Binge drinking and its tragic consequences are very much in the mind of French politicians and health specialists. Unfortunately in order to reduce binge drinking, French authorities target the wine industry more than the spirits industry. Studies show clearly that young people get drunk in night clubs on cocktails based on spirits and not on wine.

A recent report on the prevention of binge drinking and alcohol related problems among the young people show that education is the best prevention. We already talked about the various possible opinions on the delicate subject of wine education: is it better to let young people taste a drop of wine in their early age like it is still done in many French families where wine is part of the lifestyle? Or is it better to just forbid alcohol in any form until adulthood? The debate is till going on and there is no certain answer.

That’s why a report signed by Prof. Jean-Robert Pitte, former President of the prestigious Sorbonne in Paris and Jean-Pierre Coffe is rather interesting. The report  states clearly universities should serve wine in their restaurants and educate students on wine. Both men recommend that wine tastings be organized in universities and university restaurants. The proposal makes sense if one takes into account that students from international business schools, such as our HEC or INSEAD, have wine tasting clubs open to their students.  Members of those clubs organize tastings and events with wine professionals. Wine is then considered as a cultural product, part of a highly elegant lifestyle. We are very far from binge drinking! The Ministry of Education, Valerie Pecresse, already ruled out the opportunity.

What’s good? What’s wrong? Education is the key to a better understanding of cultural values. Wine is part of the history of most European countries. Young people should be introduced to wine during their studies.  The wine industry, with its long history and economical importance in our troubled times, is not explained in any geography or history course. What’s wrong with our educational system?

France is currently debating a law on how to save its health coverage system and prevent various costly diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular accidents and so on. First culprit: wine consumption. I suppose drinking a glass of whiskey a day or a glass of vodka is much better for your health!

Whatever the culprit or the intentions of the government behind this targeting of the wine industry, I suspect France doesn’t to find the right answer to the problem of binge drinking among young people. The answer is called: education. In countries where drinking wine is not denounced as a crime, alcoholism decreased while wine consumption increased. Weird? Not so much! Education was the key word. Young children learned how wine was made, how it was part of their history, their culture and their traditions, that it was part of a high quality lifestyle. Grown up, they knew to choose wine, consume it with moderation and appreciate it for what it was: the result of a difficult work done by people dedicated to a high quality product.

This is so true that some French people are at the origin of very original and innovative ideas. The small but rising Chaors appellation is one of them. Its Marketing Director, Jeremy Arnaud, launched last year the Malbec Academy in partnership for the Wine MBA program of the Dijon Business School, under the direction of Pr. Joëlle Brouard. Each year, the students spend a week in Cahors to get both a theoretical and practical knowledge of the Cahors region and wines: in the morning, they follow seminars on the international strategy of the Cahors appellation and brainstorm with the speakers on various subjects. In the afternoon, they visit properties and meet producers and negociants. To complete this “splash course”, each student is invited to spend the week with the family of a producer or a negociant.

The program takes place from March 23rd to March 27th in Cahors. I’ll be one of the keynote speakers among many others: Jérémy Arnaud, Marketing Director of the Cahors Appellation (UIVC), Pr. Joëlle Brouard and Pr. Jean-Guillaume Ditter, authors of a comparative study on Cahors and Chablis; the journalist Jérôme Baudouin for his comparative study on Cahors and Australia, Pr. Valérie Olvier on agricultural management; Pr. Jean-Christian Tulet author of a documentary on Cahors wines; Franck Lederer, Financial Director of the Taillan Group, to mention only a few.

This initiative shows how education and not repression is the best way to answer the problem.

A few years ago, the French Paradox thrilled Americans (and French as well): by drinking a glass of wine a day and eating some olive oil, a lot of fruit and vegetable, fish (rather than meat), men and women could stay healthy for many years and avoid the dreaded and dreadful cardiovascular disease. And now here is the bad news: one glass of wine a day will cause cancer! The study by France’s National Cancer Institute (INCA) says that consuming just a 125ml glass of wine increases the chance of developing mouth, larynx, esophagus, colon-rectum and breast cancer by 168%.

