Dipping glasses in liquor flood

After a year of more relaxed rules on the sale of alcohol - and a lower legal drinking age - DITA DE BONI looks at how our tastes are changing.

In the past year we had access to more alcohol, and a better variety, than ever before in the country's history.

An extensive array of imported and premium beers became staple items in shopping trolleys.

Dinner parties buzzed with the merits, or otherwise, of wine from New Zealand's 350-plus winemakers.

And spirit sales, which had been steadily declining through the 1990s, staged the second year of a comeback driven by young people buying the big range of ready-to-drink mixes.

What was underpinning this rollicking renaissance?

The liquor lobby and supermarkets struck a home run in late 1999, finally convincing the Government - a new crew, and relatively liberal on alcohol issues - to allow beer sales in supermarkets, Sunday sales of wine and beer, and to lower the legal drinking age to 18.

Hey presto, several new drinking patterns were ushered in overnight:

BEER

Most notably, the female household shopper and beer brands became intimately acquainted. So brewers had to become better acquainted with the female psyche.

"Blokey" beers continued their decline. Premium brews - prettily packaged, of course, because the female psyche is never that well understood - boomed.

But we are still drinking much less beer than in the past. Luke Nicholas, editor of realbeer.co.nz, says traditional volumes have dropped for health reasons.

"Let's face it, 10 jugs a night can't be good for you.

"The drinker still has the same amount of money to spend on a smaller quantity of beer, so he decides to drink better quality.

"Therefore, the traditional beer drinker moves from his Lion Red or DB Draught to a beer with a high perceived quality and image, like Steinlager or Export Gold, then sees there are still more choices and moves to Heineken or Stella Artois," says Nicholas.

"From here, it's anyone's guess as the market is becoming more and more segmented with different brands and styles."

About 12 per cent of all beer was sold through supermarkets last year, with these outlets commanding around 20 per cent of all packaged beers.

But despite some fairly creative efforts by breweries to keep beer sexy - Lion Nathan's beer cafes and a rash of speciality brews, for example - beer volumes have remained flat at about 4 million hectalitres, or 81 litres a person each year.

And even Lion's classy chinheads may be powerless to stop the decline.

Nicholas says the toughest part for brewers now is to correctly identify future styles that will capture the imagination of drinkers.

As the populations is so small, "it will be impossible to offer all 70 beer styles that are promoted commercially."

"When you take a step back we will ultimately follow world trends, and that suggests premium lagers will be the most popular."

WINE While beer drinkers are "trading up" to more sophisticated ales, wine drinkers are doing the same.

The amount of wine drunk by New Zealanders is rising, but we are still relatively reticent compared with other nations.

The latest figures show that while our consumption of wine has grown out of sight in the last three decades, it is still hovering below 20 litres a person per year, compared with about 70 litres in Luxembourg, almost 60 litres in France and 52 litres in Italy (where wine consumption is actually declining).

But we have certainly come a long way in the last 20 years. In 1980, for example, 50 per cent of all wine sold was fortified wine, or sherry.

Last year, fortified wine was nearer 12 per cent of sales.

One product that had a stellar 2000 was sparkling wine, especially early in the year.

By the end of the millennium celebrations, New Zealanders had bought over 50 per cent more of the bubbly stuff than at the same time the previous year, and the America's Cup celebrations kept it flowing.

Again, health concerns have driven consumers to wine as much as snazzy shirazes and rich rieslings.

A study done of Waiheke wines mid-year boosted our winemaking reputation by suggesting that our temperate climate gives wine more time to develop powerful antioxidants.

Wine has been sold in supermarkets for about 10 years, but the sheets would come down on Sundays.

We buy 50 per cent of our wine with the weekly groceries.

New Zealanders still do not spend much on wine - $10-and-under bottles are the favourite - but better knowledge of varieties means the boutique trade is thriving, with small wineries continuing to flourish.

SPIRITS Spirits provide proof that with clever marketing and a twist, anything can regain ground in sales.

Consumption was last on the rise in 1990, before going into an eight-year decline.

Spirits consumption is increasing again thanks to ready-to-drinks (RTDs, in industry parlance), which are the brightly coloured bottles of liquor and soft-drinks mixes so popular in nightclubs.

Sales have eased off since the days when the category grew 700 per cent in its first two years.

The most recent figures (for the year ended 1999) show the sale of spirits, including ready-to-drink mixes, rose 9.6 per cent to 21 million litres.

But sales of spirits alone declined 3 per cent to 8.8 million litres

Yet they are still strong, proving one of the most popular buys for the newly legal 18-year-old drinker.

You may not find yourself wearing a chicken suit at the Carnival in Rio as the ad suggests, but as one young clubber said recently, "It's just like a soft-drink, only grown up."