Winebits 112: Recyling wine bottles, binge drinking, Aussie update

• Wash and reuse: A California man, who wondered why the United States has to recycle wine bottles by melting them, is looking for a better way. His company, Wine Bottle Recycling, wants to collect, clean, and redistribute 3 million to 5 million cases' worth of used wine bottles each year by sometime in 2010.

• Heavy drinkers prop up industry: A British study has found that alcohol sales in the United Kingdom would drop by 40 per cent if everyone drank responsibly. This is an astounding number if true, and is part of an on-going debate in Britain about the health woes caused by too much drinking and calls for a minimum price for wine, beer and spirits. I haven't seen comparable numbers for the United States, but if these figures are anywhere close to being correct, I wonder how different they would be in the U.S.

• More bad news from Down Under: Depressed grape prices are getting personal in Australia, where growers are finally understanding what is going on: "Not just Australia, but the whole world was awash with cheap wine. The growers were facing serious cuts -- not only in the price they would be paid per tonne of grapes, but to the number of tonnes they sold. For Mr Calabria's 40 growers, that meant each would lose, on average, about 20 per cent of their income. Some would be paid less per tonne than it cost them to grow the grapes."

recycling, binge drinking, Australian wine

Comments

[Tom Johnson]

The thing about alcohol consumption in the UK caught my eye, so I went and looked at a couple of statistics. In broad numbers, the critical difference is that alcohol consumption in Great Britain has roughly doubled since the 1960s, while alcohol consumption in the United States has decreased. The stats don't line up perfectly, since the US stats are from 1980-2000 and the UK are from 1960-2000, but the vector's are pretty clearly different.

I worry that this might change given the increased popularity of soccer here in the US.

[Jeff Siegel]

I thought the same thing about soccer. On a more serious note, I think your analysis is probably right. There is no equivalent to something like MADD in the UK, which is one of the reasons why our drinking rate has gone down.