Agreed: it’s bad. Rising gloom is hard to avoid in a decade that’s lurched from epidemic to war to inflation crisis and now the unseaming of the international rules-based order. We’ve watched, open mouthed, as social media inverts truth and populist manipulation corrodes justice. Could it get any worse? It could. We’re unfriending solace: the shared glass with which to seek perspective.
Global wine consumption in the 21st century peaked at 250 million hectolitres (hl) between 2007 and 2008; it slid to 221 million hl in 2023. UK beer sales in 2023 were 21 per cent lower than in 2018; in the US, they are at their lowest levels since the 1970s. The value of Scotch whisky exports tumbled by 18 per cent in the first half of 2024 alone. The only alcoholic drink in surging demand is as black as our prospects: Guinness.
This new abstemiousness has multiple causes. Our desire to live healthier lives is laudable: 10,473 alcohol-related deaths in the UK in 2023 is 10,473 too many. Whether the World Health Organisation telling us “the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage” is proportionate advice, though, seems contentious.
Risk is ubiquitous in all human activity, and the health benefits of pleasure and social mingling brought by moderate drinking are overlooked. The bad rap, though, has worked: 65 per cent of Americans aged 18 to 34 now believe that even moderate drinking damages your health. Semaglutide weight-loss drugs, moreover, turn their users off alcohol consumption so successfully that they’re now being proposed as treatment for alcoholics.
Cost is another factor, particularly in the UK. Health considerations mean the lowering of duty rates is politically thorny; inflation rises go unmitigated. If you like wine, the situation has just got worse: the “temporary easement” on UK duty tax bands introduced in August 2023 came to an end on 1 February. The 30 different tax rates now payable on wine according to their alcohol percentage, introduced by Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, in October 2021 (surreally, he called this a “radical simplification”), make sense only to a teetotaller. Tax-incentivising low-alcohol wine in a warming climate encourages early picking, prior to flavour ripeness, or else the industrial stripping of alcohol from wine. Expressive, harmonious and naturally balanced wines at 13 per cent or more now pay, in the UK, Europe’s highest duty rates. Tariffs and climate chaos will keep prices rising.
I’m assigning most of the blame, though, to our oppressive zeitgeist. We’re now into the third US presidential term in succession in which the holder of this high office is teetotal. The Jeffersonian tradition of daily wine-drinking as a “restorative cordial” and a “necessity of life” is gone – along with all vestiges of presidential wisdom, acuity and perspective. Instead, it’s the rage and scorn of agitators for the androcracy such as Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson (both teetotal) that has us by the throat. The “masculine energy” hymned by public figures from Mark Zuckerberg to Joe Rogan is fuelled by energy drinks.
Twenty-four centuries ago, Euripides’ greatest play The Bacchae – a violent and sobering work in which Dionysus, the god of wine, does his worst – was (posthumously) performed in Athens. It is a play of resonant ambiguity: Dionysus describes himself as “most terrible, though most gentle, to mankind”. The Dionysiac experience may be, as the great Irish classicist Eric Dodds wrote of The Bacchae, “a deep source of spiritual power and eudaimonia [happiness]”. For most of us, this means the commonplace sharing of wine, an openness to the difference that it incarnates, an attentiveness to its quiet beauty, and a celebration of its spirit of generosity.
To turn our backs on the gentle, humane warmth of this ritual is to impoverish life – and, Dodds suggested, to risk “disintegration and destruction”. This we may yet see.
[See also: Trump’s Golden Age]
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This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age