Early in Charles Dickens’s A Tale Of Two Cities, a wine cask rolls out of a cart in a Paris street. It promptly breaks, spilling its contents. Hilarity ensues. Men abandon their “business or (…) idleness” and drop to their knees to drink. Women drench their headwear in the little pools that have formed, and squeeze them into the mouths of their infants. A shock to us, but perhaps also to Dickens’s contemporaries. Later on he explains that “those were drinking days, and most men drank hard”; the amount of wine a gentleman would imbibe would seem “a ridiculous exaggeration” to the Victorian reader. He might have been right. In his partially autobiographical David Copperfield, his avatar doesn’t drink as an infant. Instead, it’s at the ripe old age of eight where we first see him being served a half-pint of ale.

I am not aware of Victorian wine commentators’ views towards this fall from grace. Was it considered a sign of a looming catastrophe for the alcohol industry? I am similarly unaware if people in the 20th century’s seventies and eighties, now largely considered a hedonic, booze-drenched era, were nostalgic for the mid-fifties, where French children were still given alcohol at school and temperance would be restricting oneself to a litre of wine per day. But what I know for sure is that the Anglo-American wine press of today seems to think wine is going through an extinction-level crisis.

If you have even the most casual connection with the discourse, you have seen the headlines so I won’t bore you with them. Suffice to say that the Four Horsemen of the Wineapocalypse are young people not interested in expensive wine; falling wine consumption across all ages; an interest in healthier living; and teetotallers, prohibitionist by conviction or religion. Or, as the Francophile Dickens might have put it, plus ça change.

It’s not that I am entirely unconvinced there is something moving, but I am not sure about the direction and what can be done about it. Let’s start with the latter. I am just as irked as the next oenophile at someone badmouthing my hobby or reminding me that, like eating, breathing, standing up, or sitting down, it comes with a measure of risk. I am not, however, willing to try to argue with a straight face that drinking is harmless, let alone beneficial. There is something particularly droll, and likely counterproductive in the political arena, about the argument that the global scientific community is out to get alcohol (one must not have met many scientists). Or in the presentation of the alcohol industry (global value: upwards of $1 trillion) as a bullied minnow.

The threat of the health zealots sounds to me highly exaggerated. My stablemate in these digital pages, Andy Neather, covered the trend of “zero alcohol” wines recently and I share his mix of aversion and ennui towards the category. I similarly don’t share the breathless predictions of some commentators about its bright future. It reminds me of the excitement about fake meat a couple of years ago, or the prophecies of everyone turning vegan any time now. The thing is, as we’re all going to find out again very soon with this crop of New Year’s resolutions, saintliness is hard. History suggests that even the most totalitarian teetotallers somehow end up surrounding themselves with drunks. The only ones that successfully pull it off seem to have gotten the command directly from their deity of choice – and who are we to argue with the divine?

It is at this point that someone usually brings up the tobacco industry as case study and cautionary tale. An industrial behemoth and cultural staple that in the space of a generation went up in, ahem, smoke. I understand the attraction of the analogy, but it is historically misplaced. While cigarettes might have once appeared ubiquitous to anyone over the age of 40, they were actually more of a flash in the pan. They started spreading widely at the end of the 19th century: within the space of two generations it was very clear that something was seriously wrong with smoking. By contrast, wine has had a couple of millennia of fairly extensive field testing. The conversation is with Paracelsus, not the Nazarites.

This hardly means that every wine-related business will succeed all the time. If some wine investments in California and Texas end up not making their projected profits, it is of course sad, but not devastating to anyone not directly involved. Closer to home, I remember ten years ago some of the more privileged members of the London wine scene projecting sardonic nonchalance and red-trousered entitlement when the rest of us worried about the outcome of the Brexit referendum. If the trajectory of the wine business since then has not been what it was hoped, it is in equal measures unfortunate and instructive. Similarly for those that subscribe to a neoliberal financial agenda. If you support Edwardian inequalities, then be prepared for Edwardian numbers of wine drinkers. But if you want everyone to drink posh wine all the time, your intended political platform is, by definition, Champagne socialism. Do not blame the nefarious conspiracies of epidemiologists for your financial performance.

Then there is the other end of the market. There are historical and cultural reasons that make the British wine press, ostensibly targeted at serving consumers, act as a freelance marketing arm of the wine trade – and part of this mission involves affecting heart-felt concern and personal affinity for mass wine. But I’m less preoccupied by how many tonnes Oyster Bay and Campo Viejo will shift, neither do I find the litres of Carrefour Languedoc drunk per capita a cornerstone of French vinous civilisation. What I care about (and, I would suspect, what most people who follow a specialist wine site care about) is wine that goes beyond an alcohol delivery mechanism.

For this type of wine, I think the future is bright. And perhaps counterintuitively, the more people become interested in wellbeing, and the more the effects of alcohol are quantified, the more this type of wine has to win. If your weekly allowance is seven glasses, as opposed to seven litres, you’re more likely to make it count. I believe that wine has more to offer, in culture, complexity, food-friendliness, or, more simply, sheer interest, than any other alcoholic drink out there. And if there is a small percentage of people that end up getting lost in some sort of Bryan Johnson-like quest for eternal life, it’s not much of a big deal. They would have probably been Scotch drinkers anyway.

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash