with trying to say we're not going to have flagra or whatever, or you know, there's an ongoing fight with we want our pigs, pig farmers to give the pigs areas to Rome, and we don't want to buy bacon from states that don't do this. But that doesn't pass constitutional muster in the US because of the Dharma Commerce Commerce Clause. Alcohol is a separate thing, and the this has been going on in court battles for years. You have this three-third tier distributor tier, they make about 30% of every bottle sold through their tier. You can see why they would spend a lot of monies on lawyers to defend the fact that every bottle would go through them. That's just a a lot of money at stake. It seemed like in 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that uh in a case involving Michigan, that uh which is also a pretty decent wine-producing state, but they were allowing their wineries, wineries in Michigan to ship to Michigan residents and not wineries from other states. Uh Supreme Court said you can't do that. You if you can either you can either let every winery ship or you can let no winery ship, but you can't pick and choose between states. So people thought that would apply to retailers. It seemed like it might, but it hasn't. I went to the Supreme Court. One of my great moments as a reporter, thanks, Don, I got to go and cover a Supreme Court case in 2019 involving Tennessee, where Tennessee had a law that you had to have been lived in the state for two years to open a wine shop. And Total Wine, which is a big chain here that's actually owned by a Maryland politician, um, sued and they won. They said that's discriminating against people from another state. It seemed like that whole hearing in 2019, the judges talked about shipping a lot. And I left that room convinced. And then I read the verdict, which was you know, six to three, and I was convinced that this was going to mean that wine shipping was for retailers is open across the country. But subsequently, people with a vested interest are going to keep suing, and states also, you know, states get a lot of money, they get tax money from the distributors. They don't get tax money if a retailer in California sells to a consumer in Illinois, they should get tax money. They can, but they they're much more likely to collect it if it's sold through a distributor in Illinois who's paying their taxes. So the states like to restrict outside retail shops. They have the money for the lawyers from the retailer from sorry, from the wholesaler tier. And so they fought a series of suits that I just could not believe, frankly, that the forces of retail shipping kept losing. Because it seemed like the Supreme Court verdict in 2019 clearly said you shouldn't, you know, that what the judgment in 2019 said that you can't just say there's a three-tier system. You have to prove, if you want to have this kind of shipping ban, that there's some actual health and safety benefit for the public. And states have not been doing that. So Ohio had this case, and it's interesting, it was rolled once, one way, against the people who wanted to ship wine uh in in an appeals court, sent it back down, went back to the appeals court, they ruled three to nothing that, yeah, you have to prove that there's a health and safety benefit. You can't just say we have a three-tier system. So Ohio could have just said, fine, we'll change our law. They don't have to allow any any retailers to ship. They just can't they can't keep letting Cleveland retailers ship to Cincinnati. They they, you know, they don't have to allow any retailer to ship, but if they're going to, they you they should allow every retailer to ship. And it's interesting that the public health and safety case that that they tried to make was somebody in Cleveland, a home winemaker, was making wine that was bacteriologically compromised and selling it in Cleveland, like which really doesn't speak badly about retailers in LA or New York, if you ask me. Uh I I I myself would not be buying home wine from a Cleveland home wine company. That's that is the health and safety issue. But in any case, so what's really fascinating about this, and there's a there's an attorney named Sean O'Leary who I talk to a lot. He's a White Sox fan, hi Sean. If you're listening to this, what a year they're having. The White Sox are the Pope's team for those of you outside uh the United States. So, you know, uh they were also Obama's team. So Obama and the Pope.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

Anyway, uh Sean O'Leary is uh they'll be they'll be pop they'll be popular with the uh current administration then.

