Modest Good News
While Congress has done very little recently (or this entire year), last week there was some modestly positive news for the wine industry, thanks to the House Appropriations Committee passing the USDA funding bill.
One of WineAmerica’s priorities since 2022 has been authorization and funding for a national vineyard survey conducted by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). While there is no recommended funding level, at least there is “encouragement” for this to occur, which simply means we’ll have to lobby for the money later and separately. Under the best of circumstances, results of a possible survey won’t be available before 2027, given the time needed for Congress to act, and for NASS to develop and complete the survey.
The second item is the Committee’s recommendation that the process for developing an updated version of Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) follow that used in the past in order to ensure consistency, transparency, and efficacy. The DGA are adopted every five years, and alcohol has long been a part of them, but for the 2025-2030 version a totally new process has been created under different agencies which are allowing virtually no transparency. WineAmerica and other organizations collaborated on a letter to Congress objecting to this, and the Committee’s language in this bill shows that those concerns were heard.
