Until a few years ago, moderate alcohol consumption was thought to have (mild) beneficial effects on health. However, some recent studies have suggested that “there is no safe level” of alcohol intake. Consequently, public health institutions have responded by advising against any level of alcohol use and suggesting governments a number of policies to reduce overall alcohol consumption. Nonetheless, medical studies suffer from a variety of intrinsic limitations that could undermine the reliability of their findings, especially when focusing on low-intake levels. On the one hand, we show that the literature on alcohol consumption may suffer from publication bias; such a problem is known to be present in the scientific literature in general. On the other hand, we discuss other potential sources of bias, which are inevitable due to the infeasibility of randomized controlled trials. We assess a sample of articles for the presence of omitted variable bias, miscalculation of alcohol intake, use of linear in place of non-linear models, lack of validation of Mendelian randomization assumptions, and other possible weaknesses. We conclude that the claim that “there is no safe level” of alcohol intake is not sufficiently supported based on our current scientific knowledge.

China was one of the world's most important areas of growth in wine demand in the 2010s, accounting for 7% of the world's wine consumption and 8% of its value of wine imports by 2017. But China's per capita wine consumption peaked in the mid-2010s, and its wine imports have more than halved since then. As well, the sources of China's imports of wine have fluctuated considerably over the past two decades, making this a risky market for wine exporters. Certainly, the COVID-19 disruption played a role, but between 2019 and 2022, the fall in sales was considerably larger for wine (47%) than for spirits (17%) and beer (9%), such that wine's share of alcohol consumption in China fell by two-fifths over those 3 years alone. The article examines the reasons behind the dramatic gyrations in this globally important market and their impact on wine-exporting countries, and speculates on future trends.

The announcements by President Trump in April 2025, of unilateral hikes of 10–50 percentage points on U.S. import tariffs on all countries’ goods, are under threat of coming into force on July 9, 2025. This article estimates their likely effects on trade in alcoholic beverages, using a global model of national beverage markets. Various scenarios are compared. They suggest that if the tariff hike was restricted to just 20% on goods from the European Union, the value of global trade in each of the three beverages would shrink by one-tenth. But the U.S. tariff hikes are to apply to all countries’ goods, which are estimated to shrink global exports by 13% for wine, 22% for spirits and 33% for beer. In that broader scenario, most countries’ wine exports would shrink, but exports of beer and spirits would expand for some countries thanks to the trade divergence generated by the varying tariff hikes. If the increasing uncertainty associated with these developments led to a cumulated 2% drop in consumer spending, virtually all wine-exporting countries would sell less wine to both the U.S. and the rest of the world. That is, wine trade destruction would outweigh trade diversion.