What did you do in the booze wars?

Anti-alcohol campaigners are gaining control over the public health agenda: wine lovers need to fight back. Plus: what I've been drinking this week

Make mine a sensible one: left, moderate Californian drinking in the Come Over October campaign; right, British drinkers not quite managing it, as depicted in Joel Goodman's classic photo of New Year's Eve in Manchester, 2015

“Sober October” is upon us, brainchild of the funsters who just couldn’t wait the extra three months for Dry January to start. Don’t panic: I’ve no intention of altering my booze consumption and his blog continues unaffected. But the wine industry isn’t so relaxed.

Global wine sales are falling: industry observers predict that consumption will have fallen 20 per cent in the 10 years to 2028. And the biggest culprit, we are told, are the increasing numbers of people in the UK, US and elsewhere – especially young people – not drinking at all. A 2023 poll found that nearly a third of Britons aged 18-24 don’t drink alcohol, up from 18 per cent in 2011.

The trend appears to be due, in part, to health concerns. We have seen been a drip-drip of news stories raising concern about the health effects of alcohol over recent years. Especially bald was the World Health Organisation’s statement early last year that “No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.”

This may have begun to affect consumption; it is certainly changing governments’ policies. A number of countries have lowered their maximum recommended alcohol intake. Even in 2016 the UK’s guidelines were revised down from 21 units to 14 units a week – roughly six large glasses of wine. No, that’s weekly, not daily.

Even more draconian limits were recommended in Canada in 2023: just two drinks a week (not officially adopted, after an outcry). And lower limits are mooted for the US, which will next year revise its official dietary guidelines – currently two drinks a day, with campaigners lobbying to reduce it to just one a day.

As Canadians opposed to last year’s recommendations pointed out, they would have effectively categorised a majority of the adult population as problem drinkers. Aside from being obviously silly, that would also most likely have had the effect of encouraging people to ignore all such pronouncements.

There is a huge literature on alcohol and health being argued back and forth over, which I won’t get into here. But suffice to say that declaring that “alcohol can give you cancer” or that there is “no safe level” of consumption are, in practical terms, meaningless statements. Bacon, sunshine and breathing in a city can all help give you cancer too. For that matter there is no completely safe level of, say, driving: if you get into a car, ever, you are statistically increasing your chances of death or serious injury – even if only by a fraction of one per cent.

For while you raise your chance of early death if you expose yourself to these risks, the increased risk involved is tiny. Thus if women drink two glasses of wine per day, as David Clement of of Canada’s Consumer Choice Center has pointed out, then their normal risk of dying from breast cancer (17.3 per 100,000 premature female deaths, 0.0173 per cent) rockets by 27 per cent – to just 0.022 per cent.

The issue here is not percentage increases in risk from a particular behaviour, but absolute risk. And the absolute risk of getting cancer from moderate drinking – like getting it from eating the odd bacon sandwich – is tiny. This is why we accept all sorts of minor risks every day: because modern life would be virtually impossible if we didn’t.

Of course, there are plenty of behaviours which are genuinely dangerous. Earlier this year the WHO said that people who are insufficiently physically inactive (almost a third of the global adult population) face up to 30 per cent greater risk of death than those who are active. One 2018 study found that Americans who watch more than four hours of television every day had a 50 per cent higher all-cause mortality risk than those who watched two hours or less.

So as a target for public health bureaucrats, moderate drinking seems an odd choice of priorities. Unless, that is, there are other motives at work. In an important scoop in March, Australian journalist Felicity Carter exposed how neo-prohibitionist temperance organisations have infiltrated key advisory bodies in the EU and US. Swedish temperance group Movendi International, a key lobbyist, started life in 1851 as the pseudo-masonic International Organisation of Good Templars (it changed its name in 2020.) The three authors of the Canadian report recommending two drinks a week were affiliated with Movendi; incredibly, they are now on the body which is reviewing US dietary guidelines.

As David Clement told Carter’s Drinks Insider podcast in August, it’s roughly like the Government employing members of PETA to come up with guidelines saying that it’s unsafe to eat meat: you’d at least want a second opinion. It is clear that a small group of anti-alcohol extremists are trying to hijack the public health agenda – and are having some success.

In treating alcohol like a hard drug – and in trying to roll back drinking as smoking has been in recent decades – the neo-prohibitionists completely miss alcohol’s cultural significance in the West. Alcoholic drinks, and especially wine, are woven into our history, art, language and everyday life throughout the western world. New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov wrote earlier this year “In defense of wine” about the “beauty and joy of wine, which has been embraced by humans since the dawn of civilization”. 

That is part of the logic of American wine writer Karen MacNeil’s new campaign, “Come Over October” (stop sniggering at the back!) Its mission is “to encourage people to invite family and friends, new and old, to come together during the month of October to share some wine and friendship.” In other words, to celebrate drinking wine as a normal, sociable, fun activity and not the moral equivalent of shooting up heroin.

You don’t necessarily have to buy into the sweetly American sincerity of all this – “we believe that through the simple act of sharing wine, we share other things that matter… a belief that being together is an essential part of human happiness” – to see that it’s a fine idea.

And while wine writers rarely admit it, the fact that wine contains alcohol is one of the reasons that drinking it feels good. If for Come Over October you have another glass with your friends and the warm glow of alcohol starts to spread through you, and tongues loosen and laughter ripples around the table – well, you might just have a lovely evening. There are worse things, and its extremely unlikely to give you cancer.

The Sober October crowd are very welcome to meditate together, self-righteously knock back a fruit juice – or two! – and feel really good about themselves. But I know which party I’m going to.

Back to the future? An anti-prohibition demonstration, New Jersey, 1931

What I’ve been drinking this week

Can Leandro “Alt des los flors” 2020, Valencia - I tasted some of Gabriel Sanchis’s brilliant wines with him in his vineyard last year (I wrote about it here) although not this one. I especially love the way that whereas in many places in the Spanish Levant, Monastrell is often an overpowered monster, in his hands this grape makes beautifully balanced reds. Made from vines almost 70 years old, this is aromatic with lovely sweet fruit, powerful and structured yet with a lightness of touch: just so drinkable. I drank this last weekend at the brilliant Bar San Juan in Manchester, along with the Jumilla wine below - the owner is from nearby Yecla (NY Wines, £21.95.)

Juan Gil Blue Label 2021, Jumilla - this Monastrell-led wine is a much chunkier proposition than the Can Leandro above, but it’s well made, from high-altitude, low-yielding old vines. A blend including Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah, it’s had 18 months in American and French oak: but while undeniably opulent and rich, it’s well balanced, with a juicy acidity (Rannoch Scott Wines, NY Wines, Hedonism Wines, from £28.49.)

Le Soula rouge 2014, IGP Côtes Catalanes - Le Soula is a project of local star winemaker Gérard Gauby and British wine merchants Mark Walford and Roy Richards, who founded it more than 30 years ago, up at 1,300 metres in the wild Fenouillèdes badlands of Roussillon. This, their flagship red, is majority Carignan with a bit of Syrah and Grenache. It has moved some critics to florid praise: I’ll spare you that, but it’s a singular wine, animal, wild, herby and elegant. And, I suppose, pretty fair value for this kind of quality (Uncorked, Vin Cognito, Roberts & Speight and elsewhere, from £29.95.)