Another day, another warning about the perils of alcohol from a body that should know better. The World Health Organisation, which just a few years ago was prescribing solitary confinement as the cure for our ills, has recently announced the preferred level we should be drinking every day: zero, zip, nada – not a drop. Last week a Professor Nutt – nominative determinism in action if ever I saw it – was a little more generous. He suggested we would be safe with ‘one glass a year’. He was joined last weekend by a dreary columnist in the Financial Times, who said he took up drinking at 30 but wishes he hadn’t; it would be better for his health.
What madness is this? As the Italians say: ‘la madre degli imbecili è sempre incinta’, or the mother of imbeciles is always pregnant. The pint-sized Mayor of London has joined the debate by adding his opinion that cannabis should be decriminalised – presumably in the hope that the addled smokers will lose their minds sufficiently enough to vote for him.
Alcohol looks destined to follow tobacco and oil as the unholy trinity of the 21st century. What is prompting this puritanical prohibition? Is it a new atheism? All the great religions have wine at their core. For Christians, wine is literally the blood of Christ, drunk at every service. For Jews, it is a sacred and symbolic element in many rituals, ceremonies and traditions. As the Talmud says: ‘There is no joy without wine.’
Only Muslims have turned their backs on booze. A university professor in Saudi Arabia explained the prohibition to me as a necessary result of what happens when you make alcohol out of dates – something incredibly strong, which when combined with extreme temperatures, can produce combustible effects. In the circumstances, probably better to avoid it altogether.
But are the health benefits really visible? When I lived for a while in the Middle East, I was expecting to see healthy, lean individuals. Instead I was surrounded by overweight men loading up at mealtimes on cakes and sweets. Alcoholic drinks, for many people, are a way to ingest sugar in a more palatable form. Arguably, the one job of a winemaker is to turn the sugar from grapes into alcohol, while retaining the flavour. ‘Man created beer, but God created wine’, Plato is alleged to have said. Where wine trod, civilisation followed. Would Professor Nutt give up the benefits of sociability, conversation, laughter, mutual attraction – for what exactly? Sitting in a darkened room with the windows closed?
One of the most interesting people I know claims to have had two whiskies and sodas every evening for the last 60 years – and this followed by wine with dinner. Now in his ninetieth year, he is lucid, mobile, and can taste wine and discourse with knowledge. Wine, after all, is the perfect accompaniment to food. Oysters without a cool glass of Chablis or sauvignon blanc are unthinkable; likewise lamb or chicken without Burgundy; or cheese – with what exactly? A cup of tea? Ridiculous.
The World Health Organisation, which just a few years ago was prescribing solitary confinement as the cure for our ills, has recently announced the preferred level we should be drinking every day: zero, zip, nada – not a drop
Should one therefore make a distinction between beer and spirits, and wine? Wine certainly is more than just units of alcohol, though the regulators in France – the world’s epicentre of wine culture – do not think so. They pursue wine promoters with zeal, fining them if they show people laughing and smiling as they drink.
Some people are tempted to fight back against the neo-Puritans. Heineken has produced an advertising campaign suggesting that beer drinking is preferable to spending time alone on a mobile phone. The bosses of major drinks brands are combating the science that suggests that all alcohol consumption is harmful, while Finlandia, a vodka company, is co-hosting events with Jane Goodall to celebrate the life of an icon.
Wine producers do not have the same clout, but wine is the ultimate distinction between the ‘somewheres’ and the ‘anywheres’. Its rootedness leads to its best bottles being totally from one place – one tended field, one well-kept cellar. Not only can you place it geographically, you can also place it in time – like a coordinate plotted on a chart. Every vintage is a logbook of an individual year, different each time depending on the rainfall, the amount of sunshine, the presence of frost or mildew.
‘Wine is good for the body and mind,’ says Jean-Claude Mas, one of the finest winemakers of the south of France. ‘It is the essence of our civilisation. To not drink wine is to cancel our culture and reject its values.’ The Greeks realised that fermented grape juice was different to other types of alcohol. Strong enough to loosen the mind but not powerful enough to poison it – at least not without a major effort – it became a central feature of the Symposium, or drinking party.
Teetotallers may be in vogue politically – from Donald Trump to Emmanuel Macron – but they miss the important things in life, which include nature, landscape, birdsong, rural architecture, and above all, people. The correct amount of alcohol daily is not none, but sufficient. That can vary among individuals, but consumption is key. After all, as W. H. Auden noted: ‘Could any tiger drink martinis, smoke cigars, and last as we do?’ Mankind was born to drink, and it’s an imbecile who scorns it.
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