There’s a secret to drinking moderately
If you want balance, start with awe
To have or not to have, a glass of wine in hand
Zero alcohol drinks, dry January, abstinence. In the past two weeks The Economist reported on a dramatic fall in France’s wine consumption, nom de bleu !
In 2022 roughly 10% of French people drank wine every day, down from half in 1980. Back in 1960 the French drank an average of 116 litres of everyday wine per person. Between 2000 and 2018 that shrank from 28 litres to just 17. A glass of wine, let alone the once-familiar pichet, is an increasingly rare sight at the lunch table.
And The New York Times tried to explain why seniors have a booze problem, noting that from “1999 to 2020, [there was a] 237 percent increase in alcohol-related deaths among those over age 55.”
But wait — Fine Wine, the New Statesman’s magazine for refined wine nerds, is waxing poetic on the ancient and respected joy of drinking alone, thus bucking the trend. It’s worth reading to be reminded that we haven’t always had a medical view of wine in our lives.
Good, bad, worth the worry? Today, the World Health Association says no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health, although there’s a whisper of salvation for happy drinkers from the US Center for Disease Control which offers guidelines for moderate consumption. Wine alone isn’t even mentioned, so entrenched is the idea that this is a vice.
Meanwhile, in Geneva (Switzerland), there’s happy local news from the police department: in 2023 the number of serious accidents caused by drivers who were over the alcohol limit fell by more than 10%. Unfortunately for road safety, and the police don’t attempt to make a link, the number of speeders rose significantly.
What’s a wine writer to do? How is a drinker of wines to make sense of all this?
Wine is beautiful and I, a wine writer, want people to love and appreciate it. Unlike most other forms of alcohol wine isn’t just a beverage — a product — it’s a meeting point for culture, history, food, agriculture, religion, art, music. Such richness, such wealth! can be found in one sip of a pale gold or deep ruby handcrafted wine.
How can a wine writer talk about moderation convincingly? This conundrum, for we wine writers are essentially encouraging our readers to drink, has plagued me for months, and starting in 2022 I cut back on my writing about wine as I grappled with the issue for personal and professional reasons.
I, the wine drinker, have begun to fret. Can I drink intelligently? How? Is there even such a thing? The buzz word for this is moderation. There is even an organization called Wine in Moderation, based in Brussels. “Wine culture means above all knowing how to say no to excess, knowing how to make every occasion memorable, how to enhance the very value of the experience and of the wine you’re drinking.”
First, the personal issues
I watched and listened since the arrival of Covid as aging family members and friends (well, we are all getting older, but I’m talking about the over-60 crowd), mostly in the US, decided they had to stop, go cold turkey. Others, seeing that pounds were getting harder to drop after the holidays embraced Dry January and all the bad jokes that went with it.
Others who should have stopped, sadly did not.
A close childhood friend died from liver poisening the first week of January 2023, after a New Year’s binge on top of her alcoholism, which she had kept well hidden. Her siblings were astonished to find a large closet filled with vodka. I remembered with sorrow and regret the two months she spent with me a decade earlier after her new husband suddenly died, where she disappeared to her room early every evening saying my family needed time together without a guest intruding. It was only towards the end of that visit that she mentioned how she and her husband had shared a bottle of vodka most nights that I began to suspect an alcohol “problem”. I wasn’t brave enough to confront her, having seen the Jekyll and Hyde personality changes in her when she clearly had a bad hangover.
Another friend lost a brother to Covid last year, but his brother was a recovering alcoholic who later became hooked on opioids, and his ability to fight the infection was crippled by poor health. Several of my friend’s family members are alcoholics, as was his mother, and he decided to stop drinking before he ended up like them. He was well on the road. Luckily, he knew it. But the recovery is not, of course, easy for a man in his seventies, given more than five decades of a habit. And now another family member is dying from an alcohol-related disease.
These friends used to love TGIF, thank goodness it’s Friday, with happy bar crowds, the chance to relax and throw back a few cheaper than usual drinks. The wine and chicken with the girls. The whisky and steak with the guys. They never dreamed when they were young that boozing would become a problem.
