Per capita wine consumption

It turns out Americans drank more wine in proportion to how often the world tweeted, which feels, in retrospect, self-evident. Whether the wine caused the tweeting or the tweeting caused the wine is a question best not asked too loudly at dinner. The answer, as always, was both.

Both exploded in 2020 for the same lockdown reason. US per capita wine consumption hit record highs as living rooms became bars and housebound adults drank their way through the year, while daily tweet volume surged as Twitter became the pandemic's default newsroom and argument arena. Two different ways of coping, both fuelled by the same anxious refresh button.

So the correlation is the sound of a country self-medicating on two different shelves at once. Glass in one hand, phone in the other. Neither helped.