Drink (75 page)

The matter was considered by the Federal Trade Commission in 1999 and again in 2003. Its conclusions made disappointing reading to the opponents of alcohol advertising. It found that, on the evidence, the brewers had achieved 99 percent compliance with their own codes and that such codes made them models of corporate responsibility. Moreover, in response to the investigation, they had voluntarily raised the placement standard from a 50 percent adult audience to 70 percent, beyond which, in the opinion of the commission, it would be hard to venture without impeding their lawful ability to promote a legal product.

Although this round went to the brewers, the victory was technical rather than moral. By coincidence, perhaps, many of their ads appealed strongly to juvenile minds. While they did not feature adults kissing or making money, they abounded in animals. Budweiser, for instance, had expanded its menagerie. Spuds MacKenzie and the singing frogs had been succeeded by twin Dalmatians, a trained mouse, a ferret, and a pair of lizards. A 2005 study into how children responded to beer ads found that they had an overwhelming preference for those that featured their four-legged friends. The ads that interested juniors least, in contrast, were those that focused on the brewing process and the quality of the resulting product.

They did not have to sit through many of them. Quality, in the sense of a superior pint, and variety, too, had by and large been filtered out of American brewing in the fifty years following repeal. By 1984, the four largest brewers controlled 94 percent of the market. Over the following decade, when the fashion for lite beers emerged, their products, while consistent, carefully engineered fluids, had little appeal to a connoisseur. In consequence, discriminating adult beer drinkers took matters into their own hands and set up their own breweries—in their backyards, in bars, and in commercial lots. These craft brewers were inspired by the example of Fritz Maytag, a Stanford graduate who had bought 51 percent of the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco for a few thousand dollars in 1965. Anchor had been brewing continuously since 1896 but had hit rock bottom just before Maytag invested. He became its sole proprietor in 1969 and thereafter flourished. His flagship product was bottled Anchor Steam Beer, modeled on the staple brew of the gold rush era, which won itself space in California restaurants and bars both on account of its quality and its difference from the lite brews promoted with animals on television.

After quality came diversity. Anchor introduced new styles of brews, including
Liberty Ale,
which was released on April 18, 1975, to commemorate the bicentennial of Paul Revere’s rum-stoked gallop, and
Ninkasi,
made to the recipe implicit in the hymn to the ancient Sumerian goddess of brewing. Such superior products, and commercial success, prompted a host of other Americans to try their hand at making beer. Craft brewers sprung up all over the land in the early 1990s. Anchor Steam was joined by Chelsea Sunset Red, Sierra Nevada Pale, Pete’s Wicked Blonde, BridgePort India Pale Ale, Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, and dozens of other novel labels.

The craft beer movement, however, ran low on steam toward the turn of the millennium. Its growth decelerated from a 50 percent year-on-year rate to only 5 percent in 1997. Several factors contributed to the loss of momentum. Ironically, quality was one of them. Some of the new breweries made bad, strange, or temperamental beer, and whatever its critics said about Bud Lite, it was a wonderfully consistent and stable product. A sour pint of “Alligator’s Breath” or suchlike might put a prospective convert off craft beer for life. A second factor was intrasector competition. The new brewers weren’t fighting only the majors but also their peers for market share. Competition was encouraged through beer shows and prizes. Beer critics such as Roger Protz and Michael Jackson issued tasting notes and ratings, and brewers with better scores won customers from their lesser-ranked brethren.

The beer
gourmandisme
awakened by the craft sector also turned Americans on to foreign suds. Many of the new styles had been inspired by German lagers and British ales, and converts to quality beers were tempted to taste the original models of their locally made favorites. In consequence, imported brews led the charge against the bland majors in the second half of the 1990s, doubling their market share between 1995-96 and 2001. By 2005, imports accounted for 12 percent of the American market, against a 3.5 percent share for the 1,371 breweries of the craft sector. The remaining 84.5 percent was supplied by a mere thirty-eight major breweries. The market itself was a behemoth. In 2005, just under three hundred million Americans drank 6.35 billion gallons of beer worth $82 billion between them, equating to more than thirty gallons per head for those of either sex of drinking age.

