While The Wine Industry Dozed Off … The NeoDrys Come Knocking

• Alcohol does give you cancer, say scientists
• Alcohol Linked to Breast and Liver Cancer

Those links are from the U.S. government-funded National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

And from down under:

• Experts see red over wine & health ‘myth’

And please note that wine is no longer to be found anywhere in the government’s healthy eating recommendations. You may remember that it briefly made an appearance back when the interest in the French Paradox and Mediterranean lifestyle was in the news.

INDUSTRY LEADERS SNOOOOOOOZE … YOU LOSE

AWARE is dead. The California Wine Institute no longer has a program of tracking NeoProhibitionists or data on wine and health.

And while the wine industry’s leaders are asleep at this wheel (busy churning out news releases about a future that’s so bright we all have to wear shades) the NeoDrys have been out there doing their thing. God bless their Puritan government-funded hearts and nanny-state determination: they keep on pushing, pushing, pushing.

And despite the stunning amount of overwhelming scientific evidence that moderate alcohol consumers live longer, healthier, happy lives, our latter-day, global Carrie Nations seize on the one study in a thousand that proves their point.

Government funding keeps them in business as they work every angle, declaring alcohol a carcinogen based on the sketchiest of test tube experiments that never manage to rise to any level of human significance.

But the wine industry’s leaders have dozed off and that bodes very badly for the future. Government-promoted NeoProhibitionist efforts have played a key role in the decline of French wine consumption and in the overall decrease in alcohol consumption in the U.K.

The industry has been smug about their lobbying efforts that have stopped the institution of new taxes on wine. That’s unlikely to continue in today’s atmosphere of economic desperation. And even if the back-room arm twisting continues to be successful, the government spends hundreds of millions of tax dollars on scientifically doubtful NeoDry efforts aimed at re-casting wine as the new “demon rum.”

And despite the headlines touting the U.S. as the top wine-drinking country, that has been driven by population gains alone. After significant increases in 2000-2006, per-capita U.S.consumption has been stalled at about 2.5 gallons for the past four years.

It can happen here, and probably will unless the industry wakes up.