Ever since the battle over the first official French “Défi de Janvier” in 2020, when President Macron dropped public funding for the campaign under industry pressure, Dry January has a become a focus for vignerons’ anxiety over changing French drinking habits.
An open letter from Gard producers last year sums up the mood about “this initiative which, under the cover of encouraging controlled alcohol consumption, promotes abstinence.” A pessimistic Bordeaux-focused piece by John Lewis-Stempel recently echoed this view, blaming a “bourgeois, technocratic elite” for the drop in French wine drinking.
The French drank an annual average of at least 105 litres of wine a head as recently as 1965, and 160 liters in 1935; today it’s under 40 liters. Around a fifth of adults don’t drink at all: last year the nation’s first store devoted to non-alcoholic drinks, Le Paon Qui Boit, opened in Paris.
Worse, a report last autumn by radio network RTL found that 38% of French people never drink wine, and that consumption of red had plunged by almost a third in the previous decade. The survey confirmed French youth’s preference for beer and cocktails, a trend long bemoaned by the wine industry.
A similar unease stalks America’s wine producers just now. An influential survey last month found that wine consumption among under-35s has fallen yet again – in part thanks to health concerns over alcohol. Rob Macmillan’s annual State of the US Wine Industry report provoked a gloomy column from New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov.
French governments have been trying for years to cut the nation’s boozing. Back in 1991 the Loi Évin tightened the rules on alcohol advertising. Even in the 1950s, government posters urged, “Santé, sobriété: jamais plus d’un litre de vin par jour”. (Health, sobriety: never drink more than a liter of wine per day.)
The message now is much tougher. Last month a government TV ad aired showing French people toasting each other at various jolly gatherings – “Santé!” – while a voiceover scolded, “La bonne santé n’a rien à voir avec l’alcool.”
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