Hello everybody: I’m back, having been roused from my long winter’s nap by a farrago of essentially prohibitionist propaganda.
The august New York Times, in a recent, wonderfully alarmist article, warned the nation of the deadly dangers of consuming even tiny amounts of alcohol. The ominous headlines say it all:
Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health
Recent research makes it clear that any amount of drinking can be detrimental.
Got that? Any amount. If it doesn’t outright cause your death, at very least it will mutate your DNA, with all the perils that implies for yourself and your progeny.
Hogwash, I say. I take such manifestoes with a whole shakerful of salt. By the lights of that medical research, I should years ago have died of kidney disease and/or cirrhosis, if not heart disease and an utterly destroyed digestive system.
And, logically, the same must be true of most of my colleagues in wine journalism, not just in the US but everywhere around the world. If a small amount of alcohol is dangerous, the prodigious amounts we all professionally process must be mortal many times over.
© HA! Humoristes Associés, 1980
.
Yet here we are, vocal and still imbibing. I’m 84, and I thoroughly enjoy my wine with dinner every night, as I have for the past 60 years, and most nights a small brandy afterwards. How is it possible I survive such a lethal regimen? Is there even a remote chance that alcohol could, for the human system, be preservative rather than deadly?
© HA! Humoristes Associés, 1980
.
I don’t know, and I really don’t care. I have nothing to do with alcohol anyway: I never touch the stuff. I drink wine, of which alcohol is but one – and far from the largest – component.
That’s more than a verbal quibble. That’s a whole difference in outlook, a whole different approach to the question. Ask different questions and you get different answers. Can drinking wine at dinner improve people’s digestion, mood, and outlook? We all know it can. Does being happier and more content improve one’s life and support one’s general health? That is the very essence of a rhetorical question.
To my mind, leaving such considerations out of the so-called investigation invalidates all of its conclusions. Our lives are not monothematic or one-dimensional, and any medical advice that acts as if a single component can be isolated from the whole rest of the corpus – pun intended – of our lives, or as if everyone’s metabolism acted and reacted the same way, is to my way of thinking just plain stupid. And I am, frankly, getting tired of having to point this out. Surely medical practitioners know the good effects of happiness?
Back in the days when philosophers (the only doctors of the day) talked about things that mattered to people, Thomas Aquinas considered the question of what was the right amount to drink and what was drinking too much. By all the available evidence, Aquinas enjoyed his meals, and it’s sure he didn’t wash them down with Pepsi, so we may take it that he knew whereof he spoke. After much consideration of pros and cons, he concluded that one could drink usque ad hilaritatem – up to the point of merriment, or joyfulness.
.
© HA! Humoristes Associés, 1980
.
I couldn’t agree more. They knew something about drinking, those old masters. Merriment and joyfulness will prolong more lives than abstinence, or any amount of medicine.
By the way, if you’re interested in a totally different-from-the-medical-spoilsports’ take on the cultural role of drinking, I recommend you take a look at Edward Slingerland’s Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. As he asserts,
The sheer popularity, persistence, and importance of intoxicants throughout human history begs explanation…. My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively altered must have, over evolutionary times, helped individuals to survive and flourish, and cultures to endure and expand.
The whole book is entertaining and illuminating – much like a good glass of wine.
Tom's Wine Line 
Fantastic !!!!!
Well done, Thomas, as usual. I liked your throwing in the other Thomas, Aquinas, to back up your views. Abstaining from wine (or beer) does not increase one’s health or life; if anything, it might decrease it in some cases. Ed McC.
I couldn’t agree more, Tom. There is a new growing wave of prudishness and moralistic nonsense trying to pass as science that makes me furious too. That is particularly the case in Anglo-Saxon countries which, after all, have lived under the reactionary and puritanical teachings of Protestantism, where denial of pleasure and mortification of the senses is paramount. In Mediterranean countries things are were and are a bit different. You rightly quote Aquinas but, even before that, the supposedly strict Benedictine Rule for monks, which I read in a Medieval History course at University, comes up with this gem about “moderate drinking”:
“It is, therefore, with some uneasiness that we specify the amount of food and drink for others. However, with due regard for the infirmities of the sick, we believe that a half bottle of wine a day is sufficient for each. But those to whom God gives the strength to abstain must know that they will earn their own reward. The superior will determine when local conditions, work or the summer heat indicates the need for a greater amount. He must, in any case, take great care lest excess or drunkenness creep in. We read that monks should not drink wine at all, but since the monks of our day cannot be convinced of this, let us at least agree to drink moderately, and not to the point of excess for wine makes even wise men go astray.”
Not to mention Greece and Rome, where wine was seen as proof of civilisation and, accordingly, was drank copiously. In fact, the ancient romans divided the world between those who drank wine (civilised) and those who drank beer (barbarians), not between those who wrote philosophy and those who pillaged their cities dressed in animal skins. I happily drink both, of course, but wine is my favourite “poison”.