No category of alcohol has reacted to the recent public health debate about drinking the way wine has. The upcoming federal review of U.S. dietary guidelines already had the wine industry on edge when the Surgeon General in January put forward a slate of recommendations to make the link between alcohol and cancer clearer to the public. The resulting headlines weren’t welcomed by the alcohol industry broadly, but wine in particular seemed to panic.
“I don’t see beer having the same reaction or spirits having the same reaction but wine is aghast at this,” says Barbara Fitzgerald, an international wine marketing strategist with Apri La Creative Consulting. “I don’t understand how that affects everyone [in wine] so deeply, because we shouldn’t be trying to sell wine as some kind of secret elixir snake oil.”
Winemakers can’t make explicit health claims on labels or in advertising. But they’ve for decades benefited from a general perception that wine is healthier than spirits or beer — and perhaps is even healthier than not drinking at all. Much of this stems from the so-called French Paradox, an influential “60 Minutes” episode that aired in 1991 and promoted a link between a daily glass of red wine and heart health. That association stuck for more than 30 years as it was slightly repackaged for successive generations. Most recently, popular media about “blue zones” (regions around the world with higher rates of people who live to be 100 or older) has bluntly stated that wine helps you live longer. Wine’s cultural reputation as an aspirational, exclusive beverage has played a role in cementing its wholesomeness, too.
The industry is vexed by the prospect of this changing. Yet a public that’s grown more ambivalent about wine’s effects on health may provide the course-correction the struggling category needs. With its health halo dimmed, wine may be forced to find more compelling and durable strategies for appealing to American drinkers.
“There are so many things about wine that we can continue to discuss and to market and to position that are of greater value to our customers,” Fitzgerald says. As a fourth-generation wine professional, she grew up surrounded by conversations about wine’s role in a healthy lifestyle. She thinks that message has run its course. “Are people now going to recognize that actually, maybe wine isn’t the health beverage I thought it was, but I still get so much out of it? We need to be there to capture what else they get out of it,” she says.
What else people get out of wine — flavor, enjoyment, culture — are at the heart of the work Angela McCrae does. McCrae is the founder and publisher of Uncorked & Cultured, a platform to connect BIPOC audiences and brands around the world through wine, wellness, culture, and adventure. She believes wine can be part of a healthy diet, though this is one of the least important reasons she hears from consumers as to why they choose to drink wine.
“Wine starts with culture first,” McCrae says. “When people look at wine from a consumer standpoint, it’s about adding value to their lives. It doesn’t start with what a doctor says. … More or less, people understand that in order for them to enjoy life, there are certain trade-offs that come from that.”
She suggests wine refocus from the concept of physical health to one of emotional wellness. This is much more in line with how the consumers that McCrae talks to, and in particular Black women, relate to wine.
“What do we like to use wine for as Black women? First, wellness, because it’s a relaxation thing,” she says. “We want it to relax at the end of the day while taking a bath.”
Wellness versus health might not only be more resonant and culturally expansive, but could avoid some of the unintentional baggage that comes with linking wine to health. Who is drinking — and what they’re drinking — alters our perceptions of the healthfulness of certain beverages. Public health (what science has proven to be good on a population level) can be conflated with morality (the value judgments we assign to individual actions). As fat advocates have pointed out for decades, health recommendations are often indistinguishable from finger-wagging. In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom wrestles with her discomfort about this as it relates to drinking alcohol. She writes that “the fervor of the cultural denigration of drinking feels like it is less about the number of people who drink and more about who is drinking.”
“Let’s focus on the other things that wine offers, which we can prove and can talk about: being in community, a connection to the natural world, a connection to far-away spaces.”
Class matters. Wine, with its place at the fine-dining table and in expensive, temperature-controlled cellars, seems more virtuous to many Americans than 6-packs of domestic lager, tallboys of malt liquor, or nips of flavored whiskey. The flip side of positive health messaging is often shame. McMillan Cottom rejects conversation about “whether someone chose cancer because she drank red wine or chose to die because she ate too many carbohydrates and got fat.” Even if wine’s intention is not to shame, relying too heavily on its health halo compared to other beverages can have unintentional, exclusionary effects.
McCrae suggests wine find its path forward not by continuing to argue its link to health, but in aligning itself with aspects of what makes life joyful: travel, food, music, culture. Fitzgerald agrees. The alcohol-versus-health debate has lately put wine on the defensive and mired many industry professionals in a debate about research methods and meta-analyses. She advocates for a proactive approach that’s simply more, well, fun.
“Let’s focus on the other things that wine offers, which we can prove and can talk about: being in community, a connection to the natural world, a connection to far-away spaces,” Fitzgerald says.
This is what young legal-drinking-age Americans broadly want from their beverages, after all. Consumer research has consistently shown that younger generations are most interested in drinks that fit their lifestyles, their flavor expectations, and their moods at the moment. If their perception of alcohol is that it’s a fun indulgence, why push back against that with health messaging they’re skeptical of anyway? Wine benefited from perceived health benefits mostly among boomers, who the most recent Silicon Valley Bank wine report describes as a “high-earning, nearly homogenous consumer group.” Gen Z could not be more different; factoring in immigration patterns, this generation is projected to become majority non-White in 2026. Losing the health halo might hurt wine in the short term, but can ultimately point the category toward more effective, inclusive, and proactive messaging.
“Wine is not going away,” Fitzgerald reminds us. “This beverage hasn’t been around for 8,000 years because everyone thought it was making their heart healthy.”
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