A “Sideways” supply response in California winegrapes
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[Edit: others were kind enough to remind me that the saved wine is actually Cheval Blanc, a 55-40-5 Cab Franc, Merlot, and Cab Sauv blend. It’s been awhile since I’ve thought out talked about this movie.]
My parents prefer cabernet sauvignon, by the by.
Merlot can be the basis for excellent wine (see: Petrus). However, I think California generally produces mediocre merlot. California's strengths are Cabernet (Sauvignon and Franc) and Zinfandel. For Pinot Noir, there are a couple spots like the Russian River Valley that do a good job, but Oregon has a stronger claim.
In the US, you kind of need to know what varietals grow well in what regions. In Europe, they typically produce varietal blends that are optimized for the region where they are produced, but which have very different characteristics depending on the region. I prefer the European model of branding on the region rather than the varietal, because the wine experience is more consistent and predictable. You know it will usually be an appropriate varietal for the region in which it is produced. That is not always the case in the US; we seem to grow any varietal anywhere if we think we can sell it.
That said, if you want to look smart about wine without spending a ton of money, the best choice is something from a region relatively few people have heard of, and therefore inexpensive, that nonetheless produces brilliant wine. Sommeliers often appreciate people that can identify those hidden gems on the list because people trying to be flashy don't even recognize them. Of course, you learn this by drinking wine from literally everywhere, and especially places you've never heard of, until you form an opinion. Availability varies widely with geography but in 2021, with the globalization of wine, there is little reason to spend much more than $10-20 bottle (retail, not restaurant) for almost any style if you know your regions and quality is the sole objective (local availability notwithstanding).
But then, I'm just a random wine drinker on the Internet. :-)
Beyond that, I am not sure if one can trust a simple list. I think this is because region can be very narrowly defined - sometimes "side of this hill, vs. that side". Then, each year also produces different quality.
I think there are certain prototypes per region that you could learn about. But even that is a challenge. So for France, for example, the regions you want to learn don't stack hierarchically in a nice fashion (like you start with 4 broad regions and break them down). But it can be done. In realiy, however, different wines are made in each region (see "region" above) so you are not guaranteed to get something like the prototype, nor can you guarantee that the wines of a given year will be like the prototype at all. Another good example is Italy, which has fewer prototypical examples one might be able to learn. But then, Italy also has a great number of wine makers that do something very different, sometimes something better, so again it doesn't help you find a good wine.
Best bet is to pick a region and really get into it. Like, learning stuff about Bordeaux can keep you busy, but at least you'll have a solid idea. The wrong approach would be to do stuff like say: "oh Bordeaux has Merlot, while Germany has Pinot" which is sort of true in ratios of averages, but individually, and also generally, incredibly wrong.
I personally believe that identifying a good wine in all cases basically requires you to know about the wine maker and the year. I.e. - it's a full time job.
Agreed on Cabernet Sauvignon. Regarding Pinot Noir, there's just nothing in the US that compares to a good Burgundy, some things I think are interesting are Domaine De La Cote in California and Kelley Fox in Oregon though :)
Cheers!
- Napa & Sonoma counties collectively have 650+ wineries.
- Paso Robles and the extended SLO county (plus Santa Barbara) region have 500+ wineries.
Saying that just the Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc are standouts, the latter of which is rarely at 80+% because it is harder to tame in a bottle, by approximately 1150 wineries that produce all manner of Bourdeaux and Rhone varietals is quite reductive.
Oregon Pinots are good if that’s what you like: earthly, terroir-driven taste. California wines are fruitier, part of this is the fruit and the other is the limited use of whole cluster fermentation.
Washington is emerging as a fantastic wine producing state as well.
So, on balance, there is something for every palate produced by California wineries. Maybe even Washington producers. Oregon wineries are getting into Syrah and the darker reds as well.
I agree with your $10-20 range for a decent bottle of wine (retail). What I’d add to your statement is that you shouldn’t need to buy a bottle not produced in the USA if you live here. The locally made wine compares to international options, especially in the targeted price range ($10-20).
