My Shout

The trade will get the last laugh as many of its critics during 2005 are already being proved wrong says Doug Clydesdale

In 1450 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press making information more widely available. Today, knowledge spreads internationally and instantly through our lives. We just can't get enough and, in the battle for our attention, reality often disappears out the window.

Indeed, if you had arrived from Mars in the run up to the new licensing laws you could have been forgiven for climbing straight back into your rocket, with headlines predicting an 'orgy of violence and mayhem across the UK', a situation that would have perturbed any self-respecting Martian! Yet, after the first weekend the media coverage was more muted with 28 of the police forces surveyed reporting no difference in alcohol offences and a further eight actually reporting a reduction.

So as we start to draw the curtain down on 2005 let's look at a few of the 'expert' views and predictions about on-trade drinking that have fallen wide of the mark.

Did you hear the one about us all swapping our pints of beer for glasses of Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc? Well for the record, recent data shows that wine is down 2% in the on-trade. This is despite the increased focus on food and aggressive discounting which has seen bottles sold at supermarket prices.

Apparently the arrival of FABs (flavoured alcohol beverage) heralded the 'last straw' for the cider market. Well, a change of ownership for the brand leader and some great innovation has seen cider become the fastest growing sector of the on-trade. Whilst FABs have become one of the fastest declining sectors.

Closer to home, I remember entering an industry eight years ago that was trumpeting the demise of mainstream lager. It seemed we would all be drinking premium lager as we embraced a new continental lifestyle. Strange then that the mainstream lager market has outperformed the premium category in the on-trade every year for the last three years, and that premium lager is currently declining at 5%.

Finally, I have lost count of the many articles talking about national brewers all turning their backs on the ale market and that it was only regional players supporting the category. Perhaps the millions invested in brewing and marketing by Tetley's and John Smiths isn't a fashionable story for the ale experts.

However, some of the more enlightened will be pulling a few pints of Tetley's from the new Smoothflow font as this festive season gets under way.

So don't believe all you read in the papers. Three months ago the headlines read 'Sven's lost it, the system's all wrong'. Two quick wins against Austria and Poland and it's 'Germany here we come'. Now England are the number two seeds and tipped to win the World Cup - well, 'probably'