The first weeks of January are lean and spare after the indulgences of Christmas. Trees are stripped of their baubles, tinsel and lights. Fridges are cleared of their cold cuts and half-drunk bottles of sherry. Scales are stepped on, collars are loosened and, after the social bustle of Christmas entertaining, diaries return to being dominated by work engagements.
The back-to-normal, clear-the-decks mentality of January feels natural and welcome after a period of excess. For many people, some time off drinking is useful but since 2013 it has been co-opted by Dry January, a campaign run by Alcohol Change UK, an alcohol harm charity.
Dry January pitches deeper sleep, brighter skin, slimmer bodies and brainier brains. Its chatty tone has all the welcome-to-the-righteous attitude of a Bible study group. It’s old-fashioned temperance dressed up as a couch to 10k-style challenge. It’s a cure-all for the malaise of modern man or woman, a chance to start the year on the right foot with, it implies, the winners in life. There’s just one problem – it’s not necessarily true. Even Alcohol Change UK acknowledges that people may not actually feel any of their claimed benefits after not drinking for a month.
Understanding the risks is important
Let’s be clear: drinking alcohol comes with risks and wine is no exception. But how we define and understand those risks is important. The World Health Organisation states no level of alcohol consumption can be considered zero risk (what it calls ‘safe’) for health, and it is calling on governments to increase taxes and consider implementing health warnings on labels. But its carefully worded statement conceals the fact that nothing is zero risk, from riding a bike to eating bacon or the carcinogenic UV rays in sunshine.
Instead of arguing about whether any amount of alcohol is ‘safe’ – or contending that it is some sort of tasty heart medicine – the question is how steep the risk curve is at different levels of drinking, just like understanding levels of sun exposure. Risk rises with intake, and the steep part of the curve is heavy, frequent drinking.
The scientific details will continue to be debated, but for now the best approach for those who enjoy drinking and its many wider benefits is moderation, a middle way in a world that seems to have forgotten that middle ways are possible. Moderation resists the extremism of both abstinence and excess, delivering most of the health benefits of the former and far fewer of the risks of the latter.
One of the maxims inscribed on the temple at Delphi was ‘nothing in excess’.
The problem is that moderation isn’t a fashionable concept – today’s world seems more geared towards excess followed by abstinence – and it doesn’t sound like much fun. Yet the ancient Greeks knew its value and wrote about it extensively. One of the maxims inscribed on the temple at Delphi was ‘nothing in excess’. Dionysus, their god of wine, theatre and fertility was – not by coincidence – also the god of madness, frenzy and destruction. Wine, in the ancient Greek world, represented the highest laurels of hospitality, civilisation and culture, but it was simultaneously danger, violence and death. Moderation was the only way to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of drinking it.
‘Three bowls only do I mix for the temperate,’ Dionysus is quoted as saying in one ancient source. ‘One to health, which they empty first, the second to love and pleasure, the third to sleep. When this is drunk up, wise guests go home. The fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to violence; the fifth to uproar, the sixth to drunken revel, the seventh to black eyes. The eighth is the policeman’s, the ninth belongs to biliousness, and the tenth to madness and hurling the furniture.’
Moderation is about paying attention; excess is about forgetting.’
That second bowl, ‘to love and pleasure’, is right in the middle, not by coincidence. It is the most important one, because it reminds us that moderation is in fact the secret to pleasure. Excess becomes overfamiliar and too much of anything gets boring, but moderation creates enticement and unlocks joy. It’s not about having less of the thing you love, but about having a more intense experience of it, like going from standard definition to 4K on your TV. If you’re only drinking two glasses of wine tonight, you spend extra time selecting that bottle. If you’re only going to have one cocktail, the choice, composition and construction of it becomes precious. Moderation is about paying attention; excess is about forgetting.
No one describes this better than Roald Dahl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie gets one chocolate bar a year on his birthday, places it in a small box, and only when he can stand it no longer does he ‘peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble – just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue.’
Those tiny nibbles are where the joy lies. The cut-crystal tumbler of peated whisky after a frosty walk with the dogs at dusk, the glass of deep, velvety red that gets opened with a steak, the glowing amber of tawny Port served chilled from the fridge – these are moments to savour, not to rush through in search of the next glass.
Appreciating the social aspects of enjoying wine
Occasionally some of our best drinks are enjoyed alone, but in an age of isolation drinks like wine can also bring people together, ground them in a moment of shared ritual and pull them away from the blue glow of their devices and into a shared occasion. A bottle open on the table silently says that everyone needs to step back from the nebulous tasks of modern life and engage with a more fundamental idea of what it means to be a couple, a family, neighbours or friends, gathered together over a summer lunch or at the end of the working week.
So mix those cold martinis, uncork that expensive Saint-Emilion, buy that bottle of Port. In a world where attention has been commoditised, taking back your time to mix an Old Fashioned or decant your wine off the sediment is meditative, beautiful, as well as an act of quiet resistance to demonisation and extremism. And when you sit down to enjoy your drink, remember, like Charlie, to savour it slowly.