The rebirth of American craft brewing inspired a revival in that most puritan of beverages, hard cider. The staple of colonial farmers had been killed off as a commercial drink by Prohibition. Orchards were felled, and by the 1950s people had forgotten even the taste of President John Adams’s breakfast tipple. The hard cider market slept for another forty years until awoken in the early 1990s through the introduction of brands such as
Woodchuck Cider
from Middlebury, Vermont, and
George Hornsby Draft Cider,
made by the Californian vintners E. & J. Gallo. The Boston Beer Company, a small brewer responsible for Samuel Adams Ale, also entered the market with
Hardcore Crisp,
which, as its name suggests, was targeted at a different market than its beer. Neo-cider drinkers were perceived of as being in their early twenties, dynamic in character, futuristic in outlook, and metropolitan in culture. The branding and marketing of new products were therefore aimed at white collar urban males. However, it was women who loved them, and by the law of unintended consequences that seems to apply to alcohol advertising, they became the principal consumers of hard cider. From a very low base of a quarter of a million gallons in 1990, the American market grew to 3.6 million in 1995 and 10.35 million gallons in 2001.

Women were also responsible for growth in wine consumption, which climbed from 464 million gallons in 1995, or 1.77 per head of population, to 703 million gallons (2.37) in 2005. As in Britain, a Bridget Jones factor was at work, which gave America’s women the confidence to drink like men as well as work like them. Their self-belief, and thirsts, were reflected in books, movies, and on TV. The soap opera
Sex and the City,
which ran from 1998 to 2004, pictured its four career-women heroines lubricating their discussions of love and life with a profusion of cocktails and wine coolers.

American demand for wine, especially California wine, continued to be stimulated by its craft wineries, whose numbers increased year after year. All over the state, people were prospecting for that perfect
terroir
that might one day produce a vintage to equal or exceed a 1955 Haut-Brion, or a 1972 Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon. A new spirit of wine
gourmandisme
appeared that was caricatured in the movie
Sideways
(2004), which laid bare the passion and antics of twenty-first-century American oenophiles.
Sideways
is the story of two college friends, Miles and Jack, who spend a stag week in wine country before Jack’s wedding. Miles is an aspiring novelist, a wine lover, and neurotic; Jack is calm, a working actor, and wants to spend his last days before marriage in promiscuity. Although both boys meet girls and sleep with them, wine love has all the best lines; indeed, the film gives lessons in the art. Maya, Miles’s paramour, whose heart melts when she hears him speak with feeling about Pinot Noir, betters him in her response, when she describes what passes through her mind as she takes her first sip of some exceptional vintage: “I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing, how the sun was shining that summer or if it rained. . . . I think about all those people who tended and picked the grapes and, if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I love how wine continues to evolve, how every time I open a bottle it’s going to taste different than if I had opened it on any other day. Because a bottle of wine is actually alive—it’s constantly evolving and gaining. . . .”

The upward trend in wine consumption was also helped along by more good news on the matter of the French Paradox. Proof of the beneficial powers of wine in particular, and alcohol in general, had continued to mount over the years since Morley Safer and
60 Minutes
had brought it to the attention of the nation. In 1995, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines included for the first time, alongside its usual strident warnings, a cautious endorsement of alcohol, as follows: “Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.” The guidelines also hinted that the fluid might just possibly have a cultural value: “Alcoholic beverages have been used to enhance the enjoyment of meals by many societies throughout human history.” Winemakers in California were delighted. Surely they could direct their customers to the good news, now that it was official, via a few short words on their labels? Laurel Glen Winery applied to the BATF with samples and, in 1998, got clearance for a label encouraging drinkers to “consult your family doctor about the health effects of wine consumption.”

This modest concession evoked a tempest of protest from American drys, who could not countenance any praise of alcohol, however fainthearted, in any publication whatsoever. They were led by the evergreen senator Strom Thurmond, who was still utterly opposed to letting adult Americans know that a glass of wine a day might help them live longer. The ninety-six-year-old teetotaler held up treasury appointments and threatened to remove jurisdiction of wine labeling from the BATF to the Department of Health and Human Services unless the approval was rescinded. The BATF backed down and suspended clearance until hearings had been staged in 2000. The key test was whether a message suggesting a wine buyer speak to his or her doctor about the “health effects” of wine contravened the Federal Alcohol Administration Act, which stipulated that the manufacturers of alcoholic beverages should not claim their products had curative properties.

Prima facie, the evidence was on the side of California’s vintners. “Health effects” was, after all, a neutral phrase. Following the rules of chance, a prospective drinker might well consult a teetotal doctor, who was only interested in showing them pictures of damaged livers and alcohol-induced automobile crashes. The matter, however, continued to be stalled until Senator Thurmond retired in January 2003, a month after his hundredth birthday. It was settled in favor of wine later that year by the Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), which decided that scientifically truthful statements in their proper context might appear on labels, so long as they also warned of the risks of drinking and included a disclaimer such as “This statement should not encourage you to drink or to increase your alcohol consumption for health reasons.” It was a victory for principle—the TTB had made the formal admission that alcohol could be good for people—but in practical terms it was a defeat. There was scarcely enough room on a magnum-size bottle label for the “health effects” suggestion, the necessary warnings, a disclaimer, and a modicum of information about the type of wine inside. There was, however, space on promotional material such as posters to advise Americans thinking of buying wine, in wording simultaneously prosaic and suggestive, to see a doctor.

Ridiculous as the dispute may seem, it was indicative of the reviving power of the antialcohol lobby. Neotemperance was in tune with neoconservatism. President George W. Bush, who stopped “heavy drinking” in 1986, after a booze-soaked youth, was emblematic of the new dry minds, and federal policies toward alcohol reflected the influence of the health care industry, whose focus was on treating problem drinkers. The hand of neotemperance was apparent in new restrictions on drinking among members of the U.S. armed forces, whose personnel, like the doughboys of 1917, were compelled, by a change in law, to stay dry while on active duty. Those serving in Iraq, where the cult of Ninkasi had originated, and one of the few Muslim countries to have had a tolerant attitude toward alcohol in the present millennium, were restricted to “near beer” on base and, unlike in Vietnam, could not rehydrate themselves with slabs of Bud from the PX. Combat troops were also vetted before deployment. According to official guidelines, a Marine who drank a couple of six-packs in the week before going overseas was “at risk,” faced “a potential problem with alcohol,” and should be pointed toward a remedial program rather than a war zone.

Similarly Draconian interpretations of problem drinking were applied in Texas, where, in 2006, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) launched
Operation Last Call,
whose aim was to root out drunkenness at its source. A team of undercover agents was sent to patrol bars, arrest any people they deemed to be drunk, and haul them in for a breath test. Those with a blood alcohol content too high to drive were liable to fines up to five hundred dollars for public intoxication, even if they didn’t possess a car. According to Captain David Alexander of the TABC, “Going to a bar is not an opportunity to get drunk. . . . It’s to have a good time, but not get drunk.” While many drinkers might disagree with the suggestion that being drunk and having a good time were mutually exclusive, Operation Last Call was pursued with sufficient vehemence as to raise an outcry among liberty-minded Texans. Bar owners, in contrast, were afraid to complain, mindful of the fact that TABC was also responsible for issuing liquor licenses. “Do you think I want a half dozen of these baboons camped on my doorstep?” said one, speaking anonymously. “They can close me down in a New York minute.”

The hand of neotemperance was also apparent in the 2005 edition of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, which declared in the preamble to its section on alcohol that nearly half—“forty-five percent of U.S. adults”— did not drink at all. According to sources as diverse as the World Health Organization, the NIACC, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and U.S. household surveys, perhaps 33 percent of Americans over the age of fourteen are dry—a statistic that would have amazed the Founding Fathers, but which is nonetheless well short of nearly half. Moreover, 83.1 percent of Americans confess to having used alcohol at least once in their lives, as do 90.2 percent of the coming generation.
⁸⁰
The neotemperance influence over the 2005 guidelines extended beyond the preamble. The cautious cultural blessing of 1995—that people had been recorded as drinking alcoholic beverages with their food throughout history—had been censored, and the proven protection such drinks offered against heart attacks had been watered down. This is the current wording :