I was widowed in late 2020 and for three years I’ve had to reflect on how and when to drink wine at home, if at all, since I no longer have a partner with whom to share a bottle, and there are fewer dinners with guests. I have a professional excuse to uncork but loneliness and a friendly bottle can tempt anyone, so I’ve had to set myself some firm rules.
Widowhood is not a club anyone wants to join, so it seemed unfair that added to this, a nasty tick gave me an allergy called Alpha-gal a year later. As a result I can no longer eat cheese or any dairy products, or meat from mammals (beef, pork, lamb, horse, goat, game, etc.). I have learned that if I do let myself have a tiny sliver of cheese with a glass of wine, the reaction (mucho gas, aka mega farts/pfoofies/toots = not sociable) is worsened by alcohol. I’ve become a reluctant quasi-vegan wine writer who has to re-learn everything I knew about food and wine pairings.
Then there’s the professional side to all this.
Your government knows best. Or does it?
Governments are increasingly using research studies to show that alcohol intake should be reduced significantly or cut out altogether. The Center for Disease Control in the US offers “2020–2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans” that include guidelines for alcohol. What they recommend has become pretty much standard for governments today, when they are not recommending total abstinence: “Adults of legal drinking age can choose not to drink, or to drink in moderation by limiting intake to 2 drinks or less in a day for men or 1 drink or less in a day for women, on days when alcohol is consumed.” In other words, cut back and don’t drink every day, either. Even worse: binge drinking when you do have an on-alcohol day.
A major report in 2010 from the World Health Organization in Geneva emphasized reducing harmful use:
WHO has identified that the most cost-effective actions to reduce the harmful use of alcohol include increasing taxes on alcoholic beverages, enforcing restrictions on exposure to alcohol advertising, and restrictions on the physical availability of retailed alcohol.
but by January 2023 the WHO, which recommends standards that are followed by many governments, was taking a stronger stance (my boldface below):
The World Health Organization has now published a statement in The Lancet Public Health: when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health.
It is the alcohol that causes harm, not the beverage
Alcohol is a toxic, psychoactive, and dependence-producing substance and has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer decades ago — this is the highest risk group, which also includes asbestos, radiation and tobacco. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including the most common cancer types, such as bowel cancer and female breast cancer. Ethanol (alcohol) causes cancer through biological mechanisms as the compound breaks down in the body, which means that any beverage containing alcohol, regardless of its price and quality, poses a risk of developing cancer.
The risk of developing cancer increases substantially the more alcohol is consumed. However, latest available data indicate that half of all alcohol-attributable cancers in the WHO European Region are caused by “light” and “moderate” alcohol consumption — less than 1.5 litres of wine or less than 3.5 litres of beer or less than 450 millilitres of spirits per week.
There are good reasons to push for less drinking, of course, from reducing the number of road accidents and accidents of all kinds to critical or chronic health problems where alcohol plays a role. To cite the way our forefathers drank as proof that cutting back is nonsense ignores the fact that we know much more today about the nefarious effects of alcohol.
So, gloom and doom and no vino on my table?
And yet. I don’t support eliminating wine from our diets.
I think all of us need to stop looking for magic formulas, X-drinks a day or a week, and learn more about how age, genetic factors, health history, and our personal drinking patterns should be considered when we decide how much wine is acceptable.
There is one exception, and it’s a big one: if a person really must avoid alcohol, for health reasons, cut out the wine and any other booze. This includes anyone with a “drinking problem” (alcoholism or dependency that is likely to lead to alcoholism). I can’t say it too loudly: if there is a problem, get help. Stop drinking.
For the rest of us, and we are many, research results show a more nuanced picture than the headlines will have you believe. For a start, consider the source, the researchers and how they earn their keep, the type of study carried out, what was or was not included in a study. The Lancet in 2022 published a thoughtful response to a Global Burden of Disease report that received much media attention. The remarks could be applied to many other studies:
Despite the comprehensive efforts of tailoring drinking thresholds to the health risks faced by different populations, we have concerns about the methodology used in the study and the interpretation of the findings.
