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.
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