Drink (73 page)

In consequence, the average pint was no longer two units but three and a bit, which meant that any man who drank more than two and half pints of beer was, officially, bingeing. Hitherto, to binge, in English, had implied great, glorious, or self-destructive excess, and bingeing had been the province of Vikings, Reformation poets, and sybarites, of Eric Bloodaxe, the Earl of Rochester, and Lord Byron. The suggestion that someone who had a pint at lunch, a second after work, and then opened a can of beer in front of the television at home with his dinner was embarking on a binge was open to criticism. The body digests about a unit an hour, so that by the time the two-and-a-half-pint binge drinker
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had finished his spree he would be sober enough to pass a drunk-driving test; indeed, if he stretched out the latter part of his binge over three hours, he would never be drunk enough to fail one.

Some, however, still flew the flag for the old-fashioned meaning of
binge,
notably Jeffrey Bernard, “Low Life” columnist for the
Spectator
magazine, who chronicled his daily dissipation at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho between 1975 and his death from alcohol-related illnesses in 1997. Described as “a suicide note in weekly installments,” Bernard’s column set out the pains as well as pleasures of drinking. As his medical problems worsened (he had one leg amputated in 1994) he became something of a sainted figure—a man whose eyes were fixed on imminent death and so able to provide an unbiased view on life. Interviewed by the
Idler
magazine in 1995, when diabetes and a recurrent kidney problem had forced him to be dry, the dying sage set out what to him were the powers of alcohol to improve or diminish the quality of existence:

Bernard, however, was perceived as something of an anachronism— a relic of the old school that held it morally permissible to drink oneself into the grave. Most Britons, like Americans, were drinking in different ways than preceding generations. They, too, had fallen in love with bottled mineral water, and spritzers, and light spirits instead of dark; their preference for pale lager over amber bitter has been documented above. In contrast to Americans, however, they were consuming more alcohol, not less, and slowly reascending the league table of drinking nations. Despite all the good advice on safe limits, British per capita consumption of alcohol climbed in the 1980s and 1990s.
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The nation’s schoolchildren led the trend. According to the RCP, the number of twelve- to thirteen-year-old boys and girls who admitted to drinking in the preceding week rose from 29 percent of boys and 26 percent of girls in 1996, to 38 percent and 30 percent respectively three years later. In 1998, the equivalent figures for fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds were 55 percent and 53 percent. They were encouraged in their habits by the appearance of a new style of beverage—
alcopops
—or alcoholic sodas. The first in the class was
Two Dogs
alcoholic lemonade, 4.8 percent ABV, which adults drank au naturel, or mixed with their white rum or vodka. Two Dogs soon had a pack of imitators. Engineered to appeal to the sweeter tooth, alcopops, unlike beer, did not taste very different from sodas; indeed a child might guzzle one without realizing his or her mistake. Alcopops also helped grown-ups who could not stomach real ale to graduate from soft drinks to wet ones.

The rate of growth in alcopop sales was matched by that in wine consumption. The nation’s adults, once they had outgrown bingeing, drifted into lifestyle drinking. The British were told on television and in books that French, Italian, and Spanish peasants lived happier and longer lives than white-collar workers in London because of their diet, part of which was wine. Annual per capita consumption rose to more than twenty-five bottles. Much of the new demand was accounted for by British women, who, as the statistics for teen tippling revealed, were starting younger and drinking more. Sixty-nine percent of them drank wine, against 62 percent of men, and they were responsible for over 70 percent of wine purchases in supermarkets.

Their fictional role model was Bridget Jones, a thirtysomething working girl whose adventures in love, and attempts to control her intake of calories, cigarettes, and units of alcohol, were chronicled by Helen Fielding in
Bridget Jones’s Diary
(1996). Despite her resolution to stay within the government’s “sensible drinking” guidelines of no more than 14 units per week, Bridget often exceeded her quota in a single night, and managed 3,836 of them in less than one year, or just under 74 a week, enough for two “Heavy” drinkers as defined by the RCP. She also underestimated her unit count. A Bridget unit was a bottle of strong beer, a big swig out of a vodka bottle, or a large glass of Chardonnay, each one of which was more than an official measure. In this respect, she was representative of her fellow Britons, who confessed to drinking far less than they actually did. Indeed, if UK General Household Survey reports could be believed, then, in the words of the RCP, “surprisingly, it appears that nearly half the alcohol on which duty is paid is not consumed.”
⁷⁷

