On a hot summer’s evening some years ago at a well-connected Parisian’s holiday home in Provence, I witnessed a French magic trick. There were a dozen of us gathered – eight of France’s intellectual elite and four thirsty Brits. The host produced a bottle of champagne and proceeded to pour out equal micro-measures into 12 coupes.
The quartet from these islands looked on incredulously at how he achieved this extraordinary feat of rationing, promptly downed the meagre contents of our glasses the moment we were handed them, and then waited impatiently for the second bottle to be opened.
As we eventually learned, to our great distress, there was no second bottle, yet the Parisians sipped at their champagne quite happily for what seemed an eternity, chatting and enjoying the glorious surroundings on that balmy August evening.
I remember thinking, as I contemplated my terminally empty glass, that here was a different way of drinking, of savouring the wine, eking out pleasure with the habitual self-discipline of a squirrel hoarding nuts. And I also recall thinking that I wanted absolutely no part of it.
But all of three weeks into my first dry January, I wonder if there isn’t something to be admired, even adopted, about Gallic restraint in matters of social drinking.
It’s not just the well-aired health costs of consuming alcohol – said to be the fifth largest contributor to death and disease around the globe – that prompts this rotgut rethink. It’s also the crass aesthetics of excess. Chief among these are surely those fish bowl-size glasses in which you often see wine served in British pubs. They represent the very opposite of good taste, because you don’t have to be an oenophile to realise that a third of a bottle – 250ml – in your oversized glass is simply de trop.
A recent Cambridge University study, conducted in a four-week trial in 21 bars and pubs, showed that by removing 250ml wine measures from the menu, it cut the total amount that people drank by 7.6%. It’s a classic piece of nudge psychology from the paternalistic school of behavioural economics and as such its findings will no doubt be ignored by the drinks industry – the people who supersized wine measures in the first place.
After all, the more alcohol sold, the more profit. But it’s only short-term profit if the trend for pub closures continues. There were 46,800 pubs in the UK in 2020, down from 55,400 a decade earlier. Our drinking culture is changing. There has been a steady shift over the past half century from beer to wine, and from pubs to the home. Nowadaysm younger people, generation Z with its “sober curious” (interested in drinking less) or “Californian sober” (cutting out booze but micro-dosing on mushrooms or cannabis) designations, are less inclined than previous generations to drink alcohol or go to pubs.
In terms of cancer prevention and liver preservation, it’s hard to see this rejection of booze as anything but a healthy development. But we should be wary about throwing the baby out with the beer swill.
For there is a sound argument that says alcohol helped create civilisation. According to Edward Slingerland, a professor of philosophy, who outlined his case in his 2021 book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, the fermentation of beer 13,000 years ago enabled us to switch off the self-interested focus of our prefrontal cortex, and in our temporarily altered state we could build trust and communal innovation. Drawing on anthropological data, Slingerland suggests that alcohol was not a byproduct of agriculture; rather, that agriculture was the result of our need to increase the production of alcohol. He also cites a study that shows the application for patents went down in the US after prohibition and only rallied with the establishment of speakeasies.
Part of this drop in creativity he attributes to the inhibition of sobriety, but much of it to the absence of social interaction that the closure of bars caused. The problem is that nowadays people are increasingly drinking either with just one other person or alone, and they’re drinking stronger alcohol – as recently as the 1970s the ABV (alcohol by volume) of a bottle of wine was likely to be around 10%, whereas today it’s 13-14%.
Since it was first made, alcohol consumption has been a heavily socialised ritual, not a solitary pastime. We tend to celebrate the bacchanalian booze, but these were exceptions instead of a way of life.
To take the best of what alcohol has given us, while trying to minimise its worst side-effects, we need to create modern rituals or social rules that make sense in today’s world. One place to start may be to encourage the idea that drinking to excess – or drinking from an enormous glass – is, well, a bit uncool.
“Moderation in all things – including moderation” is the old saying drunkenly attributed to everyone from the ancient Greeks to Oscar Wilde. It’s not a bad guideline by which to lead life: boire avec modération, with only the occasional slaking of a British kind of thirst. With that in mind, I eagerly look forward to 1 February.
• Andrew Anthony is an Observer writer
