Girlie Drinks and a Trip to the Dumpster

The point of a recent long article about why men admire women who order whiskey rather than a pretty cocktail got us thinking about tastes and trends in alcohol in the U.S. since the end of Prohibition in 1933.

What did the wives and girlfriends of the “Greatest Generation” drink? Bourbon, Scotch, Canadian Rye, Gin – all the hard stuff that is today, in some quarters, considered “manly”.  It wasn’t a question of girlie or manly.  It’s just what everyone drank back then.  And they stayed on the spirits side even after venturing into wine decades later.  We remember visiting an elderly relative in a senior community about 20 years ago.  A trip to the glass recycle bin, a very large one, revealed it full to the brim with empty spirits bottles.  Our relative was amused by the quantity her neighbors consumed in a week.  We were amazed!

Wine encroached on spirits territory in a serious way in the late eighties.  One catalyst was the famous “60 Minutes” segment dubbed The French Paradox, which aired November 17, 1991.  The gist of the theory was that the French ate a rich diet of saturated fats, they smoked and didn’t exercise but had 40% fewer heart attacks than Americans.  Red wine consumption was purported to be the reason why.  There’s been a lot of discussion ever since pro and con this theory but at the time, wine marketers and the American public pounced on the good news and red wine sales skyrocketed by more than 44% and as a category, wine sales continued to grow.  The French Paradox had a psychological effect on a nation that was scolded for eating eggs, drinking coffee, eating too much fat, too much sugar and on and on.  There was an endless parade, it seemed, of all the things that were bad for you.  Suddenly, we had permission to enjoy wine in moderation.  And we did.

During the eighties and nineties, spirits sales stayed flat, even worse, slumped especially brown spirits.  So what happened to change it?  Nothing more startling than a new generation.  Seems kids don’t want to drink what their parents drank.  Along came a new wave of cocktails or as some people like to say, girlie drinks.  Time for the spirits marketers to seize the opportunity and they sure did with a plethora of flavored vodkas, whiskey, rum et al.  The beer industry joined in with fruit flavored beers.  Right now, Bourbon is one of the hottest ingredients for a new breed of mixologists, creative geniuses when it comes to combining spirits.

So in 50 years will the dumpster in the senior community be full of empty bottles of flavored vodkas and sweet mixes?  Probably.  Will more women switch to single malts and other spirits with provenance?  You bet.  Will White Zinfandel drinkers discover Zinfandel is really a red wine?  We think so.  In the meantime, if women want colorful drinks in pretty glasses, let them enjoy it and not create stereotypes.  All we ask is please lose those little umbrellas.