Drinking with her urban family was Bridget’s principal leisure activity. She and her fellow singletons viewed it as an essential rite of friendship, a preliminary to sex, and a passport to amnesia when they were disappointed in love. Although they had harsh words for its effects on their heads the next morning and on their behavior the night before, they criticized alcohol far less than they praised it or consumed it. Indeed, their compulsive drinking set them apart from their parents’ generation.

Bridget Jones’s Diary
, its sequel,
Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason,
and the movies of each struck a chord among young, single postfeminist metropolitan women throughout the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. They had not lost their mothers’ aspirations to be mothers, but they had gained a male confidence in their pursuit of their careers, their partners, and their drinking habits. Their behavior resembled that of the angry young men of their fathers’ generation—they swore, smoked, had extramarital sex, they suffered hangovers, and they owned their own houses. They were conscious of being different. Bridget Jones, though happy to admit to frequent bingeing in her diary, did not ex-pectit from her mother: “My mum has drunk nothing but a single cream sherry on a Sunday night since 1952, when she got slightly tipsy on a pint of cider at Mavis Enderby’s twenty-first, and has never let herself or anyone else forget it. ‘There’s nothing worse than a woman drunk, darling.’”

The favorite tipple of Bridget and real-life female singletons was white wine. Their enthusiasm for New World Chardonnays altered British tastes so much that in 2004, Australia displaced France as the principal supplier of wine to the UK. The shift was dramatic—whereas in 1997, 35 percent of the wine drunk in Britain was French, by 2004 this figure had declined to 20 percent, against a 21 percent share for Australia. Falling demand abroad for French wine was exceeded by falling demand at home. Once the champions of the league table of drinking nations, the French had tumbled to eighth place by 2003, just below Great Britain. The fall was occasioned by a collapse in wine consumption, which dropped by more than a third in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The quintessentially French beverage, celebrated by the country’s poets, statesmen, and medics as liquid inspiration, no longer commanded the affection of the masses. Their novel indifference was accounted for in part by
gastro-anomie
:
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Instead of sitting down to a three-course lunch with wine each day, the French grabbed a burger and fries at McDonald’s and lubricated their throats with water or sodas. Another factor in declining wine consumption was the introduction of strict legislation against drunk driving.

France had famously grim drunk-driving statistics. The annual holiday migrations to and from its coasts, which migrants punctuated with long and liquid lunches, were spattered with the blood of fatal accidents. In 1995, the government acted to reduce the carnage by redefining what constituted drunk driving. The permissible blood alcohol content (BAC) was lowered to 0.05 grams per liter—half the level in the United States at the time. The new lower limits were enforced with roadside checks and stiffer penalties for infringements, and resulted in an immediate 5 percent reduction in fatalities. The decline thereafter, however, was slow. The one-or-more-for-the-road mentality died hard and took with it some celebrated victims, notably Diana, Princess of Wales.

Although French traffic fatalities declined by a fifth between 1993 and 2003, the country still had one of the worst road safety records in Europe. Twice as many French people were killed in automobile accidents than in Britain, and they were twice as likely to be drunk at the time. However, a fresh propaganda campaign from the government, which caused an immediate drop in restaurant wine sales, drew protests from the country’s vintners. It was wrong, in their opinion, to tell French people to drink no alcohol before they got behind the wheel. They issued counterpropaganda, reminding drivers that although the legal BAC was low, it was better than nothing at all, and recommended they should consider two or three glasses of wine, with food, whenever they broke their journeys.

The French wine industry was in a desperate state. Supply had not slumped in sympathy with demand. In the same years that the French and foreigners drank less French wine, their country was producing more and more of it. The problem, moreover, was trans-European: Italians and Spaniards were also making more, and drinking less, and wanted to sell their surplus in France. Further complications arose from the appearance of New World wines in French supermarkets. The very existence of such fluids, let alone the notion that patriots might prefer them to the offerings of their native land, was an insult to French winemakers and a threat to the Gallic way. In the words of a Languedoc vintner, “Each bottle of American and Australian wine that lands in Europe is a bomb targeted at the heart of our rich European culture.”

