Is the demonisation of alcohol justified?

In 1988, I wrote a book called The Demon Drink about the defining ingredient of all alcoholic drinks. It did not exactly fly off the shelves, and at one wine tasting soon after publication I was approached by an elderly fellow taster who hissed at me, “How could you?”

Now that the World Health Organization is waging a war on alcohol, asserting that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption (a bit like crossing the road, then), wine drinkers are being forced to confront the least palatable aspect of their favourite drink: that it contains a toxic substance.

The WHO message makes a good headline, one that has been widely circulated with little comment or analysis, with the result that some countries have already reacted. Canada’s official Guidance on Alcohol and Health proudly recommends “0 drinks per week”. The Finnish alcohol monopoly Alko leaned on the WHO to justify its role as “protecting” Finns from alcohol. And in a television segment featuring wine-drinking, the Dutch are being told that this will expose them to seven different cancers.

Some of us will remember the early 1990s when it was claimed on CBS’s 60 Minutes news programme that a Mediterranean diet, necessarily including wine, would stave off cardiovascular disease. So how did wine go from medicine to medical no-no?

According to journalist Felicity Carter, much of the explanation lies deep within the O of the WHO. She claims that there are surprisingly close links between temperance groups and several of those advising the WHO on alcohol policy. After considerable investigative work, she finally reported on this in Wine Business Monthly in April.

At a conference last week on wine and health organised by the fine-wine think-tank Areni Global at the Institute of Masters of Wine, she explained that as soon as her article was published “all hell broke loose in my inbox. Some very well-placed individuals, from government officials to lobbyists and scientists, said I didn’t go far enough in my exposé.”

The WHO is focusing on the total amount of alcohol consumed rather than on how it is consumed, which varies enormously

Carter has studied the NGOs that work with the WHO on alcohol policy in considerable detail and has observed that, as well as links to the temperance movement, many of them are veterans of the campaign to limit and control sales of tobacco. She claims that they are using the same tactics towards alcohol, attempting to de-normalise drinking by eroding the extent to which we accept and tolerate it. The WHO is also focusing on the total amount of alcohol consumed rather than on how it is consumed, which varies enormously.

The timing of the WHO’s anti-alcohol bombshell, which was dropped in January 2023, was also a little strange, as global alcohol consumption has actually been declining steadily — in the case of wine since 2007. Total global wine consumption last year was the lowest this century. The number of abstainers from any form of alcohol, whether for health, fitness or financial reasons or a preference for other intoxicants, was increasing considerably long before the WHO weighed in.

For a balanced and informed view of this issue, I particularly enjoyed an article on alcohol and health published in Harvard Public Health at the end of August this year, written by Kenneth Mukamal and Eric B Rimm, who have been researching the topic for a combined total of 60 years. It’s all in the title: “Is alcohol good or bad for you? Yes.”

We can see clearly that alcohol was the cause of harm when a drunk falls in front of a car. But much of the literature that links drinking with various diseases is based on observational studies of people who are either abstainers, moderate or heavy drinkers, drawing correlations between each group and the incidence of each disease within it. Those correlations are particularly strong with certain cancers, for example breast cancer and cancer of the oesophagus. Regular checks are important, especially for drinks professionals.

The Cambridge statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter has shown how sloppy are the conclusions, and sensationalist headlines, that alcohol should be avoided altogether.

Alcohol when misused is clearly harmful, so it takes guts to go on the record in defence of it. But perhaps a wine writer of 49 years’ standing is allowed to highlight the pleasures of wine. Just for starters, may I point out that, now that wine faults have been virtually eliminated, most of it tastes delicious and is intriguingly varied. To me, it’s a miracle that the fermented juice of a single fruit can become so many different, expressive, intriguing and often long-lived liquids.

Last month, my Napa Valley counterpart Karen MacNeil spearheaded a campaign that encouraged Americans to celebrate wine’s special contribution to conviviality. There is certainly joy in sharing a bottle with friends, though I have to confess that a certain group of wine-minded friends and I share too many bottles several times a year. We know it’s bad for us, but we continue to do it because the sensual and cerebral pleasure outweighs the lack of mental acuity the next morning. (My predecessor as FT wine writer, Edmund Penning-Rowsell, used to describe how he felt after a particularly heavy wine tasting as “rather jaded”.)

I do drink, certainly taste, wine virtually every day, even if less and less as I get older. In the old days, my husband and I could manage a bottle between us, but not any more. The amount of pleasure that wine gives me is inordinate, but it’s not a guilt-free exercise, as I am uncomfortably aware that there is a cohort of drinkers who regard wine drinking not as an intellectually stimulating adventure but an addictive necessity. While I feel no desire to drink a wine unless it’s different from the last, such compulsive drinkers are presumably less discriminating.

As to my ability to withstand alcohol’s ill effects, I am banking on having inherited the genes of my paternal grandmother. She was a great fan of gin but when, in her eighties, she heard on the radio that too much gin was bad for you, she switched to whisky and lived to the age of 98. (It makes a good story. One’s genetic make-up does indeed play an important part in how alcohol is metabolised.)

Under threat from health campaigners and aghast at falling sales, European wine producers hit back a month ago with the launch of the Vitævino Declaration, a petition to preserve “wine culture and heritage” and acknowledge the economic role of wine production and the right to enjoy wine in moderation. There’s also the Brussels-based Wine in Moderation campaign whose Wine in Moderation Day is this Friday. I’m all for this. Moderation, as always, is the key.

It’s probably dangerous to argue that wine is a special exception among alcoholic drinks on a cultural level. Of course, it’s an endlessly fascinating subject with its millennia of history, complex and ever-changing geographical expression and famous affinity with food. But drinks such as artisan cider, local rums and whiskies aplenty can make similar claims.

And we are right to be cautious in our consumption of alcoholic drinks. I try to drink as much water as wine, but many others will welcome the increasing availability of interesting non-alcoholic, or reduced-alcohol, drinks. The champagne giant Moët Hennessy, no less, recently took a stake in a non-alcoholic sparkling wine, French Bloom. The race is on in the wine industry to find a delicious alcohol-free version of wine — beer and spirits having already managed it. I have yet to taste an alcohol-free version of wine that is preferable to a glass of water but, knowing how much research and development work is being devoted to solving the puzzle, I’m confident that it will happen.

In the meantime, for readers who want to cut down on their alcohol consumption without giving up entirely, I would remind them of the virtues of half bottles (a specialist UK retailer is The Little Fine Wine Company run by a fellow Master of Wine) and of those wines that are naturally low in alcohol, such as fruity Mosel Rieslings that may be only 7 per cent alcohol and Moscato d’Asti, which is often only 5.5 per cent. In the UK, now that duty rates are linked to alcoholic strength, we’re seeing a fall in the average strength of wines on supermarket shelves — a welcome corrective to the overall increase in the past few years caused by warmer summers and riper grapes.

Next year the US will revise its official dietary guidelines and a UN declaration on non-communicable diseases is also expected, with lobbyists lining up to influence the alcohol-related aspects of these diktats. I belong to a generation whose parents had no qualms about smoking, nor about drinking and driving, something our children would never dream of doing. Societal behaviours can change for the better. I’m just concerned that the drivers of social change be based on facts, not dogma.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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