Is a conservative boycott of California wines a real threat?

I heard about it from a liberal friend, who saw Joss Whedon tweeting about it. Conservatives, upset at California because of its relative welcome to immigrants, propose boycotting California wine.

Is it a real threat? The short answer is no. In fact, a conservative boycott would probably help California wine sales, to the point that I seriously wonder if a California wine broker or vintner surreptitiously created the image.

A brief note on that: I went looking for the source of the image, and the best I could find for Patient Zero is Patrick Monahan, a New York-based comedian. Monahan is a volume tweeter but it doesn't appear certain from his feed that he's conservative. I'm not sure where he found it: maybe he created it, but even the way he tweeted it seems ambivalent about the content: he simply shared the photo above with the overline, "Powerful stuff." Maybe it's performance humor. (I have reached out to him and will let you know if he responds.)

Conservatives, so far as I can tell, have not picked up on it so far. (Thanks for making me read Breitbart, Patrick.) But liberals like Whedon have.

Conservatives boycotting California wine? MY HOUR IS AT HAND. I shall drink my way to GLORY, for the good of the LAND #martyr #oaky https://t.co/RJe7Mmv1JS

— Joss Whedon (@joss) December 30, 2017

Whedon is not alone. I found far more evidence of liberals saying they plan to respond to a boycott by drinking more California wine than I did of conservatives planning to boycott it.

This is exactly the unreported story of what happened during the conservative boycott of French wine that started in 2003, when France had the gall to be right about the Iraq War.

This may not be how you remember it, because initial media reports in 2003 indicated that sales of French wine were down. Fox News reported, "Americans just say 'non' to French products." The Washington Post story, "U.S. boycott being felt, French say," stated, "American importers of French wine are reporting sharp drops in sales in the past two months."

But in 2007, three economists (Princeton's Orley C. Ashenfelter, Stephen Ciccarella of Cornell and Howard J. Shatz of the Rand Corporation) showed that the short-term drop in French wine sales was both seasonal and part of a longer term trend. Here is a PDF link to their paper. Wine sells less in spring, when the boycott started, and French wine sales in the U.S. had been dropping for several years, mainly because of more competition from countries like Argentina and New Zealand that were still relatively new to the U.S. market.

"Using a dataset of sales of nearly 4,700 individual wine brands, we show that there actually was no boycott effect," the three economists reported. They speculate that some anti-war folks may have bought more French wine to offset any decline in sales to conservatives, but that's just speculation: the numbers are the numbers.

In the case of California wine, I believe a conservative boycott would help sales. It's not without risks. Wine is one of the few pleasures in the U.S. that conservatives and liberals share equally. Conservatives buy a lot of California wine. Napa Valley wineries in particular would be nervous because Texas is such an important market for them.

But conservatives boycotting California wine just wouldn't have many alternatives. All of the top quality wine-producing states in the U.S. are blue states, including Washington, Oregon, New York and Virginia. There are some good wines made in Texas, which benefits from its consumers' state loyalty, but the volume of quality wines made there and in Arizona and Idaho isn't enough to fulfill the conservative wine drinkers' market.

That would leave foreign wines. I have a hard time imagining immigrant haters pursuing a boycott of U.S. products and buying E.U. products instead (maybe Austrian wines for neo-Nazis, but they'll find Austrian reds austere compared to California reds). Argentina has a conservative government right now and might benefit, especially at the low end, but I'm not sure I see another good candidate for conservatives to adopt. The National Rifle Association (NRA) wine club and the Daily Caller wine club sell mostly California wines for a reason.

And look at Whedon's reaction: once news spreads of conservatives dropping California Cab for Malbec, the backlash among liberals will be immense. I know some East Coast sommeliers and wine writers who privately disparage California wine, and who I believe would immediately start looking more deeply for some of the great balanced, individualistic wines being made out here.

So in sum, if conservatives want to boycott California wine, bring it on. More for the rest of us, and I mean that in more ways than one.

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