There are only four general reasons why people might choose to be teetotalers: religious, political, social, and health reasons. These do not necessarily have anything to do with age, which is what I looked at last week. I will take them in turn, and make a few points.
The fourth reason is easily dealt with, so I will start there. If alcohol creates serious health problems for you, even temporarily, then you should stop drinking, immediately. Indeed, there are obvious times to greatly reduce alcohol intake; and there is a list of a few types of People who should never drink wine, according to an expert: People with diabetes; Individuals with asthma; Anyone taking sedatives or painkillers; and People taking disulfira.
Moving on, next we will look at religion and politics, before turning to the most important point of this post.
Different religions have very different official (formal) attitudes towards the consumption of alcohol. As a (pro)active member of any given religion, these precepts must be upheld.
For example, Christianity does not actively encourage alcohol consumption, but neither does it ban alcohol. Indeed, it treats red wine as symbolizing the blood of Jesus of Nazareth while he was on the cross, at the end of his human life. I learned this as a child, because at that time my father was a minister of the Methodist Church, serving some of the country towns of NSW, Australia. So, wine in moderation is acceptable; we are even told that Church loopholes during Prohibition saved California’s wine industry.
The Quran (Koran), on the other hand, discusses alcohol (in Arabic: khamr) in several of its verses (Alcohol in the Quran), explicitly speaking against it each time. For example: “wine, gambling, idols, and divining arrows [gambling] are evil and of Satan’s act; therefore, leave them aside in order that you may prosper”. So, it is not possible to consume alcohol and simultaneously be a member of the Islamic religion.
In a geographically more restricted sense than most religions, and irrespective of the religious make-up of the indigenous population, some specific countries also reject alcohol consumption. A search of Wikipedia will lead you to: List of countries with alcohol prohibition. Some of these bans are only partial, including drinking in public, or drinking during certain hours of the day (eg. middle of the night) or weeks of the year (eg. Ramadan), with prescribed exceptions for some religious groups (eg. non-Muslims in Muslim-dominated countries).
Nevertheless, as an example, denizens of these countries are breaking the law if they consume alcohol at all: Afghanistan, Djibouti, India (four provinces), Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan. So, choosing to drink there could be very risky.
This leads us on to the more general part of this topic — social issues. By that, I mean a personal decision is made irrespective of religion, politics or health. This is social behavior, in the most general sense. Personal decisions can have all sorts of effects, both on yourself and on those around you. You need to tread carefully. *
For many people, consuming alcohol is unproblematic. It is a normal part of their life, and it may well have been for most of their adult years. The actual form of drink may vary, but alcohol is an ordinary part of their life. For example, wine with dinner is commonplace in the southern European countries. There is not much to say in this blog about these persons.
However, many people are part of what Charlie Leary recently referred to as The Disenfranchised — those “deprived of some right, privilege, or immunity”, as a result of their circumstances. Here, I will take myself as a classic example.
My parents got divorced when I was very young, and neither of their households consumed alcohol, as far as I knew as a child. So, I was very effectively disenfranchised from growing up seeing this social activity. (I discovered, literally on my father’s deathbed, that there were things going on in his life of which my siblings and I knew nothing. Of course!)
So, I had no personal experience of alcohol until my final year of high-school. My mates and I used to “go down to the pub” on Friday nights, to fraternize, play pool (or snooker), and drink a few beers. (We could not go to the Bull and Bush Hotel, which was the closest pub, because some of the teachers went there, and so we went to the Winston Hills Hotel, instead.) None of us were yet 18 years old, and so we should not have been served. However, in the 1970s no-one ever checked, or asked for ID. (Later, we could go to the Castle Hill RSL, if a member would sign us in.) **
What did I learn, as I started to become enfranchised? Never ever drink too much. The sight of young men hanging out the back of a car, clearly in alcoholic distress, remains with me to this day.
At university, beer was still the go-to drink, if only because the University of Sydney is in an old part of the city, and there were more pubs nearby than you could poke a stick at. Indeed, there were so many that I once photocopied the relevant double page from the street directory, and marked them all on it. (This was decades before Google Maps, remember, which now has exactly that same information.)
It was not until my postgraduate years that a girlfriend and I started to visit the wineries of the Hunter Valley, on weekends, three hours north of Sydney. It was this that finally enfranchised me, in a sense that would make sense to the wine industry.
So, what is the point of this long personal history? Well, it seems to me that, as far as the social drinking of alcohol is concerned, there are:
- those people who are enfranchised from early on,
- those who become enfranchised through time,
- those who have become disenfranchised through time, and
- those who have remained disenfranchised.
This leaves the third group, along with the second — those who have become enfranchised (second), but some of whom have then reversed this (third). One of the important things about this third group is the trend to what has been called the “New Temperance Movement” (From dry January to fake cocktails, inside the new Temperance movement) or “neo-Prohibition” (US wine industry in a tailspin). There is also what has been called the growing “Sober-Curious" movement” (What is the sober curious movement?) — those people questioning societal norms surrounding alcohol consumption, and being mindful about when, how, and why one drinks.
The difference between these attitudes is whether one outright opposes alcohol or merely suggests its personal regulation. Discussion of both viewpoints exist (Is Prohibition returning?) and (Who is drinking low / no?). The first of these alternatives is often concerned with the idea that “Alcohol consumption and its associated harms are reaching a crisis point” (Alcohol warning labels need an update). The second alternative is often concerned about the idea that the taste of non-alcohol options is improving; along with the fact that the lines between the drinks originally categorized as beer, wine or spirits have become blurred, so that a fourth category of ready-to-drink (RTD) beverages has emerged (Big Soda’s alcohol drinks worry health experts).
It is important for the wine industry to recognize these distinctions, because only some of these groups of people can be targeted as future wine drinkers; and these are thus the ones that need to be thought about now, in terms of new or revised strategies for promotion.
* Personal aside
During the summer holidays before my final year of high-school, I did not shave. So, when I returned to classes I had quite a nice beard; indeed, one that was better than could be grown by some of the younger male teachers. This caused a lot of commentary among the other students and also the teachers, because this was a new school, and we were the first year to go through — this meant that I was the first pupil to ever grow a beard at that school.
One day, I was walking through the area with the school’s administration offices, and I heard an explosion behind me: “Who was that boy!!!???” I looked around, noting that I was the only student there, and so it must be me. I walked back to the Deputy Principal’s office, and peered in the door. He had turned red/purple: “How dare you!!! Get home and shave it off immediately!” This was the only hint that I got about what the issue was.
So, I went home and shaved the beard off. However, this then caused a stir amongst some of the girl students. You see, this was the 1970s, when male hair was long; and the girls were outraged that a bureaucrat thought they could tell us about hair length. So, the girls actually rang up the government Department of Education. They thereby discovered that, indeed, the bureaucrats could not determine our head-hair length, but they did have the right to determine facial hair. So, I remained shaven for the rest of the year; but I have determinedly had a beard for most of the five decades since then!
** I should note here that I borrowed my mother's car to get to these pub events, and so I wisely drank lemon squash (non-alcoholic) rather than the beer being drunk by my compatriots. Interestingly, Random Breath Testing was introduced in NSW only in 1982, long after the events described here — the slogan “Be Under .05 Or Under Arrest” meant nothing in my day!
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