Young, Sober, and Cautious: What a Major Study Says About Alcohol and Gen Z

Part I of a 3-part look into GenZ and drinking

Few questions have gripped the wine industry more than the question of why young people are drinking less.

Is wine outdated? Too full of obscure rituals? Not innovative enough?

Now it’s not just wine — beer, spirits, and even financial institutions are asking what’s happening with young people. And so are public health academics.

In late April, an international group of academics published a book called Young People, Alcohol, and Risk: A Culture of Caution by Amy Pennay et al.

It’s a weighty tome that looks at young people and why they’re drinking less from a sociological point of view.

Matese Fields/Unsplash

It’s tough going

There’s no nice way of saying it: this book is a slog. I’ve read it twice now, and it was an effort both times.

Part of what makes it such a difficult read is because it’s a good faith attempt to understand a complex global phenomenon and the authors are careful not to overstep the evidence — of which there is plenty, some of which is contradictory.

And also, alas, because this bunch are not wordsmiths. I know editorial budgets are tight, but there’s no excuse for this linguistic barbarity:

“Moreover, young women can use clubs and bars as places to territorialise for themselves a space of privacy in which they feel confident of doing tipsy or drunken femininities.”

The authors are also heavily ideological, pinning everything on ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘late-stage capitalism’ in a way that has no explanatory power.

There are also some aggravating gaps. For academics who spend their lives thinking about alcohol harms, it’s weird how rarely they ask people what they’re drinking, or how they’re drinking it. They acknowledge that they’re treating alcohol generically, but still, you’d think this would be crucial information — some young people admitted to drinking more than 15 drinks in a single session. Fifteen ciders is a hangover; 15 shots means hospital.

It’s their blind spot: public health people see alcohol as just the demon drink ethanol, and therefore miss the significance of different drinks and drinking styles.

But for all that, this is still a document with a lot of worthwhile observations. It’s a big report, so I will summarise it in three parts.

The background

This book is based on recent studies of teenagers aged 14-19 in the UK, Australia and Sweden, some of whom were followed into their early 20s. It also draws on contemporary research from the US, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Ireland and New Zealand, while comparing it to decades of research on the same topic.

If you’re wondering why anybody should care about drinking patterns in teenagers, it’s because the age that you start drinking impacts how much you drink later in life — or whether you drink at all.

What this latest data shows is that there has been an unprecedented decline in alcohol consumption among young people in high-income countries.

The decline has been startling; between 2001 and 2022, for example, the percentage of Australian teenagers reporting any alcohol consumption fell from 69% to 32%. In Sweden, the proportion of students who had drunk alcohol in the previous year dropped from 83% in 2000 to 37% in 2023. And so on.

Researchers didn’t notice until around 2010, but after they began watching, they realised that the decline accelerated around 2015, before levelling off around 2020. Meanwhile, the age at which people take their first drink has increased, and when young people do drink, they drink less.

By contrast, the kids of the 1990s and 2000s were drinking like fish, immersed in a “culture of intoxication”. They were also doing drugs.

“This pursuit of intoxication was understood as essential to maximising the enjoyment of being young.”

What’s even more unusual about what’s happening, say the academics, is that young people’s drinking is out of step with the rest of the culture. Normally, if one group drinks less, the wider population also drinks less, and vice versa.

Is Gen Z different?

This question comes up a lot at wine conferences. I’ve been to talks where the morning speaker will explain how to market to Gen Z and Millennials, while the afternoon speaker assures the audience that these groupings are meaningless; what’s a professional got in common with a supermarket shelf stacker of the same age? Both speakers will be convincing.

Just to complicate things, there are two cohorts of Gen Z:

• Gen Z 1.0 (1995-2001)

• Gen Z 2.0 (2002-2010)

This report looks at the second group, which I’ll just call Gen Z.

But does Gen Z actually exist, or is this just a convenient term for a bunch of people of the same age?

Second, if a distinct group called Gen Z does exist, is their behaviour just because of their age and financial circumstances, which they’ll grow out of?

(“We didn’t drink wine when we were young and so we just have to wait for them to mature.”)

Pennay et al tackle this right at the beginning. They compared what they’re seeing now to what researchers have seen in the past and have concluded that distinct generations really do exist, as per the work of sociologist Karl Mannheim.

They argue that Gen Z is fundamentally different from any group they’ve seen before:

“These declines are historically unique. There have never been so few young people in high-income countries drinking, and the levels of drinking among young people who do drink have never been so low as they are today. There are always historical ebbs and flows in alcohol use, but they are not usually specific to one generation.”

The age at which people take their first drink has also increased.

This data is consistent across multiple countries, though the scale of the effect changes by country. The trend began in the US, went to Northern Europe, then Western Europe, and then to Australia and New Zealand.

But the change in drinking has not been observed as strongly, if at all, in Southern or Eastern Europe.

In fact, it’s been most apparent in Anglophone and Protestant countries, and least observed in Catholic countries.

What’s driving these changes?

There are multiple things happening at once, and I’ll cover the main ones before looking at the implications and predictions for the future.

Once again: this is research done on 14-19 year olds.

1. Risk taking

While multiple trends are driving these changes, the number one is that younger people are risk averse.

This has been extensively studied by research psychologist Jean Twenge, who reports that the cohort she calls ‘i-Gen’ — the group that grew up with smartphones — avoids taking risks.

Pennay et al claim this is because of the stressful impact of neoliberalism, neatly side-stepping the way society in general became more risk averse after September 11 and then again after the 2008 financial crisis — not to mention the impact of helicopter parenting. But that’s an essay for another time.

But whatever the reason, this cohort is extremely risk averse. In this group:

• Smoking has dropped

• Crime has dropped

• Illicit drug use has dropped

• Road accidents are declining, and

• There’s been a decline in sexual activity and teenage pregnancy

Rather than either managing risk or embracing it, as teenagers did in the past, young people are just side stepping it altogether.

This is not simply because social media records everything they’re doing, as is often assumed, but also because they’re more anxious about their futures than previous groups:

“Studies have argued that young people feel as though they are walking along an increasingly narrow path, with less and less space for failure, and that they should avoid drinking alcohol in general, and becoming intoxicated in particular, to prevent themselves from falling off course.”

Risk taking is also more stigmatised, with drinking in public increasingly seen as unsafe and morally suspect.

And that’s only part of what’s going on — there’s more. A lot more.

Part II in this series will look at what else is influencing attitudes towards drinking in young people.

Part III will look at what happened once Gen Z became eligible to buy alcohol — and what the researchers predict for alcohol consumption in the future.

For anyone brave enough to read the whole thing, the book is: Young People, Alcohol and Risk: A Culture of Caution (Routledge, 2025) by Amy Pennay, Gabriel Caluzzi, Laura Fenton, John Holmes, Michael Livingston, Jonas Raninen, and Jukka Törrönen