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Americans prefer wine to beer?

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OSUsushichic

OSUsushichic

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Beer in the Headlights
Sales are flat. Wine is ascendant. How did this happen?
By Field Maloney
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007, at 6:19 PM ET

Last year, a grainy video appeared on YouTube. In the clip, three scraggly-looking men in a scraggly yard shoot full cans of Milwaukee's Best Light beer out of a homemade cannon. They shoot at a bottle of what they call "fancy-pants wine," which they've placed at the bull's-eye of a giant white target. On their first shot, they miss. The second shot sends green glass and red wine flying, in the kind of glorious mess that would please Jackson Pollock. The men hoot.

As it happens, the video was made by a beer company?SABMiller, which owns Milwaukee's Best?and while it plays class warfare for laughs, it also represents the ultimate fantasy of American beer executives, who have been jittery for years. For one thing, wine consumption in this country has nearly doubled in the last decade, while beer sales have been pretty much stagnant, growing less than 1 percent since 2000. Even more galling, in 2005 a Gallup poll revealed that, for the first time ever, Americans preferred wine to beer. This was an astonishing development, akin to Americans jilting baseball for bocce.
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Wine vs. beer. - By Field Maloney - Slate Magazine
 
I demand a recount!

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The beer industry has only itself to blame with the scourge of the microbrews and their $10.00/six-pack prices. It was only a matter of time before there was a huge beer-snob/connoisseur backlash.

After about ten years of riding the tidal wave, it's like everyone has woken up and realized they'd rather live the "High Life," because, quite frankly, this Heineken we've been buyin' tastes like dog piss. Seriously people. Heineken sucks! As does about 80% of the other crap taking up shelf space in stores across the country.

If you're going to get raped over alcohol prices, you might as well buy something that doesn't taste like ass and take up half the room in your fridge too.
 
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The poll in question is outdated:

Slate sidebar said:
In 2006, the Gallup results flipped; Americans again claimed a preference for beer over wine. Still, while wine consumption has grown steadily in this country, beer consumption has remained flat. (The one exception to this trend is craft beers, which have enjoyed double-digit sales growth in the last few years. But craft beers command less than 5 percent of the domestic beer market. Anheuser-Busch alone, by comparison, controls about 50 percent of it.)
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Dryden;854432; said:
The beer industry has only itself to blame with the scourge of the microbrews and their $10.00/six-pack prices. It was only a matter of time before there was a huge beer-snob/connoisseur backlash.

After about ten years of riding the tidal wave, it's like everyone has woken up and realized they'd rather live the "High Life," because, quite frankly, this Heineken we've been buyin' tastes like dog piss. Seriously people. Heineken sucks! As does about 80% of the other crap taking up shelf space in stores across the country.

If you're going to get raped over alcohol prices, you might as well buy something that doesn't taste like ass and take up half the room in your fridge too.
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Mass-produced American beer (Bud, Miller, etc.) has always tasted like piss. I've been drinking microbrew stuff and imports since I can remember. What's funny is that the big beer cmpanies think they can pawning off their beer as reall beer via their saturation TV ads...and fat-ass redneck fucks who've never been out of their home county eat it up.

Budweiser, King of Beers my ass...
 
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Big Papa;854452; said:
I don't know why anyone would drink something that you can actually buy and drink from a box. :sick1:

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Franzia isn't the best tasting stuff, but it is very popular and convenient for people who only want one glass a night, if even that often, and don't want to buy bottles of wine and wind up throwing 80% of every bottle out. At least, it was up until the low-priced California vintners wised up and started bottling their table wines in 4-pack single-serve bottles with screw-caps like wine coolers.
 
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MililaniBuckeye;854456; said:
Mass-produced American beer (Bud, Miller, etc.) has always tasted like piss. I've been drinking microbrew stuff and imports since I can remember. What's funny is that the big beer cmpanies think they can pawning off their beer as reall beer via their saturation TV ads...and fat-ass redneck fucks who've never been out of their home county eat it up.

Budweiser, King of Beers my ass...
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The worst is that watered down shit that they charge you $7 for at a ballgame. I have to go search out the stands that have real beer, I would much rather pay more for those than drink that gold water they sell from the vendors.
 
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MililaniBuckeye;854456; said:
Mass-produced American beer (Bud, Miller, etc.) has always tasted like piss. I've been drinking microbrew stuff and imports since I can remember. What's funny is that the big beer cmpanies think they can pawning off their beer as reall beer via their saturation TV ads...and fat-ass redneck fucks who've never been out of their home county eat it up.

Budweiser, King of Beers my ass...
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You're absolutely right! There have been some immensely popular imports available everywhere in the States for decades (Pauli Girl, Guinness/Bass/Harp, Dos Equis, etc ...). But somewhere along the way in the late 90s, all the college kids that bought Natural Light and Busch by the 30 pack abruptly switched to microbrews, and by the late 90s the market was flooded with a bunch of crap that nobody bought. Most of the micros today are now owned, operated, and distributed by the major brewers, but retain the micro labels.

My point isn't necessarily that people shouldn't buy something like Heineken, but rather a few million 30-somethings suddenly started buying Heineken even though they didn't really like it because it suddenly became taboo to buy a Bud Light. The irony is that this all happened once Heineken started advertising more on TV. :tongue2:
 
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I usually prefer a good pint, but the truth is that wine will get you laid; beer, not so much. Show up unexpectedly with a decent bottle of white and, if you don't blow it, you're in. Show up with a six pack and you're everything her mother warned her about. That's why beer sales are stagnant and wine is on the upswing.
 
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