Per capita wine consumption

There is something almost unbearably tidy about the observation that Americans drank more wine in exact proportion to how many of their grown children moved back home. One wonders whether the wine caused the moving-back or the moving-back caused the wine, though the more likely answer is that the universe enjoys a joke you can serve in a glass. Proximity, it seems, has a bouquet.

Both lines lunge upward in 2020 and for once the common cause is not subtle: covid sent a historic wave of young adults back to their parents' houses after losing jobs, leases, and campus housing, and the same lockdown year drove US wine consumption to record highs as living rooms became wine bars. The share of 18-to-29-year-olds living with parents hit roughly 52% in mid-2020 — the highest since the Great Depression — and wine sales grew almost 18% that year. The two numbers didn't cause each other; they just shared a household.

So the correlation is less a statistical curiosity than a family photograph: grown children back in their bedrooms, parents uncorking something red, everyone waiting it out. We learn, once again, that shared circumstance can masquerade as correlation for years. The house drank together.