The tenor of recent news items regarding wine seems to signal a growing shift back toward the temperance movement. Costco’s loss in their legal battle to purchase direct from wine producers continues to send the message that retailers (and consumers) need to be protected from purchasing alcohol by our three-tier system. Related issues with wineries and retailers still remain in the courts.
Even more appalling, the French newspaper, Le Figaro, was issued a fine for printing an editorial article on Champagne without the corresponding disclaimer about the potential harmful effects of alcohol usually reserved for advertisements. These and other stories continually place wine (and other alcoholic beverages) in the position of being inherently evil. Similarly, articles published in the UK press are admonishing Britain’s middle-class for drinking too many alcohol units and characterizing them, with a single broad brush, as problem drinkers.
In his article, "The Wine Industry of Australia 1788-1979," Gerald Walsh provides a historical account of the total abstinence and temperance movements of the 1880s and 1890s in Australia and notes that, in 1875, the Dean of Melbourne, "even went so far as to say that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden must have been the grape!"
Historically in America, efforts to control drinking have gone to the extreme, with Prohibition, which banned all alcohol, as a prime example. With a seeming resurgence of this mindset, it will be interesting (and perhaps troubling) to watch the tide as it continues to shift in this regard.
While prohibition ended 75 years ago its roots remain and it could be reborn at any time. We still cannot feel pleasure without guilt. We still have the backward idea that non-medical drug use is immoral and should be eradicated. We still believe that this end can be attained by prohibition. We still deny that there is a basic human need for intoxicating drugs; we pretend it is not like sex, hunger or thirst. We think we can just deny it. “Wine is different; it is a food”, we say. We need to be real.
We can’t relax; we have to fight prohibition in its every form. Even though we drink wine, and we may not use marijuana, cocaine, exstasy or opiates we have to fight prohibition and the problems it creates. The “War on Drugs” directly supports the Taliban, the RAF rebels in Colombia, American gangs and underworld. It drives everything underground where it festers untreated and unaddressed. The “War on Drugs” wastes valuable resources that could be used to address the problems of drug abuse. It creates criminals where it needn’t. A fifth of our prison population are there for drug offenses. We have to replace this with sanity or the “War” could turn on us and our chosen “intoxicant” at anytime.