SPEAKER_04 20:02

Yeah, no, Donald Trump not gonna be a White Sox fan. Anyway, Sean is an expert on this and has actually written he's written various front-of-the-court briefs. I think he's piled in on a suit about California distribution laws. And what we were talking about this after I wrote my story on it, I regret not putting this in the story, is that it was a strange and very personal decision by Ohio's attorney general to appeal this to the Supreme Court because he doesn't have to appeal. They could just take the loss. But this was his last day or something, wasn't it? Right, exactly. So they could just take the loss. What everyone thought they would do would be appeal for something called an on-bank review, where they lost, they lost three to nothing with three judges from the appeals court, but they could go and ask all 16 sitting judges and see if they'd do better. I mean, they'd have to come from behind, you know, they'd have to get nine out of the remaining 13 judges. But, you know, they could give it a shot because as I said, it did an earlier verdict went a different way. They could have shot, and everyone thought they would do that because that's how, and uh plus the the ruling would be stayed. I mean, right now the the ruling was, you know, you got to get rid of this law immediately. People could ship. The ruling would be stayed while they filed that appeal, and that's what people usually do. They follow every possible appeal. Ohio's attorney general didn't do this, and not only that, and the thing that Sean pointed out to me that I didn't think to put in the story, usually in the US legal system, people take every day available to them to file an appeal. Uh, they want to see what else might happen, you know, what other issues there might be. Um, so they had 90 days to file an appeal, and they filed it, I don't have the exact day in front of me, but like less than 40. Like more than a month and a half before they needed to. And it was the last day, as you said, Don, the attorney general was outgoing. And it's his to my knowledge, unless he signed some other legislation, it was his last official act was to file this appeal to the Supreme Court. And I can't figure out why, and neither can Sean. And we kicked it around for a while, and uh, we both have theories, but you know, he's not in charge of the case anymore. He's a he's a very right wing religious guy. He left to become like a fundraiser for some right wing religious group. But you know, in the US, right wing religious and alcohol, it's it's unpredictable because uh you know, Catholics can be right wing religious and they're pro-wine, but we have this whole you know school of evangelical Christianity that doesn't has never read the Bible and doesn't realize how you know Jesus turned water into wine, not the other way around. But but in any case, you know, it's uh it could have been if he made it as a personal decision that he wanted to challenge the Supreme Court, which both Sean and I think this is true. We don't know why. Sean thinks he might want to lose, you know, and and maybe he might. I I don't know, because I think the thing of it is the people who want to ship were delighted. They had no way of appealing. They won the case. This was a great case for them. They won the case of the appeals court, they really wanted to go to the Supreme Court because the Ohio case is just brilliant for them. And because they won, they had no way of getting it there. So the Ohio's attorney general does them does the the pro-shipping forces an enormous favor for reasons that we just don't know and and may never know. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

But then part of the problem though is now that it goes to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has where it's made decisions in the past, they've they have been ignored by lower courts, haven't they? And the Supreme Court hasn't made any move to try and enforce their decisions or their judgments.

SPEAKER_04 23:24

That's been a bit of a surprise to me, but he part of the problem, you know, the Supreme Court, they're very activist on political issues in this administration, as you may know, but generally, but that's an aberration from Supreme Court history, and including with this court. And the Supreme Court usually is like job of the hut. They sit and wait for things to come to them. So I would bet that Samuel Alito, who is a conservative justice, but he wrote the the pro the Tennessee decision that should have opened up to to should have opened the country to retail shipping. Because alcohol law doesn't really fall on our traditional, you know, our liberal conservative lines in the U.S. I would bet that Alito is pissed off. I would bet that Alito, you know, it's not that I know these people personally, but I've been covering the Supreme Court enough for Wine Zarcher that I've got a good sense of their personalities. I'll bet he's really pissed off that these lower courts have been ignoring him. And frankly, I think that's a reason they might take the case. And I I know I there's a little bit of a, you know, yeah, I've said this before. Oh, they might take this one, they might take this one. But this isn't this one is one where the state of Ohio is asked them. It isn't some consumer, it isn't some wine shipper. The state of Ohio is asking them to take this appeal. So it's a much greater chance that they'll take it. And yeah, I I would think if Alito is is in on this decision at all, he he'll want to weigh in. You know, the Supreme Court, Supreme Court doesn't like their uh their orders being ignored. So, you know.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Well, so it might be finally after, and we've we have been talking about this for a long, long time, as long as I've been at Wine Searcher, I've been here since I've been here for 12 years. This question has been rumbling along. But do you think that maybe we are getting sort of the the pebbles at the start of something that may eventually turn into an avalanche?

SPEAKER_04 25:06

Yes. Oh, I I I think if I had to bet, and I don't know what odds I'd give, but I it's only 3% of co of cases that it's called uh certi rari, I don't know why, some Latin word, but only 3% of cases that does that people appeal to the Supreme Court does the Supreme Court accept. So I don't know that I would bet even odds on this, but I think there's a lot better chance the Supreme Court takes this in the usual case. I think they will take it, and I think they'll rule for wine shipping. In terms of when, I would think since the appeal was just filed in June, it might make it as soon as the fall calendar, and then we'd be talking about a ruling probably next probably next May or June. So it could be with it's possible that this could happen within a year. Uh Frank, I i if you again, I I'm not betting my salary on it, but this is what I this is what I would say I think will happen. Is there any noise?

SPEAKER_02 25:57

Is there any is there any noise from distributors on this?

SPEAKER_04 26:03

They're not going to uh they'll put up the legal the legal power to fight it. Um you know their argument is uh it just it's just tiresome though, frankly, that oh kids are gonna order wine. You know, really the only the the arguments you have to make if you have to make a health and safety argument, that's the one they always make, that a bunch of teenagers are gonna order wine. And uh, you know, I don't know how many teenagers you know, but I don't uh we were just talking about this. I don't know how many of them drink wine in the first place. I certainly don't think that many of them want, you know, a $75 Napa cab with plus shipping costs. Uh it's just a lot easier if and and I drank when I was underage. Uh oh my god, I've just admitted a crime, but I think the statute of limitations is over. I think it goes, yeah. It it's it's just easier to pay some homeless guy outside a convenience store to go get you a bottle of vodka, which is probably what you're or beer, which you're more interested in at that age anyway. To go through the trouble, there's signature verification from the common carriers, FedEx and UPS, to go to the trouble to try to order wine that you might not get, steal your parents' credit card, they're gonna find out about it. You know, it's just a lot easier if you've got $20 cash to go get it, you know.

SPEAKER_02 27:16

I I could probably yeah. I think also from from the outside world looking in, we sort of use that same argument and say, well, it's it's just as dangerous that you can buy an AR-15 online.

SPEAKER_04 27:28

Oh well, you we have the constitutional right to that. You can't take away our can't take away our assault weapons.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Well, or or more to the point, more more to the point, with a with a single click of your mouse, you can watch the most depraved sexual activity you like at any time of the day or night, no matter what age you are, or just clicking I am over 18. And yet nobody seems to have any kind of moral panic about that at all. But as soon as you mentioned booze, whoo!

SPEAKER_04 27:53

Yeah, well it's and that segues into the idea that uh something we should talk about is health, because it's interesting because in order to make this argument, the the the wholesalers have to make an argument that wine is dangerous, right? Um, that wine is somehow dangerous. But in that sense, you're undermining your own business. Because to me, the biggest threat to the to wine right now are these reports about negative reports about health, which are being, in my opinion, very inaccurately portrayed.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

And indeed, indeed, they're being put together in a flawed manner as well. Right.