What about the Pinots from "Sideways" in Santa Ynez area? Paul Lato, Sea Smoke (maybe played out) to name a couple.
Funny enough I'd been to Lompoc a half a dozen times before I realized it was the region from the movie.
How is this possible in the Internet age? I mean, I've always liked Dolcetto d'Alba (I know, Piemonte is a well known region, but not for this wine), but in the 10s, there were a few popular articles talking about how it's such a great pizza & pasta wine, and all of a sudden, bottles were more expensive...
Neither of us had heard anything about Serbian wines or that they had any wine production nor that it's really good.
So I'd say there are ton of interesting regions to be discovered.
That said its often hard to find those. I like red wines from the regions near Capetown, SA. You can get some of it in big wine stores, but its hard.
I have experienced wines I discovered when they were inexpensive become trendy and therefore expensive. I've always just moved on; you'll never run out of obscure wine-producing regions that produce excellent inexpensive wine. The largest practical limit is distribution, but wine has become much more global.
You will find a lot of good wine in countries you might not expect e.g. white wine in Mexico. Many countries that produce superior wine almost never export, such as Switzerland. There are excellent small appellations even in France with brilliant wine that everyone ignores because few people have ever heard of them, so it costs very little if you can find it. Smaller countries in Europe are always at a disadvantage regardless of their wine quality e.g. Portuguese and Spanish wine are very similar in quality and style but Spanish wine commands the higher price.
There isn't nearly as much information about wine on the Internet as you may hope. Absent a substantial marketing effort, it largely isn't discoverable virtually. Even in cases where countries like Uruguay attempt to market their wines, it has minimal visibility to the wine drinking world.
It is an inefficient market with incentives that don't necessarily ensure the best wines for the money are easy to find.
By now the place has probably changed name or owners. It was a pretty good local flavor burger joint at the time.
I've always been left wondering if the "I am not drinking any fucking Merlot" line was a direct result of the snub by Petrus.
source: https://www.chateau-cheval-blanc.com/en/vintages/chateau-che... (you can check other vintages there etc)
Now that I’m the age of the characters in the movie I realize that the wine is literally the least important factor in the movie (and also that it’s implied Paul Giamatti’s character kills himself at the end.) It’s funny that such a small subplot in a feature film can have a dramatic effect on a major industry like wine making.
There's even a sequel to the novel with the same characters.
I'm calling "shenanigans" on this whole "Miles kills himself" meme.
Yeah, there are references to death and suicide in the movie, like there is in most fiction about depression. But there's nothing explicit about Miles's fate, and the film ends on an upbeat note ("Because you were wearing your seatbelt!" Jack says to Miles). I've watched the movie 20x and the stuff you list is very liberal interpretation of some scant events.
I wrote this a couple years back on Quora when someone asked "why is Miles celebrating alone in the diner?" Maybe we've all felt something like this at one point.
>> Imagine you’ve been living the last few years with some crazy hope or dream that all the things happening to you are just a fiction and that things are going to turn around. The bottle of wine is a delusional symbol of a life that you’re going to get back — good career, a wife who loves you and wants to have a kid with you. To be opened on the day it all comes true.
Look at Miles’s eyes as his ex-wife tells him she’s expecting a kid with another man. All the hope and fictitious dreaming comes crashing down — that life was a complete delusion, like when you look yourself in a mirror and see, really see, what your life has become and that all the things you’ve been saving that bottle of wine for, just don’t exist.
Not much left to save that bottle for. No one to drink it with and toast over a fancy dinner. Just take it to the grimy local burger joint, drink in sadness to the life events that passed you by, and savor the sublime, once-in-a-lifetime taste of dreams that are dashed on the roadside.
