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Don't Believe the 'National Drink Wine Day' Hype 


Did you drop everything and change your day’s schedule yesterday when you realized it was National Drink Wine Day? No? But perhaps you (or somebody you know) shared a meme or two featuring a giant wine glass. Because you deserve it.

Talking about wine has become a shorthand for “I’ve had a long day and I give up.” If you’re a single woman and you’re sick of the world’s bullshit, you can joke about how tonight is a night to stay in with your cat and a box of wine. If you’re a mom and have been looking after an exhausting toddler all day with no support or sympathy from your partner, you can turn to Facebook and share a meme about it being wine o’clock. It’s a way to express frustration with the world’s problems, large and small, without having to explain exactly why you feel that way.

And so companies who want to sell stuff to people who are stressed out (that is, all of us) have embraced it as a form of marketing. The product varies with the demographic: maybe instead of wine it’s beer, or video games, or sheet masks. Either way they encourage you to funnel all your complex and justified emotions about the world into a desire to buy some shit.

It should be no surprise, then, that a wine company is “the exclusive 2019 sponsor” of National Drink Wine Day, as if four dictionary words could band together and negotiate sponsorship contracts. And then, like every other national marketing day, it becomes a post on the local TV station’s Facebook page because people love to talk about how stressed they are how much they love to drink wine.

There are lots of things we could buy when we look for a way to escape our problems. Novels, video games, subscriptions to meditation apps—all of these are not actively harmful. Alcoholic drinks, on the other hand, are.

As writer Pixie Casey points out, alcohol is associated with a rising number of deaths among young women. And we’ve mentioned before that alcohol increases the risk of several cancers. The wine company that currently owns the nationaldrinkwineday.com domain says that they want to “spread the love and health benefits of wine.” There are some definite health risks to wine as well.

And with wine companies volunteering their product as a crutch for coping with your problems, they’re also helping to normalize some harmful behaviors: drinking too often, drinking too much, and being proud of how much you drink. When in fact, if wine memes make you feel seen, you might have a problem.