5 Things We Learned in April 2025
Drunken monkeys, layers of flavour and GenZ’s digital sophistication debunked. There was a lot of news in April.
1. Wine as fishing
Wine has long been used as a tool of corruption, because it’s the right size and value to offer as a discreet gift. Now it’s also a tool of espionage.
As reported by Politico, European diplomats have been opening their inboxes to discover emails with subject lines like ‘Diplomatic Dinner’ and ‘Wine Testing [sic] Event’.
A cybersecurity company called Check Point has been tracking a phishing campaign “conducted by APT29, a Russia-linked threat group” and discovered it’s targeting “diplomatic entities across Europe”.
APT29, also known as Cozy Bear and Midnight Blizzard, has been linked to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service.
Their latest campaign, GRAPELOADER, is a continuation of one called WINELOADER. Once the recipient clicks on it, the email automatically downloads malicious software.
According to Check Point, the targets are not just diplomatic missions, but also think tanks. So far, Areni Global hasn’t received one of these invitations. Then again, how would we know? Invitations to wine tastings end up in the inbox on a regular basis. If any of us were invited to a “wine testing event” we’d assume we’d been asked to judge.
Perhaps the spam filter worked this time.
2. What is means to be a digital native
Remember everything you’d heard about GenZ being digital natives, swimming the internet with ease? Politico published another intriguing report in April, suggesting that this picture is dangerously false.
Researchers from Stanford have discovered that young people in the US find it hard to separate fact from fiction on the internet.
The researchers, from Stanford Graduate School of Education, gave 3,446 American high school students a series of internet tasks. One task involved a video from 2016 that had circulated on Facebook that seemed to be evidence of voter fraud during the American elections. The students were asked to use the internet to confirm or debunk the video.
Only three of the students — less than one tenth of one percent — were able to identify the source of the video, which came from Russia.
“This study is not an indictment of the students — they did what they’ve been taught to do — but the study should be troubling to anyone who cares about the future of democracy,” said Joel Breakstone, director of the Stanford History Education Group and the study’s lead author. “We have to train students to be better consumers of information.”
The issue is that social media is now the main source of news for this generation. According to Politico, “about three in five Gen Zers, from between the ages of 13 and 26, say they get their news from social media at least once a week”.
“TikTok is a particularly popular platform: 45 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 said they were regular news consumers on the app.”
Worse, this group “fact checks” by looking at comments, because they trust what other people are saying about an issue or a product.
The implications for the future are huge — and ominous, particularly if this is an international phenomenon. “Without some sort of course correction, a growing piece of the electorate will find itself falling victim to fake news and fringe conspiracy theories online — likely driving the hyperpolarization of our politics to new heights,” said the article.
It sounds like encouraging people to sit down together over food (and a glass of wine) will become even more important than it is now.
3. Chimps go wild
A bunch of convivial chimps in Cantanhez National Park, Guinea-Bissau have been caught on video sharing booze with one another.
Researchers set up cameras in the park and watched chimps as they scavenged for breadfruits. The researchers, from the University of Exeter, also tested the fruits, and discovered they contained a mild amount of alcohol (up to 0.61%)
On ten separate occasions, the researchers saw the chimps sharing the alcoholic breadfruit with one another. While primates have been seen drinking alcohol before, this is the first time they have been seen sharing food and alcohol at the same time.
Researchers have long wondered when it was that humans began to drink alcohol together, and why we developed the ability to tolerate alcohol, hypothesising that it helps forge social bonds.
The Washington Post asked several researchers to comment on the findings. Scientists being scientists, they were cautious in their responses, saying things like there might be a social benefit, but further research was needed.
It’s an easy problem to solve — just leave out some bottles of wine for the chimps to find, and see what happens next. If they start pouring out measures for each other and raising toasts, researchers can confirm that alcohol was indeed the basis for civilization.
Like what you are reading? Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to access new articles.
4. Spoiled for flavour
The New York Times ran an interesting feature on flavour in late April, noting that in 30 years, food had swung from being, well, food, to something created to please palates accustomed to bursts of flavour. The author, Marie Solis, suggests that we’re now in an era of “hyperflavour, in which many of us seek out increasingly elaborate combinations of ingredients and spices”. It’s a world where the professional classes talk obsessively among themselves about ingredients and the latest bakery finds.
Food is no longer food, but art.
How did we get here? Some of it was the emergence of bestselling cookbooks that introduced new ingredients, like Yotam Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem; some of it was because prestigious food publications moved online and made their recipes and articles widely available; and some of it was because of the pandemic, when people spent more time at home experimenting with food.
In theory, this could explain some of the collapse of the commercial end of the wine market and the swing towards drinking less but better — as palates become more refined, simple wines would naturally be edged out in favour of more complex, food friendly wines.
A little tip: apparently miso caramel is the next big thing in flavour. The first sommelier to work out the correct wine pairing will have a hit on their hands.
5. You need a bar for that
Also according to the New York Times, every high-end home now needs a bar cabinet. Apparently the well-heeled are now spending more time drinking at home and they want to be stylish while doing it.
If you’re in the market for one and you only have a small space, make sure you buy a cabinet with a shiny, reflective surface. If you’ve got a darker space, go for cream or white.
And expect to dig deep into your pockets. Louis Vuitton’s ‘Party In a Box’ retails for $192,000, while the Ralph Lauren version is $40,780.
Or just get an old one from a charity shop and call it vintage.