In my own reading of the movie, while Jack learns nothing and even earns a reprieve, Miles does evolve -- though painfully and at the very end of the movie. He finally lets go of his ex wife, realizing she's definitely out of reach and committed to a new family now that she's pregnant. He also lets go of his book dream, and also the drinking of his prized bottle signals -- albeit in a humorously depressing manner -- his finally letting go of everything that got him stuck.
In my mind his walking up Maya's stairs is a symbol of a hopeful new beginning. Because this is a dark comedy/drama, it's not immediately obvious everything will work out well, but at least there's hope.
I had to check for myself and it really doesn't look that way to me.
No it isn't.
It is a typically silly fan theory, because if that was the case, there would be no development journey for the character, making the whole story pointless.
Fan theories are often like that: "it's actually all in their head", "its all just a dream". Edgy on the surface, but really negates all the drama and and development of the story.
> the wine is literally the least important factor in the movie
Of course the movie is not "about" wine in the sense of a documentary about wine, but wine is certainly a significant part of the story and the main characters journey.
I've noticed that. I suspect it comes from a lack of tragedies in our entertainment, that we try to invent tragic meanings to stories intended as comedies.
I think the "it was all a dream" or "it's all in their head" sort of fan theories come from a place of denial. If the story is real (even in a plainly fictional movie setting), and a character shows development, learning, growth, and change over the course of whatever happens - that could have repercussions in my life. It is easy to get into a rut of behavior and to steadfastly avoid thinking about all of the things you can and should change in your life. If entertainment shows me people who actually do change based on a need to change something about themselves to become better people, then I am forced to think about that and consider what that means for my life. That could mean that I actually do need to be more considerate, healthier, or whatever it is. Whereas, if the entire story is fake, or a dream, or whatever, then how I act now is the inevitable conclusion of my life, and there is no changing.
It's easier to just hand-wave away any lessons about human behavior and say that it's imaginary.
"It was all a dream," or, "It's all in their head," are easy fan theories to attach to works of fiction because that's what actually happened. The creator of the fiction imagined it in their brain. You can trivially apply it to any fiction without any creativity.
More complicated fan theories rely on the content itself, and thus are going to change from work to work. So people hear "It's all in their head," more.
In Sideways, Giamattis character starts out in a really bad place, but through the events of the story ends up in a (slightly) more hopeful place. Having him kill himself in the end instead would not turn the story into a genuine tragedy, since nothing would really be lost. That would just be a pointless story going nowhere.
Hayden Church' character on the other hand do have something to lose, so his story could have been made a tragedy.
I wasn't familiar with Sideways, but from your description it sounds like I'd call that a comedy being reinterpreted as a farce. Which can be a great story form as well, but maybe it's reached for too often in fan theories because it's the easiest thing to imagine after melodrama.
Agreed!
> It’s implied Paul Giamatti’s character kills himself at the end
Uh, the film ends in a hopeful note. Virigina Madsen's character states she enjoyed the book, and he goes to seek her out and is about to knock on her door when the screen fades to black. To me, it is implied she opens the door and at least they become friends again, if not a couple.
https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.72/p2z.144.myftpuploa...
I'm a bit surprised that movie had such a large effect, Merlot isn't necessarily a hugely popular wine here but I sometimes prefer it over a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Shiraz since a lot of wine makers here have followed a bit of a trend for "full bodied" (aka sledgehammer) wines from those varieties. It's a bit like the megalitres of India Pale Ale that is virtually undrinkable because the brewers are in a competition to see how much they can destroy the overall flavour with hops.
...so try the Merlot (esp. Australian merlot). It's tasty, affordable and won't leave you feeling like you lost a fight the next day.
She looks at the menu and asks, "Oh, do they have any IPAs? That's what everyone's drinking in {insert hometown}."
"Mom... IPAs are kind of overdone now. There's lots of other, more interesting types of beer."
Waiter arrives. My mother, "Do you have any IPAs you would recommend?"
Waiter replies, "We have some good ones, but if you want my opinion, IPAs are kind of overdone. We have lots of more interesting beers."
