A Case for Wine

Suspicious puritans, the distrust of pleasure and the vanishing glass of wine. France counts units, America counts steps, and somewhere between the two, pleasure goes missing.

France, once proud of its conviviality, has begun to play the unit-counting game as well. Across the Atlantic, our beloved America, having turned sin into lifestyle management, measures virtue in steps and sober months. A sad symmetry emerges, a shared distrust of pleasure. At first glance the movement seems benign, even enlightened. Fewer drunk-driving deaths, cleaner livers, longer lives. Yet take a few steps back and another story appears. Over the past two decades both France and the United States have seen per-capita wine consumption fall to historical lows, while prescriptions for antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs have risen steadily; a sad paradox if you ask me.

France has not yet lost all its vineyards, but it has lost the assurance that wine belongs naturally at the table. The “denormalisation“ started with the “Évin Law“ of 1991 restricting the advertising of ALL alcoholic beverages to factual, non-emotional language, a bureaucratic dagger slipped quietly beneath the ribs of romantic imagery. Later came the mantra from Santé publique France (ten glasses per week, two per day, not every day) and the national embrace of Dry January. These measures were designed for moderation; they landed as moral instruction. A glass of Chablis now comes with a whisper of guilt. The numbers are stark. In 1960 the average French adult consumed about 120 litres of wine a year. By 2024 it was barely 40, the lowest figure since records began. The change is cultural as much as economic. Urban dwellers lunch with mineral water, and even in the countryside wine has retreated from routine to occasion. The small cafés and family restaurants that once formed the infrastructure of sociability are thinning out. To the government this looks like progress. To me and many other it looks like amputation.

Across the Atlantic, America has been conducting its own purification campaign. The warning labels of 1989 were followed by the 1990s boom in wellness culture, the rise of the non-alcoholic “mocktail”, and now the Surgeon General’s call for explicit cancer warnings. Gallup finds that only 54 percent of Americans now drink alcohol at all, a level unseen since Prohibition. Yet the same data show record prescriptions for antidepressants, sleep aids, and stimulants. The vocabulary of sin has been replaced by the language of risk, but the moral charge endures. The vice is no longer drunkenness; it is inefficiency.

In both countries policy follows the same arc: treat all ethanol as equally harmful, disregard context, and trust that education will replace custom. But ethanol is not the same everywhere. Fermented drinks such as wine, beer, sake are foods of culture, products of yeast, soil and souls. Distilled spirits can be as well but the neutral ones are chemistry: tasteless, industrial, anonymous. To equate them is to reduce agriculture to pharmacology, music to noise, art to content, I’ve said it many time; but Public health arguments rarely tolerate poetry. To the bureaucrat, wine is not memory and craftsmanship but a vector of ethanol. This flattening of meaning this “essentialisation“ equals an individual who drinks a glass of Champagne with dinner in the same risk category as one who downs spirits alone. It may well be correct medical but we all know it is a fallacy.

The irony is that this crusade for bodily purity coincides with a permissive attitude toward labour intensity. France keeps its famous thirty-five-hour law on paper, yet reforms have added layer upon layer of “flexibility.” Overtime is easier, temporary contracts longer, and the digital leash keeps everyone reachable. In the United States, where no federal limit exists, the cult of hustle becomes a religion. The WHO and the ILO estimate that working more than fifty-five hours a week raises the risk of stroke by a third. Such statistics rarely appear in state funded wellness campaigns. A hangover is a scandal; burnout is still as badge of honor

The bias runs deeper than policy. What we condemn is not only harm but also potential unproductivity. Alcohol is targeted not only for its medical cost but for its symbolic refusal to serve the modern economy. A glass of wine slows time, invites talk, demands presence. It is the antithesis of the efficient day. To drink with others is to step outside the measurable. That, perhaps, is the real sin.

Sociologists have a word for the communal surge that arises from eating and drinking together: collective effervescence. Durkheim saw it as the pulse that keeps society alive. Strip away those rituals and people do not become more rational; they become isolated. Recent French health surveys show rising loneliness among young adults, a generation raised on health messaging and digital connection but little real contact. The United States reports the same: record levels of isolation despite constant communication. The social consequences ripple. In rural France cafés close; in cities employees eat at their desks. The meals that once structured the day becomes an irregular pause. The bottle that once punctuated conversation disappears, replaced by screens. Public health gains may come, but so does a quiet erosion of trust and familiarity; the unquantifiable tissue that binds a society. Economists call it social capital. It never appears in national accounts until it is gone.

