(Wine-Searcher) - The Centers for Disease Control recommendation that women quit drinking is getting a predictable reaction.

Women buy 57 percent of the wine in the United States, according to Nielsen. So when the Centers for Disease Control recently advised women who are sexually active and not using birth control to not drink any alcohol at all, it seemed like a possible body blow to the wine industry.

The pool of sexually active US women who might become unintentionally pregnant is huge: fully 70 percent of women of childbearing age, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Traditionally, drinking wine has been associated with – how can we put this? – spontaneous decisions. And the US wine market has had big reactions to health issues in the past, notably the switch to red wine in the 1990s after reports of a "French paradox" that might reduce heart disease.

So at a time when pictures of Zika babies are spooking mothers worldwide, it seems like a threat to the industry when a CDC report warns that "alcohol use during pregnancy, even within the first few weeks and before a woman knows she is pregnant, can cause lasting physical, behavioral, and intellectual disabilities that can last for a child’s lifetime."

So far, women in the wine industry seem to be shrugging it off, if not openly making fun of it, as one blogger did when she created a chart pairing types of birth control with different types of booze (white wine goes with a birth-control arm implant, we learned, while condoms go with beer.)

More seriously, wine marketing professor Dr. Janeen Olsen told Wine-Searcher: "The only women I know who are sexually active but not on birth control are indeed attempting to become pregnant. I can see that some of these women may decide to not drink alcohol during time period, but since this may only be for a matter of a few months in most cases, I don't see the impact on wine sales as being great."

Lisa Mattson is an expert on the story in two ways: she has been a wine marketing professional for 20 years and wrote a book about her love life titled The Exes in My iPod: A Playlist of the Men Who Rocked Me to Wine Country.

Mattson told Wine-Searcher: "I don't think this report is going to motivate many women to change their drinking habits, especially not on the mid- to high-end of the age scale referenced. There's a big difference between how women in their teens and women in their thirties and forties view the relationship between drinking, dating, sex and pregnancy."

Some commenters saw the CDC report as at best a scold from a nanny state. Mattson said focusing on the potential for birth defects in an unwanted pregnancy might actually undermine a message to moderate drinking.

"CDC's efforts would be more effective if they focused on educating young women on understanding how alcohol works once it enters your bloodstream and the measures women should take to drink responsibly, so they don't get themselves into compromising situations, where their inhibitions are loosened and their judgment impaired," Mattson said. "Trying to encourage sexually active women who are not trying to get pregnant that they should not drink because their behavior could possibly harm the fetus if they possibly get pregnant is not a motivator."