This is part of Wet February, a series about America’s increasingly muddled relationship with drinking—and how to sip your way through it wisely and well.
Americans are drinking less. And across the country, brewers, vintners, and distillers are sweating stagnant sales. Some of the country’s biggest brands have already tightened their belts. In 2025, legacy Oregon craft brewery Rogue Ales & Spirits filed for bankruptcy and shuttered operations, California uprooted 38,134 acres of wine grapes (in order to cope with overproduction and stymie future excess crops), and Jim Beam announced it would cease production of bourbon at its main distillery for the duration of 2026. An increasing push toward sobriety has flooded the market with nonalcoholic alternatives to traditional tipples. Amid all this cultural drying out, some in the beverage alcohol industry have begun decrying what they view as a dastardly neo-temperance—even neo-Prohibitionist—movement.
Wine, which has always accounted for a smaller percent of alcohol sales than beer and spirits in the U.S., is struggling most of all. In the first half of 2025, wine sales shrank 6.7 percent year over year, compared to a reduction of 4.7 percent for beer and 3.2 percent for spirits. Over the last decade or so, wine has also ceded market share to beer and spirits, accounting for 17 percent of sales in 2011, now down to around 15.8 percent.
But the wine industry is not taking the new sober slump without a fight.
Where beer and spirits have largely opted for diversification into nonalcoholic renditions of their traditional offerings as a hedge against the surge in sobriety, wine is relying on its smooth and rounded voice to push back. Perhaps it’s because wine is feeling the squeeze more than the others, but industry veterans are leading the charge against today’s push for temperance. Wine, they argue, still has a place in a century obsessed with well-being.
In the world of beverage alcohol, winemakers do not necessarily feel a kinship with their maltier peers. “When I talk about wine as alcohol, people in the room literally flinch,” said Felicity Carter, the founder of Drinks Insider. “They don’t think of themselves as being pushers of ethanol. They see themselves as offering a cultural product. The issue is that, at a lobbying level, the governing health bodies do not see it that way.”
Wine—thanks to its religious, agricultural, and culinary roots—has long enjoyed a status apart from other alcohols. Under Prohibition, the sale of all alcohol was illegal, with the exception of sacramental wine. Americans were also permitted to produce wine at home for domestic consumption, while homebrewing beer was still outlawed. Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible and the co-founder of Come Together, a Community for Wine, noted that wine’s grouping with other alcohols began rather recently. “In the 1980s, the spirits industry mounted what was called the ‘equivalency campaign’—the idea that a glass of wine equaled a beer which equaled a shot of, say, whiskey or tequila. In other words: All alcohol is the same.” Begrudgingly, wine is still commonly grouped into this big, indiscriminate bucket of booze.
The problem for wine is that this bucket is increasingly the target of a coordinated effort to malign alcohol consumption. Our current fitness-frenzied decade and similar pushes for sobriety in the 1980s have roots in the original temperance movement, which culminated in the 1919 ratification of the 18th Amendment, ushering in a decade of Prohibition.
Far from being organic upwellings of sober passion, these pushes have reflected a remarkable level of coordination. The many societies, lobbies, and publications that backed early temperance represented a sophisticated regime of communication. The Anti-Saloon League was an early pioneer of what we might call public relations today. They built coalitions, unified messaging and slogans nationally, placed op-eds in newspapers, and aligned their teetotaling cause with other issues like public health and family policy. The passage of Prohibition was one of the greatest lobbying successes the country has ever seen. On more than one occasion, temperance campaigns have proven to be incredibly persuasive at influencing public sentiment and national policy.
Ironically, this is where wine may have a strength. “There is much more of a developed ecosystem of wine writing,” explained Esther Mobley, the senior wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. “We have two full-time wine writers and no full-time writers dedicated to other beverages. That helps in getting the word out more effectively, especially at a time like this when there’s a sense that they [winemakers] need to band together to boost the whole industry and not just their individual brands.”