Meanwhile the pharmaceutical industry occupies the emotional ground vacated by conviviality. France now ranks among Europe’s heaviest consumers of psychotropic drugs. In the United States antidepressants have become a household item. Correlation is not causation, but the coincidence is hard to ignore: as convivial self-medication declines, clinical self-medication rises.

Governments claim success. Alcohol-related hospitalisations fall modestly, and officials cite the decline in liver disease as proof of progress. Yet broader measures of well-being such as stress, fatigue, mental-health diagnoses do move in the opposite direction. Public health was meant to rescue the citizen from vice; instead it has turned him into a permanent patient. “Better to prevent than to cure,” says the slogan, but prevention itself has become the cure: a permanent regime of surveillance and self-adjustment.

In America just as in France the process flirts with theology. Metrics are now subject of worship: blood sugar, heart rate, mindfulness minutes. Abstinence is repackaged as optimisation. Where Puritans once shunned the tavern, moderns shun carbs and alcohol. The sermon has moved from pulpit to podcast with an extra spiritual void… Hardly a progress

In France one might add an extra layer of bureaucratic kink. Ministries issue « repères », agencies publish campaigns, and the vocabulary of moderation is replaced by that of compliance. A small glass of Champagne at lunch is no longer a pleasure to be weighed but a risk to be managed. When a nation that once baptised its children in wine begins to apologise for a single glass, something deep in its sense of self has shifted.

Economics aggravates the loss. Industrial beverages (sweet, neutral, endlessly rebrandable) thrive under regulation. They pivot easily to “zero alcohol” or “functional” lines. The family vintner cannot. His work depends on patience, geography, history. He cannot relocate his terroir. Every new tax or warning label lands on him like mildew on the grapes. The multinationals adapt; the artisans vanish.

The paradox is visible in Bordeaux, where hectares of vines are being uprooted under state subsidy because demand has collapsed. The government pays farmers to destroy one of the few truly sustainable products of the land. Each vine pulled is a data point in the triumph of risk management over sense.

In America consolidation takes another form. Craft breweries and small wineries proliferated in the early 2000s, promising authenticity and community. But the new health puritanism, combined with inflation and logistics costs, has squeezed margins. Large conglomerates dominate again, often under the halo of “better-for-you” branding. The independent pub gives way to the wellness bar. The liquid is the same; the rhetoric is detox.

Yet for all this piety, excess has not vanished. Episodic heavy drinking remains common, especially among the young. The problem is that moderation has lost its home. A generation taught to see alcohol as poison either drinks furtively or abstains entirely. The older Mediterranean model (wine as food, social but not obsessive) was a civilising compromise. Once it disappears, the alternatives become abstinence or binge.

At this point policy makers can protest that public health is not responsible for loneliness or work stress. Be that as it may, if the same government that preaches abstinence also celebrates longer working days and digital productivity, it cannot be wholly exonerated. The body may be healthier, but the mind is not. The small, slow rituals that once balanced labour have been declared obsolete. Efficiency has become a virtue in itself.

The risk is civic as well as personal. The places where citizens once met as equals (cafés, bistros, bars) are vanishing. Political scientists note that societies with fewer informal meeting spaces exhibit lower trust and weaker democratic participation. The glass of wine is not the cause of democracy, but it is a symbol of conversation, and conversation is what democracies are built on. When citizens stop talking to one another, they start shouting at screens.

This is the paradox of the neo-prohibitionist moment: it arises in societies that have never been so materially comfortable and yet so emotionally impoverished. In chasing perfect bodies and perfect productivity, they have neglected the imperfect but essential art of living with others. It begins quietly, as a vague absence. In France it is the emptiness of the midday hour, once filled with laughter from a café terrace.

The sociologists have data. A European survey finds that young adults are the least likely in recorded history to eat with others. In the United States, the proportion of meals eaten alone has more than doubled since the 1970s. Loneliness, once private sorrow, now qualifies as a public-health concern: Britain has a minister for it; America calls it an epidemic. Yet few officials acknowledge the cultural policies that helped empty the table.

If conviviality had a medical code, it would lie somewhere between preventive medicine and the humanities. The research is clear: social connection protects health as effectively as diet or exercise, reducing mortality risk by a quarter. The irony is exquisite; a moderate drink with friends may do more for the heart than the gym membership purchased to atone for it. But because science struggles to measure laughter or warmth, policy does not reward them. It rewards abstinence, the visible signal of control.

