The World Has Hit 'peak Booze'

That's a turning point in a habit at least as old as civilisation itself. For millennia, we've used drinking to loosen our inhibitions at social gatherings, anesthetise ourselves from the drudgery of life, or simply give a little sparkle to our days. The fact that we're giving it up without even noticing is a sign of how other longstanding practices - from smoking and sexual promiscuity to eating red meat - might dwindle just as painlessly.

It's impossible to know whether an activity is truly going out of fashion until years after the fact. Shifts in our consumption can be mysterious, and hard to predict. As any hiker would recognise, it can be all too easy to think you're at the peak long before you actually get there.

Such transitions do happen, however. Production of grape wine hit its maximum level of 37.5 million metric tons - equivalent to about 50 billion bottles - as far back as 1979, and has since fallen by about 27. Decades of advocacy for the claimed health benefits of a daily glass of shiraz have failed to turn that picture around. We appear to have hit a shallower peak in beer, too. The world is now about 2.6 below where it was in 2016, when 190 million tons was brewed, or roughly half a trillion standard bottles.

That may be an overoptimistic assumption, though, because the hardest-drinking parts of the world have already had their demographic booms. Map out the region from Africa to Southeast Asia that will account for almost all population growth over the rest of this century, and you're looking at a picture of the larger Muslim world that includes places like India and Nigeria, home to some of the largest Muslim populations. This is unlikely to be a strong market for the world's brewers, even as rising incomes give locals more opportunities to slake their thirsts.

In India, even non-Muslim religious groups often abstain, while a long-standing temperance movement means alcohol consumption is banned altogether in several states. Some of the fastest-growing Christian sects in developing countries are also non-drinkers, such as the Latter-Day Saints and Seventh-Day Adventists.