02 Feb 2025 Is the demon drink over-demonised?
Turns out there may be a reason so much doom and gloom is being broadcast about there being ‘no safe level’ of drinking alcohol. Here’s an excellent article by famed wine fundi, Jancis Robinson….
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 drug.
The WHO message makes a good headline, one that has been widely circulated without comment or analysis, with the result that some countries have already reacted. The Finnish alcohol monopoly Alko justifies 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 influential 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?
Much of the explanation lies deep within the O of the WHO. Felicity Carter is a journalist who works harder than most of us at getting to the truth. After considerable investigative work, she finally reported on 1 April 2024 in Wine Business Monthly, tracing the surprisingly close links between temperance groups and several of those advising the WHO on alcohol policy.
At a conference last week on wine and health organised by the think tank Areni Global at the headquarters of 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.’
Carter has studied the NGOs who work with the WHO on alcohol policy in great detail and has observed that many of them are veterans of the much more understandable campaign to limit and control sales of tobacco.
She claims that they are using the same tactics towards alcohol, even though there is no medical proof that a drink is as harmful as a cigarette, attempting to ‘denormalise’ drinking by eroding the extent to which we accept and tolerate it.
They are focusing on the total amount consumed rather than on how it is consumed, which varies enormously, and which consumers need most help in dealing with it, often because of their genetic make-up. (I am banking on having inherited the genes of my paternal grandmother, who was a great fan of gin but, when in her eighties she heard on the radio that too much gin was bad for you, switched to whisky and lived to the age of 98.)
The timing of the WHO’s anti-alcohol bombshell, which was dropped in January last year, 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 in 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….
JancisRobinson.com: Read the full article here