Wine was not an alcoholic drink?

(After reading a book "World of wines")

The only truth is there is no truth. Wine was not considered an alcoholic drink until 1820. Until that time, people didn't know there was alcohol in wine. Therefore, wine was regarded as a kind of food like orange juice. Even after wine was discovered to be an alcoholic drink, it was treated differently than  other alcoholic drinks such as beer, brandy, and so on. Part of the reason was wine had been used in Christian masses as a food together with bread. They couldn't change Christian masses.

For Western people, especially the French, wine was a food. If you saw the data for annual wine consumption per person in France, you could easily understand that. In 1930, it was 170L. It means every individual person in France drank about 0.5L of wine everyday. One bottle of today's wine is 0.75L, so you can imagine how much the French drank. In 1980, the amount was reduced by half to 90L, but still that was a lot. Wine has been integral part of French life.

French people loved wine so much that they were very proud of the quality of their wine. Thus, it was a true shock when French wines were defeated by American wines in the blind tasting competition, a.k.a "The Judgment of Paris," held in 1976. It was proposed by a rich American businessman, but all of the judges were famous wine experts from France. Before the results came out, all of the judges said that there was no doubt that French wines were far superior than American wines. The results were shocking. Both the No.1 red and the No. 1 white wines were American. You can imagine how embarrassed the judges were after the results. In fact, some of the judges begged to have their name removed from the results because they worried all the blame they would hear from the French community. It was a really shock to not just the French people, but to everybody in the world who was interested in wine.

In fact, in any field, it is very difficult to maintain the lead if there are diligent followers who work hard to catch the leader. A result of such fierce competition is that we can enjoy quality wines at low price.  The $10 Australian wine I am enjoying now is probably much better than the one a king enjoyed a few hundred years ago. It tastes really good to me.