A couple of things relating to booze today.

First an article (on Slate) about how the U.S. (and presumably Canada too) is increasingly buying wine over beer.  Sales of wine have doubled in the last decade, while sales of beer largely remained the same.  As a beer (and not wine) drinker, there’s probably a good reason for this, but I can’t imagine what it is.  The article seems to attribute it to a lean towards the wine “lifestyle”, with a bit of savvy marketing thrown in.  Whatever the trend might be, I know I will be enjoying a frosty 50 for years to come, that’s certain.

Then an interesting development by a bunch of Dutch students who have invented a kind of powdered alcohol.  You add some water, and bingo you’ve got:

“…a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.”

There must be some interesting laws there because they are targeting the youth market of underage kids.  Apparently because the alcohol isn’t liquid you can sell it to anybody.  Weird.  I can only imagine that soon you will need to tell your bartender exactly how dry you want your martini, maybe you can snort that sucker.  You probably would really want to hang onto your own straw in that scenario….