I went to a lot of trouble to acquire a taste for those evil things you're not getting away with not serving me one at a hipster bar.
The smaller breweries will always make something different but their consistency is atrocious most of the time.
That said I've appreciated drinking red wine more after drinking an IPA, as it seems to help me get past the tannins quicker.
Sort of like the run-up that red wine gives you to a glass of whisky.
I wanna drink beer, not tea made with hops
It does seem to have swung back a bit over the last few years though. I find people are looking for, "drinkability" over "hoppyness" but that's obviously anticdata.
Larger craft breweries really don't have this luxury. They need to have both a means of production laser focused quality and process oriented folks AND a place for rapid research and development.
What is ironic is when a craft brewery starts reaching size where they can afford these types of benefits they are often demonized for various reasons all having to do with the Brand.
I think the other side of this is that Merlot was very popular. Everyone had already tried the Merlot. Merlot was overrepresented, so, there was like a Merlot "bubble" at the time, in part because of reports on the French Paradox [0], and it being the most popular grape in France and a very popular grape in California and the Finger Lakes. More than the film putting down Merlot, it was praising Pinot Noir. So, you have a movie more or less telling wine drinkers there's another wine you can drink besides Merlot...
But drink what you like. Giamatti's character was so troubled in that film, and his advice was definitely questionable.
American wine palette has come a long way since then
Oh, come on.
Even budget grocery stores separate their wines by region and grape.
Just about every American who drinks wine has their favorites, even if it just goes as far as something like "I like Malbec because it's less dry."
True experts can distinguish an astonishing number of characteristics of wine in a blind taste. Most people are not experts. The price of wine is also largely decoupled from how much any given person will enjoy it. (However, psychologically, you will probably enjoy a bottle you paid $100 for more than one you paid $20 for.)
Basically: Wine is not all just indistinguishable fermented grape juice, but most stuff written about wine is a combination of bunk and rarified trivia no normal drinker should care about. Drink what makes you happy.
Corollary: the wine in a €4 euro bottle is 3x as expensive as the wine in a €3 bottle €1.50 vs €0.50).
That broadcast was a while ago, so the details might not be exact. But the main point is that after the first (about) 3 euro, you're starting to spend money on the contents. Before, you're literally paying a few pennies for the wine...
* well, better than the £5 bottles you get here in the UK
At the release of Sideways, everyone and their brother knew the major wine varieties, and had opinions. Indeed, a major reason the merlot spiel had such an impact with so many is precisely because it was so popular. Many like to be a contrarian, so if something knocks on the popular thing that can have an impact ("who else can't stand Tiktok, right?"). Most of the varieties of merlot were very high quality, and I doubt the overwhelming bulk of wine drinkers could taste any deficiency (many can't even differentiate varieties).
https://www.guildsomm.com/public_content/features/articles/b...
That's a much better article about the rise and fall of California merlot, and basically notes that merlot had plateaued by Sideways release, and there's a bit of a cause/correlation mixup happening.
I think it's probably more accurate to say that everyone felt they were supposed to be familiar with the major wine varieties so all had picked up the terms and desperately clung to a few half-earned opinions because they didn't want to appear unsophisticated. But I think most people didn't actually have particularly strongly held or individually acquired wine preferences. (It's well known that even professionals can often not correctly identify what variety or even what color wine they're drinking.)
This is a social situation that's ripe for a radical opinion swing. Because everyone is trying to look like they know what everyone else knows but there's little "ground truth" (i.e. actual personal opinions) slowing down the change. So when a movie like Sideways comes out with a character who clearly cares deeply about wine and knows a lot and expresses a strong opinion. Well, I guess merlot's not cool anymore.
As an aside, while I absolutely agree that most wine snobbiness is absolute horseshit (there is loads of it throughout the discussion in various other threads), that study on wine "experts" who couldn't tell the difference between red and wine is just terrible nonsense. It was some students who were recruited and smelled wines, given the visual cues of color.
