Two weeks ago, I was at a conference at UC Davis, when somebody in the audience asked the question:
“What about sugar?”
It’s the question I hear at every panel, every conference.
There’s this widespread idea that wine is being unfairly attacked, while junk food gets off scot free. People get really upset about it. I’ve lost track of how many times people have told me that “they” (meaning the WHO etc) should be going after sugar instead.
Yes, sugar is a big problem.
And it’s time the alcohol industry dealt with it — by declaring the sugar on the label.
Drama in a yoghurt pot
In late 2023, I had the joy of being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which meant taking classes on how to calculate insulin doses when eating sugars and carbs.
It’s really hard to determine the carbs in unfamiliar foods, so I typically sidestep the whole thing and eat low carb. If I get tempted by the potatoes, I go for a walk, a reliable way to lower blood sugar.
Except in America. Conference and hotel food is full of hidden sugar, as per my continuous glucose monitor, from the maple-coated bacon to the glazed salmon. The hotel I stayed at the other week offered flavoured yoghurt for breakfast, which I decided to brave, figuring the half-hour walk to the conference would sort it out.
It turned out there was so much sugar in that small pot that I ended up sprinting across the campus in a futile attempt to lower my blood glucose.
It’s not just diabetics who should avoid sugar-drenched environments — they’re bad for everyone. But the remedy needs to be the right one.
Introducing HHIs
In 2024, the World Health Organisation identified four Health Harming Industries: alcohol, tobacco, junk food and fossil fuels, which collectively drive diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and obesity.
The WHO’s prescription is to use the template developed for tobacco control and slap onerous restrictions on advertising, marketing, sponsorship, and availability. And, above all, to raise taxes.
They are joined in this endeavour by numerous academics and NGOs, most of which rely on grant money, or philanthropy from billionaires like Michael Bloomberg. They unlock that money by showing how dire the situation is, and how much action they’re taking.
As a result, there is an ever-increasing stream of conferences, white papers, submissions to government, and lobbying efforts, often quoting WHO statistics to bolster their claims.
Alcohol is just one of a number of industries under pressure, from junk food to chemical companies to the meat industry, and even pharmaceuticals.
The trouble with good intentions
In May, Amsterdam banned open-air advertising for meat and fossil fuels. Three years ago, I could have been convinced this was a good idea. But since then, I’ve immersed myself in public health literature, and now these gestures disquiet me.
The academics who spin up the policy proposals that then get laundered through NGOs are not only deeply illiberal, they also live in an epistemic bubble, speaking only to one another. This self-reinforcing loop is making them increasingly militant.
More and more, they are redefining the word “freedom” to mean “freedom from”, the idea being that if they can restrict our choices, they will save us from ourselves.
They are also deeply hostile to commercial actors, whom they want to ban from speaking to legislators. They even float proposals to stop industry from conducting scientific research, because they think commercial funding pollutes the scientific discourse. Their idea is that industry should put levies into a central repository and then apply for grant money. Public health people will then determine whether the project is worthwhile. (Good luck getting that grant to develop new cosmetics or paint colours.)
Mostly this is time wasting, as no national government would agree to this. Local government, like Amsterdam, can be a different matter.
Unfortunately, the grant system rewards mission creep. The more public health emergencies they can identify, the more funding they unlock to address them.
Take the Tobacconomics research unit at Johns Hopkins University, once devoted to the problem of smoking. Recently, it became Economics for Health, and its remit now includes alcohol and junk food. The University of Bath has done something similar.
And yet too many wine, spirits and beer producers are not using one of the best tools available against this relentless activism.
It doesn’t stop with sugar
To be clear, I didn’t get into journalism to defend corporations. Given the havoc wrought by pollution, tobacco, junk food and alcohol, it would be negligent to let producers do exactly what they want. But the proposed solutions have to solve problems, not create them.
Public health’s attempts to tackle sugar have mostly failed. Worse, other HHI policies have led directly — as prohibitionist policies do — to mayhem and organised crime. These people never retract anything, but insist on doubling down on whatever disastrous ideas they’re pushing.
Tobacco control has become a governing philosophy rather than a targeted response to a uniquely deadly product. An increasing number of behaviours are declared public health emergencies — and the demands never stop, because if they did, so would the grant money.
If they get away with slapping labels on supermarket chocolate today? There will be a warning in the local patisserie tomorrow.
Information, not prohibition
What consumers themselves want is clear information; the Wine Market Council found that many people believe wine is full of sugar and additives. Unfortunately, there’s generally nothing on the label telling them otherwise.
Which means this lack of transparency about sugar and ingredients is backfiring on the trade.
The answer to this is nutrition labels. Preferably, physical labels.
The European wine industry recognised this problem a long time ago. The issue is that most wineries are small businesses producing a product that changes every vintage, so having to recalculate all the values each year and print new labels, especially for export markets, is onerous and expensive.
The wine sector formally proposed QR codes to the EU. Since the 2024 vintage, energy values must appear on the physical label. Sugar, ingredients, and everything else consumers actually want to know can go behind the QR code.
Unfortunately, while QR codes seem like an elegant solution, consumers don’t use them.
I moderated a panel with Sandro Bottega at the Tasting Climate Change conference in Montreal in January, and he said that of the millions of litres Bottega Spa sold since implementation, only five bottles were scanned.
This is consistent with data cited in the European Parliament last year: only 0.26% of people scan the QR codes.
Something has to change, whether that’s making the codes much bigger and adding an explanation of what they do, or — even better — using physical labels.
There are major upsides to being completely transparent. The research is clear that “carbohydrate and sugar claims have no effect on the amount of alcoholic beverages consumers intend to consume”.
Second, transparency would stop producers from being able to profit from disparagement marketing, who slap “better for you” claims on thoroughly conventional products while insinuating that competitors fill their bottles full of sugar and chemicals.
Most satisfying of all, it would annoy the temperance activists, because they like accusing the industry of being opaque and having something to hide. And, unfortunately, when it comes to this issue, they’re correct.
(Ironically, they absolutely do not want the trade to be transparent about sugar.)
I know that some producers, including in beer and spirits, already put this information on the bottle. Everybody else needs to do it too. Adding prominent and easily available nutrition information would give consumers something they want, while defeating one of the strongest accusations of the alcohol control lobby.
And yet the industry keeps raising hands at conferences and asking, “What about sugar?”
The answer is sitting there: Put it on the label.
Did you think I was joking about warning labels on chocolate?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666319312735?via%3Dihub
How about this one?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666320317128?via%3Dihub#sec2
Felicity, this is exactly the point the wine industry needs to hear.
For too long, wine has been great at talking about tradition, terroir and craftsmanship, but far too slow in understanding how the world around it is changing. The debate around sugar, ingredients and transparency is a perfect example. If consumers ask questions, hiding the answers behind QR codes nobody scans is not communication. It is avoidance.
Many producers are late on almost everything beyond production. For decades, there was always money for the next tractor, the next press, the next vineyard investment. But too little attention was paid to market signals, consumer doubts, health debates and changing expectations.
Now the air is getting thin and not much time and money left…
In many ways, transparent and consistently available information is ideal. If everyone included sugar labels on the bottle, it could add clarity for the consumer. When the consumer sees only an occasional bottle labeled with "zero sugar", it can unfortunately give the impression that wine without such a label does contain sugar. In truth, the vast majority of wine is fermented to dryness (all grape sugar has been converted into alcohol during fermentation). For the balance of wines that do contain some residual sugar, I think labels should clarify that this is residual grape sugar, and not sugar that has been added during the winemaking process (which seems to confuse a lot of consumers).