San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Esther Mobley
Wine industry, wine drinkers at political odds.
Can you explain the 2016 election of Donald Trump by looking at the country’s wine consumption habits? That’s what Karl Storchmann, a New York University economics professor and executive director of the American Association of Wine Economists, believes. “Wine drinkers lean left,” Storchmann said.
It isn’t exactly a groundbreaking revelation. Demographers have long known that Democrats tend to favor wine while Republicans favor beer. Still, it’s interesting that wine is such a potent marker of American identity — cultural, political or otherwise. Wine and beer can hint at income and education; whether you live in an urban or rural setting; whether you live on the coast — all of it comes out, more often than not, in what you drink.
This left Storchmann with another question. Wine drinkers may lean left, but does the wine industry?
When he compared states’ percapita wine consumption with their percentage of votes for Trump in 2016, a clear pattern emerged. Washington, D.C., is the most prolific wine consumer, at over 25 liters per person per year, and also favored Trump the least, giving him just 4.1% of its votes in the last presidential election. Meanwhile, the state with the lowest percapita wine consumption, West Virginia — about 2.5 liters per person — had the secondhighest share of Trump votes of any state, at 67.9%, just barely trailing Wyoming’s 68.2%. With the exception of a few outliers, like New Hampshire, where wine consumption is high (close to 20 liters per person) but votes for Trump were also relatively high (46.5%), the data follow a more or less linear pattern.
To be clear, this is correlation, not causation. And to economists, it’s not actually very surprising. “I would say that drinking preferences have more to do with demographic and cultural
factors than political affiliation,” said Steven S. Cuellar, an economics professor at Sonoma State University. “You could have just as easily looked at the correlation between political affiliation and NASCAR viewership.”
Another factor: Some Republicanleaning states have tighter alcohol laws. For example, many counties in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia prohibit the sale of alcohol altogether. In a 2013 paper, Cuellar and his colleagues found that states with more restrictive laws tend to have less variety in their wine selections as well as higher prices — which might also make residents there less likely to buy wine. Nevertheless, however you want to explain it, higher wine consumption is usually a phenomenon of the left. But the people who power the wine industry, Storchmann believes, do not necessarily reflect these leftleaning tendencies. “The bucks go to the right almost overwhelmingly,” he said. He reached that conclusion by searching the Federal Election Commission’s database to see which presidential candidates had received donations from people who work in the wine industry. He found that most wineindustry dollars had gone to Trump, rather than to Democratic presidential candidates.
He posted infographics about those findings on Twitter and Facebook, and the revelations sparked controversy. Blogger Tom Wark performed his own counteranalysis of the FEC data, concluding the opposite: that the wine industry has directed more money toward Democrats than toward Trump in the 2020 campaign.
Whatever the overall share of wineindustry donations to Trump versus Democrats, what we can say for sure is that a number of prominent owners and executives have made significant contributions to Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. They include Tom Barrack, owner of Happy Canyon Vineyard (who has donated $360,600 to Trump); Michael Kahn, coowner of Empire Distributors ($70,200); Wine Spectator publisher Marvin Shanken ($185,800); Sheldon Stein, president of the wholesaler Southern Glazers ($25,400); and Grace Evenstad, owner of Domaine Serene winery in Oregon ($50,000).
Cakebread Cellars cofounder Dolores Cakebread, who gave $7,650 to Trump’s campaign, declined an interview, but a winery spokesperson emphasized that the winery itself does not make political donations.
Bill Foley, owner of Foley Family Wines and the chairman of Fidelity National, has contributed $255,600. Foley — who announced his purchase of Sonoma County’s FerrariCarano Vineyards recently — made the donations in March without listing his wineindustry affiliation. He declined to comment for this story.
One political donor took issue with the way the FEC database characterized his giving. John Jordan, owner of Jordan Winery in Healdsburg, appears to have contributed $75,600 toward Trump’s campaign in 2019. But Lisa Mattson, the winery’s director of marketing and communications, said Jordan merely donated to the Republican National Committee, not to Trump specifically, and that the committee subsequently redirected his contributions to a Trump fund. “He has no control over where the RNC
transferred it,” Mattson said.
That raises an important question. If wine industry’s major players are at odds with those of their customers, is that bad for business?
Twitter offered a small bit of early insight there, as wine drinkers reacted to Storchmann’s post. “Definitely not buying anything from these folks,” tweeted @ursomoneyhoney. “Boycott time,” said @elisekerm. But other voices dissented: @lexx82 said, “I really don’t give a s— if they support Trump or donate to Republicans. Im drinking wine because i love it and it taste good not for political purposes” (sic).
Yet there can be little doubt that the current social unrest — catalyzed by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis — has renewed American consumers’ sense of importance about where they spend their dollars. So far, much of that energy has been directed toward, for example, encouraging people to support blackowned businesses, lists of which have proliferated across the internet (including at The Chronicle). But it could easily turn in the other direction, with drinkers boycotting businesses that don’t stand for what they believe in.
I was curious about whether other local wine businesses — wine shops — might be trying to align their practices with their customers’ political views. So I tried to find a store in the Bay Area that carries products from Trump Winery, the Charlottesville, Va., estate that the president owns. A query on WineSearcher showed only one, a store in Berkeley. It turned out to be a search error, I learned after speaking to the owner. The shop has never carried Trump wine.