It's even less than that. The study showed that if people are primed to think they're drinking red wine, their responses reflect that. If the experiments wanted a controlled study on whether the subjects could tell red and white wine apart, they could have blindfolded them or told them the wines had all been dyed the same colour, and the students would have discriminated between them very accurately.
Anyway, like you I tend to discount the opinion of anyone who misinterprets this study's results in the way that the article does.
This is demonstrably false, btw. Either those professionals you are referring to are completely untrained (just being in the wine business doesn’t mean you are an experienced taster) or it’s just complete bullshit.
Millions of drinking age drinkers in America then and today know nothing about wine. Perhaps I just missed the intentional exaggeration, but "living in bubbles" was a discussion I had with a friend recently and this struck me as that kind of line.
To me, those are things that allow you to elevate your enjoyment of tasting the wine itself. Anything beyond that (knowing region or grape by taste) is turning wine into a hobby, which is fine, but not necessary.
But you'll come far enough with general guidelines (older = better, except some years are very good and others... less so) to please guests. Except for the amateur vinologist, but he gets to be happy about showcasing his knowledge.
I'm more familiar with Santa Ynez and the Pinots from Sideways. The only Paso wine I've had has been Justin, which seems to be a large producer since it's in Costco.
This makes sense from a Bayesian point if view... What are the experts priors? What's more likely? That their nose is off today or someone is trying to decieve them by dying white wine red? I would guess it's the former. There must be a large publication bias is well, "experts can differentiate white from red wine" is hardly going to get much attention.
To make this a fair trial I think you need to blindfold them rather than "trick" them.
There is great video of guy trying to reconstruct red wine from whites + coloring and serving it to master of wine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN83j5ZOUm0
And there are a lot of other tricks and blind tasting sessions in his channel. This is how expert taster works.
Whats the point of a wine? looking at it or tasting it? Dude recognized its colored before even tasting it, or rather strictly without tasting it. Would he be able to do this without looking at it?
If you didn't know the speech was from Sideways you'd think Arnett's character is deeply eloquent, and if you did happen to see Sideways recently, you see him for the fraud he is.
It would be interesting to see a comparison to whites - are Chardonnays and Pinot Gris also on an upward trend?
OK, let's generalize my comment to "common attributes" of wines like Pinot Noir.
Rombauer also makes their reds with a little bit of sugar and I think they are excellent.
Not enough sugar ;-)
Sweet reds do exist, but almost all of them are fortified to stop fermentation early and leave sugar in the bottle, or just cheap wines with sugar added to appeal to simpler palates.
Presumably the rant against Merlot is in the book, so perhaps it is less likely to just be a product of the times.
>In the movie, Giamatti's character is a wine aficionado who drinks Pinot Noir in favor of Merlot, a wine that he despises. Now every idiot who has seen the movie has suddenly become a wine expert, and Pinot sales have shot through the roof. NPR interviewed a guy who said, and I quote: "I used to drink merlot, and after I saw the movie, they say 'don't drink merlot,' so [now] I'm drinking pinot noir... "
Of course, drink what you like. But the industry was hardly “broken” (If anything Id bet it was accelerated) just altered.
Perhaps it was just a funny line with no deeper-wider-meaning or commentary?
Someone so entitled and so obsessed with the details that a "normal" person would not notice - a wine geek or wine nerd if you will - getting worked up about something so totally inconsequential to most people. It is funny.
I could totally imagine a line from some HN-favourite tech satire. "And if they use cherry MX reds in there, we're just going to use cherry MX reds ok? I'm not going to fucking use cherry MX reds!" Substitute keyboard switches for vi/emacs, tabs/spaces, 80 chars/120 chars etc.
It’s very common that waiter tells you we have Pinot Noir or Merlot, but without telling you at least from where they are, that information is pretty much worthless. And I’m almost sure most people can’t tell the difference anyway.
