(No) more wine please?

My son, 12 years old, insists that he will never drink alcohol- ever- in his entire life.

Fair enough, my parents would have been very relieved to hear these words out of my mouth when I was 16. Things have changed since then. Young people don't drink as much alcohol as we did when we (40+) were young and I really believe this is a good thing. I never understood the point of binge drinking and I find it dangerous when someone can't relax and unwind without a glass of wine.

Covid was a challenge for all of us and as a mother of two, my most present memories of covid lock-downs are related to home-schooling and home-kindergardening while trying to juggle office work, phone calls with customers and glueing together my son's mother's day DIY project for school. Times were rough and the glass of wine, sometimes two, when kids were in bed really made life more pleasant at the time.

After the first ecstatic weeks and months of regaining our much desired freedom, going out to restaurants, enjoying cocktails at hotel bars and opening bottles of wine with friends, I felt that I needed a break. Less party, more excercise and apple juice instead of wine.

Roughly about the same time, I started coming across „Sober October“ and „Dry January“, I heard people talk about „low/no“ and read articles in which sommeliers talked about taking time off from wine. I tasted my first alcohol-free wines and watched the increasing worry in the wine industry that people might stop drinking wine alltogether.

„Every drop of alcohol is bad for your health“, I read. I absolutely agree, it's definitely safer not to drink any alcohol. It's a lot safer to drink water instead.

It should, however not be from a plastic bottle or in a glass that comes straight out of a dishwasher. It's also safer not to eat any sugar, highly processed food, breath air anywhere else but in the mountains, wear clothes that were produced in a third-world country, spend too much time on social media or eat vegetables that were not grown in your own garden. It's potentially lethal to take aspirin, get a tattoo or drive a car.

I am missing common sense and I am missing the idea of people actually being able to do things moderately in this discussion. Looking around on social media, I sometimes feel there are only the two extremes: alcoholism and complete abstinence from alcohol.

For thousands of years, people have enjoyed wine. Some of them drank too much I am sure but the rest found that wine was part of their culture or simply had a good glass of wine together with dinner or some drinks on a night out with friends.

All my life, I have lived in a world where wine was part of everyday life, the landscape, the community. Nevertheless, there are times when I don't feel like having any wine. But I also enjoy opening a bottle when friends are over, when I go to one of the local wine taverns or when I sit down on our terrace at the end of an intense working day. I could of course drink apple juice on all of these occasions, but do I really want to? …Naaah

(At Fritz & Frieda we support the “Alcohol in Moderation”- Movement)