For every professional certification you can get in beer or spirits, there are five available in wine. Achieving the title of Master of Wine, a feat that requires candidates to become walking atlases of the world’s most obscure wine regions and savants in technical wine production, which only 517 people have managed to do since 1953, is a far more rigorous educational process than getting most Ph.D.s. The wine industry spans a network of university laboratories, agricultural communities, robust trade organizations, legacy publication platforms, and neighborhood sommeliers. Working in wine at all already requires a high degree of coordinated communication.
“You’ve got this layer of critics and educators and certification bodies and sommeliers,” Carter explained. “They’re attracted by the complexity of wine, which is the very same thing that can just be baffling for ordinary consumers. Basically, it’s the inherent complexity which has allowed all these other layers to flourish, which hasn’t really happened in other categories.” Wine, then, is at the reins of the most formalized network of communicators in the world of alcohol. For decades, it has developed an apparatus to explain the complexities of terroir, fermentation, climate, and grape varietals to often wide-eyed consumers. Now, in the face of an existential threat to the wine business, a new message is beginning to gel from the far-flung geographies of the wine world: Wine is good for community.
In response to the successes of Dry January and Sober October, wine has come up with its own rhyming, monthlong alternative: Come Over October. In 2024, MacNeil, along with public relations and communications executives Gino Colangelo and Kimberly Noelle Charles, launched the campaign with a focus on togetherness, community, friendship, and sociability. In the campaign, clinking glasses, bokeh photography of autumnal evening banquets, and bright, laughing faces cast wine as a nonnegotiable tablemate to proper hosting. They even hosted a congressional wine reception in conjunction with WineAmerica to mark the inaugural month that year. While this is the buzziest of wine’s initiatives, the fixation on community permeates the industry.
Mobley said that the message is popping up more organically as well. “What I see is a lot of folks expressing a similar message on an individual business basis. I hear the argument that wine brings people together and inspires togetherness. It’s not something meant to be consumed alone (though I have no problem with people having a glass of wine alone). It’s not a single-serving-type beverage. It demands sharing.”
The culmination of the 1980s push against drunk driving led to a boom in nonalcoholic beer. At that time, wine’s respite from the sober sales slump was the roaring popularity of the French paradox. The French, the theory goes, eat plenty of rich foods with saturated fats but have surprisingly little heart disease. How do they get away with it? In the early ’90s, it was widely held that the presence of resveratrol in the red wine the French so love to drink helped build heart health. Nowadays, as more studies come out emphatically declaring that no amount of alcohol is healthy, wine communicators are wary of referring to the drink’s health benefits. But social health is a different story.
Monika Bielka-Vescovi, a Napa-based wine educator, said, “Many companies and private people in wine have really jumped into the movement. It has allowed us to focus on being together and enjoying a glass of wine—something we increasingly postpone and stay away from due to the changes we see in the world, spending more time online rather than with friends.”
This time around, wine is hoping that a different kind of heart ailment will bolster its sales during a downturn—loneliness. For lovers of wine, the multisensory experience of sharing a bottle among friends is shaping up to be a salve to the confines and isolation of digital life. While the industry is not making any promises that a bottle of cabernet will improve your longevity, they are increasingly suggesting that we should all touch grass, or at least come together around a glass. And wine is in a much better position than most to communicate this message to consumers who might be tempted to turn their sober-curiosity into a full-fledged lifestyle.
“Wine has this unique quality of taking consumers to the sensory level,” Bielka-Vescovi concludes. “When you have a glass of wine, you don’t just talk about a grape variety, you have a sensory experience. We don’t only communicate verbally; wine allows us to start communicating nonverbally. You cannot do this online. You have to find time and place to focus on using this sense of taste and smell.”
As winemakers around the world brave a dreary market, low-end, high-volume brands will surely feel the brunt of souring consumer sentiment. But wines with character, artistry, and a sense of place continue to offer drinkers intrigue and utility beyond the mere thrill of inebriation. Wellness, we have increasingly come to accept, is not just a physical state. It comprises our mental health, our spiritual sanity, and our social connections. Wine is here to remind us that analog aesthetics offer up something digital displays cannot. It’s a compelling argument we will continue to hear in the coming years, and one that may just work. After all, if there’s one thing the wine industry is equipped to do, it’s deliver a message in a bottle.