Fortunately for the producers,
rich European culture,
as interpreted by the European Union, meant providing subsidies to agriculture. In the case of wine, the EU operated an intervention mechanism to buy up surplus production. This was
crisis distillation,
introduced in 1982 as a measure for use only in emergencies, but operated in twenty-two of the twenty-six years since, and which made the supranational entity the biggest buyer of French, Italian, and Spanish wines in the world. Presently, one in every six bottles of European wines is bought by the program for conversion into ethanol for use in fuel additives, industrial disinfectant, and vinegar. Alcohol fuels not just the driver but also the automobile in France. One percent of all French gasoline comes from crisis-distilled wine—each bottle being good for a few kilometers’ travel down the autoroute.

Crisis distillation was not popular in the sunny vineyards of Languedoc-Roussillon, whose proud vintners did not welcome the forced conversion of their liquid artistry into petrol, aftershave, and antiseptic. Their government had betrayed them by permitting competition. If foreigners were barred from the market, then all would be well once more. A resistance was formed, which attacked the bastions of free trade and of government authority. It called itself the
Comité Régional d’Action Viticoles
(CRAV). CRAV’s clandestine operatives, some of whom had learned their trade against the Germans in World War II, hijacked bulk transporters of foreign wines, and French wines from different regions, and emptied their contents into the drains. They dynamited government offices and set fire to police cars; they organized riots and sent death threats. This display of brute force by militant vintners focused the French government on their woes. Studies were made and it was concluded that image was the problem in Languedoc-Roussillon. Few foreigners knew where it was in France, its wines were too heterodox, and their labels were confusing. They lacked the clarity of New World wines, most of which were marketed as varietals—Chardonnay or Pinot Noir, for example. French state funds were dispensed to reform the image, and in 2006 the pending introduction of a new generic appellation,
South of France,
was announced. According to Jacques Gravegeal, the man behind the uberbrand, these three words would turn consumers on the proper way: “Languedoc-Roussillon is still the biggest wine-producing region in the world, but it is a hidden region of France. No one knows where it is. When you talk about the South of France it is different, it creates an image in peoples’ minds.”

The problems of the south were also present in the west. Even Bordeaux was suffering. While its best wines fetched record prices,
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its table wines were being crisis-distilled. The strict rules of the various AOCs limiting how wines could be made meant that many areas could not produce the single-grape varietals that were most in demand. The sheer number of producers (Bordeaux had over seventeen thousand) also worked against the region. New World vintners were winning market share by offering a few clearly branded products—Paul Masson Chardonnay, for example, was the best-selling wine in Bordeaux’s oldest overseas market. Such problems were compounded by complacency among the region’s vintners. “We thought we were the king of carrots,” one confessed. “We just didn’t see the others coming. . . . We never bothered about consumers. Now we’re beginning to wake up. We understand that the consumer is what really matters. We can make the best wine in the world, but if nobody buys it, it’s useless.”

Other regions were suffering alongside Bordeaux and Languedoc-Rousillon. In 2006, France was subsidized by the EU to crisis-distill 150 million liters of quality wine, and an equal amount of table wine. Italy, also in a glut, was paid to refine 250 million liters of table wine and a further 10 million of quality vintages. The exceptional cost to the EU, mostly borne by countries making little or no wine of their own, was 131 million euros. The community also spent 220 million on maintaining its so-called
wine lake,
a network of warehouses that contained 1.5 billion liters of unwanted wine, i.e., more than four bottles a head for every living European. Such wastage was prodigal even by its own standards. According to Mrs. Fischer Boel, the official charged with formulating a new policy on wine for the EU, it was “a ridiculous way to use taxpayers’ money. . . . We are producing too much wine for which there is no market.” She proposed the destruction of up to four hundred thousand hectares of vines within the EU. Their crop was worthless and it would be cheaper to pay their owners to grow nothing.