What does moderation mean?

We are all apparently drinking less. But how are we doing that?

Image: ©Robert Joseph/Midjourney AI

My recent piece, calling for a broader range of formats for wine as a way of embracing the ‘moderation’ so many people claim to support, attracted a fair amount of interest. Including among people who, quite frankly, admitted they have no time for moderation.

All of which made me think about defining that term beyond, say, two units per day or a given number of litres per year. In other words, what does moderation look like in the real world?

For some, I’m sure it’s about following medical or fitness advice about those units. This is where my 50cl bottles fit. But for many others, it is more a binary matter of drinking or not drinking.

A study by IWSR earlier this year found that a growing number of people have embraced an ‘intermittent abstinence’ or ‘zebra striping’ approach to alcohol. There are periods when they are happy to consume it, and ones when they are equally happy not to. These teetotal times might take the form of Dry January, Dry July or Sober October, or ‘school-nights’ - Sunday-through-Thursday evenings. The IWSR report suggests that this way of looking at alcohol applies to 60% of Gen Z and 40% of the general drinking public.

Only 11% of the French consider themselves ‘regular wine drinkers’ - down from 16% just seven years earlier.

Quite frankly, I don’t care about the precise accuracy of these two figures, any more than of the FranceAgrimer charts showing that the proportion of French citizens who drink wine ‘frequently’ or ‘on frequent occasions’ has fallen from 37% in 2015 to 30% in 2022. They are telling the same story—one that is reflected in attitudes toward what one might call intermittent vegetarianism.

No wine or meat, thank you - it’s Wednesday

According to a 2024 report, 38% of Americans are already ‘flexitarians’, who mostly go without meat for three days a week. This figure is expected to rise to 42%. Again, I’m not fixated on these specific numbers; other studies will offer alternatives. But, as with alcohol, they collectively reveal a pattern that most of us will have witnessed in our own lives and those of people we know and encounter.

Sociologically, these two trends matter because they are at odds with tradition. For many cultures, especially in colder climates, the ability to provide one’s family with sufficient protein to get through the next 24 hours, by putting some kind of meat or fish on the table, was a mark of physical sustainability. In warmer regions, wine, it is too often forgotten, had a similar role as a source of valuable calories.

Religious abstinence

Various religions have sought to encourage their adherents to appreciate this god-given food and drink by imposing periods of fasting and voluntary deprivation. Critics of Dry January and Sober October conveniently overlook the 40-day period of Lent leading up to Easter, which has been observed since possibly as early as 200 AD, and certainly since the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. Over the centuries, Anglican, Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist and Orthodox Christians have all, to one extent or another, temporarily given up the consumption of meat and alcohol.

Logically, assuming, as I do, that zebra striping is here to stay, unless wine drinkers today drink significantly more than their parents did during the days, weeks or months when they are not on the wagon (which would, incidentally, hardly accord with ‘moderation’), overall consumption will inevitably continue to fall.

How far it will fall also raises the question of acquired behaviour patterns. Will, five-days-off-two-days-on, become a rhythm for some people who will associate Friday or Saturday night with opening a bottle? Or, after several days of not drinking, will it be as easy for them to skip wine, or any other kind of alcohol, for one more?

I doubt I’m alone in admitting that I have no answer to this question, but if I’m correct in believing that we’re all going to be drinking less wine, the cost and profitability of most of the wines we do drink will have to go up. And that’s a topic I’ll be addressing next week.

My fight for the 50cl bottle