SPEAKER_04 28:30

And there was a report last week that actually showed that moderate drinkers had lower had less chance of cancer. And I thought about writing a story about it, but the conclusions uh say, and I'm really looking at the report right now, while light to moderate drinking may appear neutral or even protective in certain analyses, we caution against interpreting alcohol consumption as beneficial for cancer outcomes. In other words, we have these results, but you know, we don't want to publicize them because you might drink. Uh and that was that was the positive report. And if it is really positive, uh like, you know, I don't think anyone should drink because it's good for you, even though every study that's ever compared teetotalers and wine drink moderate drinkers have found that moderate drinkers are healthier. Every study. There's never been a study that hasn't. But that that said, I don't think people should drink because it's it's good for you, but I don't think you should not drink because it's bad for you unless you are specifically allergic to alcohol, like my unfortunate wife, who marry poorly. Um you know, if unless you people have individual reasons where they they can't drink, and you shouldn't drink, you shouldn't binge drink, you know, the kind of drinking that people did when I was younger. I mean, shots in the bar, you know, shots, shots, no, but you know, enjoying a bottle of wine with your dinner, I mean, makes life better. Moderate drinkers have lower cause all it's lower all-cause mortality, so less chance of dying. Um, and the reason it has protective effects against heart attack and stroke, and heart attack is the number one killer of Americans. You know, I'm not saying you drink to be healthier, but I think drinking drinking wine with dinner is a health is a part of a healthy lifestyle. And it's something the industry is I don't know how they address it, but they have to. Yeah, we we have to get back to, I mean, the thing about it this this other report, Joe Biden, which we've covered this extensively, and I don't want to touch on it too long. If the New York Times has a health reporter who is a teetotaler and very anti-alcohol, and she she didn't write about this first report that I mentioned, which showed that there seemed to be some sort of protective effect against cancer, but she was all over the Biden ICPUD report. You know, to inform the U.S. dietary guidelines, Congress, Congress designated uh really a blue-ribbon panel of top experts, including a couple of abstinence advocates called Nason, the National Advocate of Society, you know, science and engineering or something. Um, Biden, who was a teetotaler and was very anti-alcohol, got something called ICPA, the interagency committee for the prevention of underage drinking, to file to create a separate report about to supposedly what's healthy for adults. And remember, this is the Committee for Underage Drinking, which had nothing to do with saying what's healthy for adults. And Congress found out about it and said, no, stop that. Uh and this was bipartisan too. Biden started it. Congress found out about it in the Trump era. Congress, and this is both Democrats and Republicans, said no, stop that. You weren't authorized to do this. We authorized NASOM. We want to hear what NASOM has to say. So the ICP people, which includes the Canadian Tims, they're two Canadian anti-alcohol researchers named Tim, and they get themselves in Namie and Stockwell, and they get themselves, you you you know, just look for the if you want to, if you want to know what a report is gonna say, just see if the Canadian Tims are on the are on the panel. Um so the the ICP report comes out this week, even and not only is the New York Times play it as, you know, we know what it was gonna say because it was that these people were put on this panel to make this finding. Uh, and they're saying, oh, anything more than one drink a week, which is actually better than the New York Times usually says, anything more than one drink a week has risk. And moreover, they're able to play it as the Trump administration killed the report, which isn't the case at all. It was Congress that killed the report. But, you know, you may have noticed that um not as many of us love Donald Trump as we used to. We won't delve heavily into the reasons for that. But that said, you know, the New York Times knows their audience, and if they if they connect Trump with killing this report, they know what the impact is going to be. And I gotta say, personally for myself, and I hope Eric Asimov, who I respect the hell out of the New York Times wine critics, hears this. I don't think he will at the end of the podcast. But I know, I don't know that many American topics all that well, but I know alcohol law very well, and I know alcohol and health very well because I like to drink wine, and uh, even before I ever started writing about it, I wanted to know what was healthy for me. And I know the New York Times is just way off base intentionally on how it covers alcohol and health. And that makes me wonder about every topic that I don't know that well. You know, security, the Iran war, Gaza, whatever. If they're off editorializing in the news section on alcohol and health, and they are, I I I'm sorry. I I I were I the New York Times as a whole doesn't have as much credibility for me because of how they cover alcohol and health.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Right. Well, that's uh it's a it's an issue of journalism as well, isn't it? Because it's it is, as you say, editorializing in the news space, which is well, always was traditionally in no-no.

SPEAKER_04 33:37

This might be a detour and you can cut it, but I will say this. So the Times is very strongly out anti-alcohol. They're also pretty strongly anti-cannabis. And I don't see anybody talking about this, but you know, we have an enormous problem here with designer drugs, designer drugs coming from China, things that are based on fentanyl, that are, you know, just weird molecules that chemists in China, people just order them and they show up and they take them. And we have we have hundreds of overdose deaths in San Francisco every year. And I personally think that if we weren't telling people that alcohol and cannabis are so dangerous, maybe they wouldn't be taking these truly dangerous fentanyl alternatives that they don't even know what's in it.

SPEAKER_01 34:14

That's a fair point, well made. And and I think, folks, we're probably gonna close it off there because we've run into um run a little bit over time, but that's okay. It's all been fascinating. I'd like to thank you very much, Blake, yeah, um, for joining us, for being part of it. And I'd also like to get some commitment to coming back again and talking to us again on a more regular basis. Yeah, I'd be happy to do it.

SPEAKER_04 34:38

As long as they don't have to, as long as they don't have to show my face.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

Wait, listen. We're trying to attract reader uh listeners. You know, that's why we don't have any of our faces on there.

SPEAKER_02 34:50

That was a pack, that was a pack from the start, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 34:53

Yes, yes, it was indeed. All right, well, thank you very much, everybody. Thank you, Ollie, thank you, Blake, and um thank you to our listener. And we'll be we'll be back with you with the regular programming on Monday. Cheers. Thanks, Mike. See you.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

Thank you for listening to the Week in Wine News podcast. For more than all that we discuss, and for price of retail information on all the wines near you, including comprehensive coverage from our pro membership option, go to winesearcher.com.