I’m a lifelong wine lover, even with some education in wine tasting, and the more I know about wine, the less I’m sure I’d be able to tell them apart in blind tasting. It’s more like I roughly know what style of wine I can expect from different countries, and which varieties have good conditions in those countries and which are better avoided.
Do some Merlots taste more like Cabs? Sure. Is an experienced wine drinker going to mistake Pinot Noir for Sauvignon Blanc, even if they’re both from Sancerre? No way.
> There’s no “better”.
To nitpick, there are definitely better and worse winemaking grapes—thing is, the bad ones are only grown by necessity, as in the case that the better ones won't grow well due to e.g. weather, so for obvious reasons they only tend to feature in wine from places that aren't known for winemaking.
This is completely incorrect as any habitual wine drinker can tell you. Wines made from the two grapes look very different - Pinot is translucent, Merlot has a lot of colour - and taste quite different, though the specifics of the taste difference are dependent on the wine making technique.
Wow that’s surprising.
There was a famous study that asked its test subjects to describe the wine that they were drinking. There are certain words that are typically associated with red wines and certain words that are typically associated with white wines. They used red dyes to dye white wine red and a different chemical to turn the red wine the color of white wine. The administrators of the study found that the words used to describe the white wines died red aligned more closely with the descriptors used to describe red wines, and the words used to describe the red wines bleached white were more closely aligned with the descriptors used to describe white wines.
Conclusion: wine experts can't tell the different between white wine and red wine. The problem: The "experts" were 18-22 year old college students who had just taken a class on wine tasting. They weren't actually experts, they were just people who had been taught the right words to say to pass the tests. They were taught what words to say. Then you tested to see whether they said them.
There was another famous study where its test subjects were given a sampling of wines, with each wine having a short blurb about it, which included the price of the wine. The prices were fake. They were then asked to rate each wine. The administrators found that the fake price stated on the blurb was correlated with the rating. Conclusion: wine experts can't tell the different between expensive wine and cheap wine. The problem: the only thing you've actually proven is confirmation bias.
Those two studies are quoted a lot. You'll quite often see those two particular quotes, wine experts can't tell the difference between red and white wine, and wine experts can't tell the difference between expensive and cheap wine. You don't see studies that show that wine experts can't tell the difference between merlot and cab franc, or the difference between stainless steel and oak aging on a chardonnay. You don't see those studies because those studies don't exist.
I guess there are a few grape varieties that are used for red and white wines that might pose some more tricky edge cases. E.g. pinot noir (a grape type) white wine is actually made with the same grapes as the red variety. The juice is actually color less; the skin has color. I guess it depends on how you process the grapes on what color wine you end up producing. And they'd obviously share a few of the same flavors because it is the same base ingredients that are used.
Crud. Underpriced Merlot has been the best thing ever for the last decade!
The graph shows plantings are flat for a couple of years before the vineyards actually started switching, they just weren't planting new merlot grapes.
I also think Pinot is superior (both the white or the red variety). Chardonay and Merlo are every day staple, but Pino is just a tad better.
I think once more people tried Pinot (Noir or Grigio), they just stuck with it because it is good.
Pinot is just so sensitive and fragile. Merlot is a drinkers wine.
While the US produces excellent wine, Europe usually wins the price/quality battle.
I’m not some snob who judges wine on price either! I mainly drink cabs that are < 15.
I think Pinot is really hard to grow so we end up with a lot of mediocre stuff. But it has a good enough reputation that the meh stuff still sells at lower price points.
I also prefer bigger reds like cabs. Give me Bordeaux. Easy grape to grow and for the money you get a great wine.
In 1395.
Or are you saying, “I don’t like it when people care about how they’ll be seen so much that they can’t do whatever they like.”?
I don’t think it’s sad at all, it’s a fun reminder about how we function.
There is a mystique surrounding wine, as if it is a pure product shaped only by nature and the skill of the winemaker. The reality is that it's an engineered product full of adulterants(many natural and historical, but adulterants nevertheless. Think fining agents, acids, etc). Same with spirits. It's an industry that must produce a consistent product from highly variable inputs. Your impression of the bottle and the label also contribute to the brand/image.
