Decanter World Wine Awards
Others will chose to wait until Lent begins on February 22nd to hang up the corkscrew (or leave the screwcaps intact). Some try to have an alcohol-free day or two every week; my own strategy tends to mean leaving abstention to fate, but to welcome it when it happens. Any habit is best repudiated once in a while, if for nothing else than the view it gives of a changed world. I’m sure that time spent away from wine, too, can sharpen one’s tasting abilities on return.
You might, of course, regard any kind of restraint as wimpish and contemptible. “Un repas sans vin est un jour sans soleil” (‘a meal without wine is a day without sunshine’), Louis Pasteur is reputed to have said, and some wine lovers enthusiastically agree. Medical opinion, moreover, can usually be found to back up almost any personal alcohol strategy other than that of unmitigated excess.
Individual practice is one thing; debate and lobbying another. When those involved in wine production, sales or promotion discuss restraint or abstention, an element of self-defensiveness seems to sharpen the tone. This is particular evident when the restraint is being urged by governments on citizens for their own benefit (as with the current debate regarding minimum alcohol pricing in the UK).
I’ve spent my working life writing about (and thus in some sense promoting) fine alcoholic drinks including wine, and I’m in no doubt of their beauty, intrigue, cultural depth and civilising qualities. I’ve often witnessed and experienced the beneficial effects of moderate alcohol consumption in lifting the spirits and bringing people closer to one another. A little wine brings spiritual music to secular life. Without alcohol, wine wouldn’t do that. Without alcohol, wine does not exist.
Drunkenness and alcohol dependence, though, are pure horror, both to experience and to witness. I’ll never forget the boiling rage of someone’s aunt, banging the table next to me at a friend’s wedding because the serving staff were slow in uncorking the bottle she was clutching, nor the sense I had of peering into an abyss as I imagined the life she and her mortified husband lived out together. One of the reasons I relish no longer living in the UK is that it’s rare, closer to the Mediterranean, to observe roaringly drunk males sow discord in public places, though you don’t need to be particularly observant to see (and smell) the less ostentatious forms of drunkenness here. Set against these excesses, the calm and serenity of abstention is indeed beautiful.
It’s admirable to drink moderately, and to celebrate and propagate the richness which wine’s long culture has brought to human existence -- but it’s admirable not to drink, too. Beneficial moderation, after all, is defined by intermittent abstention. Dionysus, as Euripides wrote in the Bacchae, is most gentle yet also most terrible to mankind. It’s in our greater interest to maximise the gentleness, and minimise the terrible episodes.
When those in power try to bring this about, it seems to me that they deserve the support of moderate drinkers. (This, of course, is not an argument for prohibition: we would then miss out on the beneficial gentleness.) Those whose livelihoods are articulated around alcoholic drinks should also take a long view.
Between the adoption of the Loi Évin in France in December 1990 and 2008, alcohol consumption fell by 20% -- yet those producing France’s good wines and its fine wines prosper today as never before. Governments don’t always get it wrong. Minimum alcohol pricing in the discount-addicted UK would principally target the cheapest and most alcoholically corrosive drinks: those favoured, in other words, by those in thrall to the terrible Dionysus rather than the gentle one. It’s a sound policy.
Have your say!
Erica Landin
February 03 13:43
Since I started working with wine, I have become much more aware of how much I drink and how much people around me drink. I might even seem more boring at times because I turn down a glass at a party or dinner, simply because I have too much opportunity during the week and want a break. I agree that people writing about wine (me included) and people promoting wine have an obligation to communicate moderation along with the enjoyment. Promote the drinking of better wine instead of the sloshing back of non-descript bag-in-box. There are far too many in the trade who have missed their own excess because they feel "fine wine" is not part of the drunkard's diet. Whenever I get too much for a while, I am reminded of the main character in Paul Torday's novel "Bordeaux" and I restrain myself quickly... Pleasures are best enjoyed in moderation or simple bouts of excess, lest they cease to be pleasures and start to be expectations.
carl puttnam
January 31 11:27
I Don't imagine our correspondent or many of his readers regularly come across the "victims" of alcoholism. I live in inner city Leeds and my corner shop is full every morning with people buying alcohol. They aren't buying it from the supermarket and saving a little money, so they are probably paying as much as a minimum pricing policy would mean.
"Responsible drinking" doesn't come into it. Perhaps "Responsible Living", or a responsible, caring society that doesn't condemn those which it has discarded.
Mark
January 31 00:05
The problem with the present duty system is that it is unfit for purpose, and sadly most of the discussion (including this lovely article) is framed around perpetuating it and making it more onerous, rather than reforming it.
With wine, the tax is heavy and penal on champagne, sherry and port; yet I have seen no derelicts with bottles of Bollinger, Lanson, or Taylors LBV. Real ale, which is a slow drink, is punitively taxed as well, and it is killing the old fashioned pub (and responsible drinking with it). There is very little evidence of 'binge-drinking' around most wine and real ale; the culprits are the 'fast drinks' like lager and bulk cider.
The elephant in the room that no-one talks about is fast food, with its lethal quantities of sugar and salt. Even before people drink alcohol, far too many have been fed burgers, fried chicken, fries and fizzy soft drinks as children. They then move onto lager and cider and they drink it the same way. If you don't believe me, carry out an experiment and from Monday to Friday drink two litres of the following in succession: (M) sparkling water; (Tu) a fizzy 'lemonade'; (W) orange juice; (Th) lager; and (F) real ale; at the weekend drink wine. Note how long each takes you to consume: the fizzy drink and the lager will be drunk most quickly.
What needs to happen is for the differential on port and champagne to be abolished and the duty on all wine cut, as should the duty be on real ale. On the other hand, the duty on lager, bulk cider and alcopops should be increased substantially; and fast food should be taxed. As 74% of the beer consumed is lager, the government would increase revenue, encourage a shift away from binge drinks to wine and real ale, and change food habits before they flow on to excess drinking. Sadly, I've seen no public body or politician advocate that kind of adjustment.
Steve Connolly
January 30 17:15
I was beginning to think I was the only drinker in favour of minimum pricing. It isn't a tax and most of what I drink will be above the suggested threshold and so will not increase in price. It will only affect the cheaper end, and as a GP who sees the effects of this on a daily basis, anything which helps to reduce the harm of alcohol whilst maintaining the benefits of moderate consumption is a good thing.