> 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.
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.
since when did everyone, ditch personal responsibility to the drain ?
I understand that social media platforms are hardcore unethical with the way they prioritize screentime and addiction
Over our wellbeing even at the cost of knowingly decreasing our attention spans with all the Shorts / Tiktok Algorithms.
But we must also take personal responsibility, it costed me $2 (/year) to buy a screen time addiction removal app that works for my iPhone, iPad and even my linux machine with firefox browser, and to lock down every damn social media app in both intervention and absolute blocking ways, and it worked great !
I moved from a screen time addiction of 9h / day to just using my phone in total for 2h out of which most of that is Phone Calls, Apple Music, and Booking Ubers.
I was able to set free, and my life was better for it, because of my personal responsibility towards my own life.
It doesnt cost much / almost nothing, to reclaim your life back, there will always be people / organizations trying to screw you over, they have always existed since time millenium , be it corrupt empires, cults and anti-social religions, horrible food, bad peer pressure in school leading to poor influence, bad habits picked up from parents/elders in a kid's life.
The only consistent way that humans have been able to survive, thrive and personally excel in their own lives, against all odds of their society, family, and their sorroundings.
Is PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. I sometimes feel many of us have given up on any outlook of fixing ourselves, i see it with my friends and my loved ones too, we have to make personal responsibility, popular again, if we want a better future.
You mistook what I said, for saying nothing needs to be done regulatory, and everything is ok.
What I said is, dont wait, for the government to come save you, regulations take a lot of time to happen, societal level malice/bad things take a decently long time to correct itself.
So dont wait until then, life is too short to wait for the government to come save you. Save yourself ! atleast thats what I did.
Folks can downvote me all they want, doesnt change , that personal responsibility is the only reliable way in this world to consistently lead a happier life.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Alcohol is consistently more dangerous statistically than most other things, I doubt lowering consumption is the driving factor behind the patterns you're mentioning.
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.
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.
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.
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 values, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)?
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.
While technically incorrect, tree is informally used to describe grape vines in some regions. Similar to “tomato plants” which is a more common example.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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. They can slash production costs while branding it as 'healthy'... 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 and charge a premium.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You didn’t point out a fact; 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 and its policies. Most of them haven’t been public representatives for over a decade. The last one left office in 2018.
You shouldn’t have worded it a different way; you shouldn’t have raised it at all. It’s a weak, tangential point, almost completely substance-free, 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
Over our wellbeing even at the cost of knowingly decreasing our attention spans with all the Shorts / Tiktok Algorithms.
But we must also take personal responsibility, it costed me $2 (/year) to buy a screen time addiction removal app that works for my iPhone, iPad and even my linux machine with firefox browser, and to lock down every damn social media app in both intervention and absolute blocking ways, and it worked great !
I moved from a screen time addiction of 9h / day to just using my phone in total for 2h out of which most of that is Phone Calls, Apple Music, and Booking Ubers. I was able to set free, and my life was better for it, because of my personal responsibility towards my own life.
It doesnt cost much / almost nothing, to reclaim your life back, there will always be people / organizations trying to screw you over, they have always existed since time millenium , be it corrupt empires, cults and anti-social religions, horrible food, bad peer pressure in school leading to poor influence, bad habits picked up from parents/elders in a kid's life.
The only consistent way that humans have been able to survive, thrive and personally excel in their own lives, against all odds of their society, family, and their sorroundings.
Is PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. I sometimes feel many of us have given up on any outlook of fixing ourselves, i see it with my friends and my loved ones too, we have to make personal responsibility, popular again, if we want a better future.
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.
What I said is, dont wait, for the government to come save you, regulations take a lot of time to happen, societal level malice/bad things take a decently long time to correct itself.
So dont wait until then, life is too short to wait for the government to come save you. Save yourself ! atleast thats what I did.
Folks can downvote me all they want, doesnt change , that personal responsibility is the only reliable way in this world to consistently lead a happier life.
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.
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.
Born 1940s, about 14u/week. 1960s about 12u, By 1980s dropped to 10u, and by 2000 down to about 7-8.
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.
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
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...
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
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.
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 values, 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.
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.
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.
Effectively every non sleeping minute of your life monetized by tech.
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.
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'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
WTF?
This just sounds like yet another thing that can give me a rash or some kind of weird cancer in 20 years.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Then its a personal preference thing.
Yes, exactly you're proving my point. You see this as a slot to fill and are making it a wedge issue.
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.
Why's this?
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports
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.
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.
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. They can slash production costs while branding it as 'healthy'... 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 and charge a premium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Groundwater_Manage...
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.
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.
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.
You shouldn’t have worded it a different way; you shouldn’t have raised it at all. It’s a weak, tangential point, almost completely substance-free, 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/
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).