People often choose the beverage that helps them identify with a story or project a certain image, not necessarily something that tastes good. Then again that's part of why their doing it. They want to signal. They need a vehicle for it.
I don't know if you've seen the movie, but Giamatti's character does come off as someone you feel really understands when wine is bad, or at least was written by people who do. It's hard to resist that.
Those who have achieved enlightenment just drink what's in front of them, shrug, and say, in the words of Thomas Hayden Church, "tastes okay to me." :)
Miles, on the other hand, is speaking of himself when he talks about his interest in Pinot Noir: "It's uh, it's thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It's, you know, it's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and uh, thrive even when it's neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. You know? And in fact it can only grow in these really specific, little, tucked away corners of the world. And, and only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression."
Miles is fussy. He knows he is temperamental and sensitive. "Ripens early" translates to "I may have already peaked with a previous relationship." He is bitterly aware of how much attention he needs in a relationship, and so on. It's a helpless self-awareness, knowing his flaws but being unable to act on them.
My wife and I, we just like and prefer the sweet $8 pink sweet barefoot wine. Despite having no guests, we don't touch the 'good stuff.' For no other reason than we don't like it.
(I am not advocating for prohibition or anything like that by the way. Clearly many people enjoy wine, beer and spirits in moderation, although often this follows ingrained sociocultural norms.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/470961/ad-spend-to-sales...
Data for other industries here: http://www.rab.com/research/10014.pdf
Alcohol seems quite popular and has been quite popular for literally millenia, no massive advertising campaigns needed. The alcohol industry is highly competitive, and saturating consumers with ads can certainly influence their choice of which alcohol to buy.
And lest you accuse me of being a lightweight, I regularly enjoy in moderation something actually not that far off from hand sanitizer - cask strength whisky, weighing in at 60+% ABV. Because it is undiluted out of the barrel, it provides an incredibly intense flavor and aroma that I do not need to be tricked into liking.
I think it is a bit more complicated than you make out. The popularity for millenia is really when the only competing beverage was water, and even clean water was hard to get until recently. In recent times, soft drinks and juices have usurped the ubiquity of wine at the dinner table in France for example (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21929287).
Out of interest, what did you think about the whisky the very first time you tried it? Do you think it is likely that without all the notions out there about whisky to do with cachet, heritage, masculinity etc that you would have kept drinking it? That is my point. This is all quite aside from your current experience of drinking whisky, which is of course entirely legitimate and enjoyable of itself. I like beer now but the first time I had it I couldn't get one mouthful down.
Oh, come on. People like to get drunk. It's that simple. That "the only competing beverage was water" is some kind of argument ... get real. That's completely ridiculous. People REALLY REALLY like to get drunk. Water is no competition. Has nothing to do with what the drink tastes like.
A lot of it goes to the fact that bitter, acidic, pungent things are an "acquired taste" in American culture. That's just not true in countries where children grow up with stronger flavors like real unpasteurized cheeses, fermented foods, and offal.
So what you say might be true as far as ad spending influencing the basic, cheese-puff-snorting American, but the premise that alcohol is unpalatable to most people (at least, most people around the world) is a false projection.
My semi-nightly movie time usually involves a bottle of wine (I change up what kind), couple squares of 90% to 100% chocolate, bowl of homemade popcorn, some American Spirit dark rolling tobacco, and a CBD+THC gummy. All those alkaloids roll around your senses like bittersweet heaven.
As an American I am angry that they make red wine and white wine, but no blue wine. That damn unpatriotic California wine industry. I will drink Windex instead, and that will show them. It all tastes the same anyway. /g
There're already blue potatoes, so cmon wine industry, please make it happen!
https://www.md2020wine.com/bottles/
Disclaimer: enjoy responsibly and may god have mercy on your soul.