Among the problems they found: on the one hand “known age-dependent effects of alcohol and regional differences were not considered” so that, for example, a much higher genetically-related incidence of oesophageal cancer in some Asian countries was not taken into account. Nor were drinking patterns, despite much evidence that heavy episodic drinking (binging) appears to cancel out any heart protecting benefits from small amounts of alcohol consumption by older people.
The flip side of this problem of saying alcohol is just plain bad while ignoring what lies behind research reports is arguing that alcohol is good for you without questioning the source material — especially the now tired arguments that red wine and a Mediterranean diet are beneficial. We trot out centenarians who proclaim they’ve made it to 100 by drinking a glass of wine every day for eight or more decades. What about their genetic heritage, lifestyle of manual labour, no processed foods and a garden behind the house?
Where’s the good in wine, then?
I write mainly about the landscape of Swiss wine, where I daily see the beneficial meeting point mentioned earlier. The physical landscape includes the mountain sources of both the Rhone and Rhine rivers, glaciers and majestic mountains and splendid lakes and grand waterways, with the multitude of soil types and diversity in plant and animal life that result from so many extremes in a small space (Switzerland is not quite the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, in the US).
Tavolatas in summer celebrate wine and food at long tables set up in vineyards where scores of people raise a glass to friendship and family. Vineyard hiking trails take you along history-rich Roman roads. Outdoor art exhibits share space with ripening grapes, bringing people into the vineyards.
Our wine producers see themselves as guardians of the land, not people who make something to support unthinking drunkenness.
Balance is one of the keys to a good life, whether we’re talking about food or drink or love or sex or just about anything else that gives us a high. And yet, and yet, I love excess, occasionally. I also love purging desires through brief passages of spartan living. I love sometimes having more wine than the researchers say is good for me, over a dinner with friends, with laughter and ideas and mutual affection. A time out from drinking feels good now and again, too.
Balance is the even keel that we return to after moments of flagrant joy or deep sadness. Whether we lead solitary lives that can be painful at times or we’re surrounded by what can feel like too many people, we all share the need for balance. Wine, when treated with respect, has the ability to render us more relaxed and more open to others, a thread in the weave that helps us return to that even keel.
Wine has a beauty of its own, and it is also a tapestry of so much else that gives us beauty, if we take the time and slow down enough to look for it. It gives us splendid memories. I remember holding up a glass of white wine that seemed to smell and taste of the sea in Cinque Terre, Italy, showing the my just-married husband how the light shifted from sharp gold to green to straw. A dark red burgundy in a musty cobwebbed cellar in France where my girlfriend’s father, the count, talked about hiding his family’s wines during world war two, and how he made chips for casinos to stay afloat financially afterwards. Those wines are now priceless, but the beauty was in that rare glass offered with a story and family pride, making memory into a shared chain.
The first decent wine I ever drank, with a man whose great love had just left him, and I too young to know how to respond, was a wine of delicate beauty tinged with sorrow and respect. A wine for observing love unraveled, a lesson for the future. A fruity dry and acidic Swiss white Fendant on a mountaintop before skiing down was a wine with a zing linked to the thrill of snow under skis, part of my introduction to my new homeland.
Can I say I would have been better off without these moments, these memories?
No.
Moderation has its roots in awe
Moderation, the opposite of extreme, ironically has its roots in awe, a state of being where we suspend ourselves to focus on the world around us. If there is an extreme that is bounty-filled, it is our capacity for awe. It’s not sustainable, and so we come back to moderation and the even keel, but we’re better for that moment. Sadly, too many people, bogged down by troubles with work or relationships or the weightiness of the news, lose their ability to see awe in the world.
Awe is magnificent. Now and again.
Wine is beautiful. In moderation.
They give us magical moments and memories. Reason enough for me to raise a glass to you and your memories, and to me and mine.