France illustrates the paradox perfectly. Having long claimed the “French paradox”(low heart-disease rates despite high wine consumption) it now writes the reverse. As consumption falls, stress and antidepressant use climb. The republic of gastronomy has become the republic of restraint. When the Ministry of Health speaks, it does so with the tone of a parent addressing a child. What was once culture is now compliance.

In the United States the tone is different but the logic the same. The puritan impulse there has always been entwined with commerce: prohibition bred bootlegging; wellness breeds supplements. Today “sober curiosity” is marketed as a lifestyle. Influencers post their non-alcoholic cocktails beside sponsored vitamin gummies. Morality, once enforced, is now monetised. The state no longer needs to preach abstinence; Instagram does it for free.

Both nations have entered a new moral economy where the body is a site of continuous optimisation. Alcohol is only one front. Sugar, gluten, meat; all are hazards to be managed. Pleasure itself becomes suspicious. The person who declines dessert is praised for discipline; the one who lingers over lunch is pitied for weakness. Health is no longer the absence of illness; it is the absence of spontaneity.

Meanwhile the engine of overwork hums on. The post-industrial economy runs not on coal but on attention, and attention intentionality is stretched thin by fatigue. In France the smartphone erases the boundary once defended by the thirty-five-hour law. In America the absence of limits is sanctified as freedom. The tyranny of the inbox replaces the whip. People drink less not only because they are virtuous but because they are tired and deprived of valuable time.

This collision between hyper-health and hyper-work produces moral vertigo. Citizens are told to maximise everything (productivity, longevity, self-care) yet to feel guilt for every indulgence. The result is chronic anxiety, medicated rather than resolved. Each new guideline that constrains informal relief (wine, rest, unstructured talk) feeds demand for formal relief in pill form. The market for serotonin does not depend on vineyards.

This is no conspiracy, only a feedback loop between regulation, culture, and commerce. The ministry warns, the citizen abstains, the social fabric thins, the therapist prescribes. Intentions are noble; the outcome absurd. The vintner in Bordeaux uproots his vines; the pharmacist in Lyon extends his hours.

Luckily in History puritan moods never last. I for one am tired of being told what to do all the time. After every wave of abstinence comes a return of appetite. Signs of fatigue are visible already.

Technology, paradoxically, might help. The same networks that amplify abstinence also connect communities of taste. Online wine clubs and local cooperatives are giving new life to moderation, valuing provenance over volume. The post-modern drinker, aware of both the liver and the planet, may yet find a middle path: fewer drinks, better ones, and in better company.

For policy makers, what the wine world should actively campaign for is not to abandon health campaigns but to humanise them. It is possible to discourage excess without discouraging pleasure. To treat all alcohol as poison may protect the liver but impoverish culture. A wiser approach would distinguish between the solitary binge and the shared bottle, between the industrial and the artisanal, between escapism and celebration. Risk is not only chemical; loneliness kills too. But to do so they must first come to the same conclusions and therefore all wine lovers of good faith must be vocal and defend their lifestyle. We have to stop hiding in fear of dire repercussions for businesses. We lost already part of the right to promote we must not offer on a plate our right to defend our culture.

A deep challenge lies before us. Modern governance has mastered the management of bodies; it must now rediscover the stewardship of souls. The term need not be religious. It means recognising that humans are not merely biological units but symbolic beings who live through ritual, taste, and story. To drink together is to rehearse trust. When that ritual disappears, society loses a quiet but vital cohesion.

Perhaps the next revolution in public health will come not from laboratories but from tables. Imagine a campaign that counts shared meals per week as carefully as alcohol units. Imagine ministries of health working with ministries of culture, treating gastronomy as an ally rather than an adversary. Such reforms would not restore the consumption levels of the past, nor should they, but they might restore the sense that pleasure, taken intelligently, is part of wellness.

The pandemic offered a glimpse of both danger and remedy. Lockdowns deepened isolation and some time wine induced self medication but also prompted many to cook again, to rediscover the tactile joy of pouring wine and sitting down. In those small acts lay the beginnings of a counter-philosophy: not decadence, but presence. To eat and drink well is to reclaim time from the machine.

Here, then, lies the source of optimism. Humans remain stubbornly convivial. Health and happiness are not opposites. They are partners that occasionally forget to dance together. A society that relearns their rhythm will not return to excess, nor will it live in sterile perfection. It will inhabit the middle ground civilisation has always known: disciplined yet curious, prudent yet joyous. When that day comes, public health posters may at last speak with grace. They will not warn that no level of drinking is safe; they will remind us that there is safety in friendship, and friendship often begins with a glass.