Who should we trust? Europeans have been drinking wine for centuries with their meals. Wine is part of our culture and tradition. Poets, writers, musicians, painters celebrated its history, beauty and positive influence on Western civilization. We, Europeans, are blessed with the beautiful landscapes of our wine countries: travel along the gorgeous Rhone Valley, cross the hills and the valleys of Burgundy, admire the fabulous landscape of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire painted by Cézanne near Aix-en-Provence and now the place of one of our Controlled Appellation areas. More South, did you go to Rioja in Spain or in Tuscany in Italy?

As soon as this report of the INCA was published, a general outcry was heard all over France. Wine consumers expressed their disbelief: wine is not bad for your health – certainly less than all the chemicals, salt and fat in processed food sold freely in every supermarket. Forums, blogs, answers to articles expressed the same irritation to the dumb propaganda. Respected physicians and researchers published answers to the study, showing how the data were manipulated by the authors of the INCA study. They contested its results and conclusions. Vintners are considering suing the National Institute of Cancer for “misleading information” and for damaging their image and business.

Why all this noise? This week the French Parliament will discuss a new law on alcohol: how to prevent binge drinking by young people, advertising wine on Internet, suppress the “open bars” (which will outlaw all wine fairs, public tastings and tastings in vineyards), how to save money by avoiding dangerous behaviour such as drinking a glass of wine. When is the French government going to prevent us from crossing a street, shaking hand with a colleague or a friend (hands are the most common vector of contamination when you sneeze or cough) or forcing us to exercise 3 hours a day after work? All for our good, of course!

Let’s be serious: as grown-ups and responsible human beings, we have the right to our own privacy. We have the right to decide what kind of lifestyle we want to live without interference of our government. We are very privileged to be living in countries at peace and rich enough (even with the current crisis) to worry about health and prevention. Does it give the right to our government to decide if I should have or not a glass of wine or a piece of meat? I don’t think so. I think our money would be much better spent to help better causes.

If we believe all our governments, every citizen in every country drinks too much! The UK imagined a more “subtle” way to make people feel guilty by starting a campaign on how much they recycle glass!

You feel good because you recycle and there is a little spy counting the bottles you put in the bin. This a very devious way to “help” people control their drinking. Maybe I’m a little hard on the campaign but the explanation of decanter.com doesn’t convince me: “A new £1m poster campaign (pictured) by drinks industry lobby group The Drinkaware Trust focuses not on typical ‘binge drinkers’ but on middle class drinkers for whom a glass of wine with dinner becomes three or four. The campaign aims to persuade drinkers into cutting back by pointing out how many bottles they take to recycling each week. “

It seems that British couples are more likely to drink 5 times a week and exceed the reasonable 2 glasses a day for women and 3 to 4 glasses a day for men. “A lot of couples don’t realise if they are sharing a bottle of wine between them then it takes them into the area where if they did it consistently it’s putting their health at risk”, Trust chairman Derek Lewis said to Decanter.

Why am I skeptical? Because every country has a scapegoat as wine is concerned. Nobody wants to stop the citizens to drink – well, not really but if they could stop drinking, it would be better. It seems there is no end in making wine lovers feel guilty! But recycling… this is a new one!

Binge drinking, underage drinking, drunk driving are topics making the news a lot in the beginning of this summer. Is it because the season makes everybody more relaxed and willing to have a drink to fight the heat of the season? I don’t know, but whatever the reason I read a lot about this important topic. It comes back to educating young people on wine, alcohol and, very interestingly, their parents, as a recent initiative showed.

Beam Global Spirits & Wine, Inc. partnered with the Century Council’s educational campaign, “Girl Talk.” The Century Council, a not-for-profit organization funded by distillers and dedicated to fighting drunk driving and underage drinking, held two “Girl Talk” initiatives in the month of June 2008 to help mothers start the dialog with their teenage daughters about the dangers of underage drinking. A recent survey by The Century Council revealed that nearly half of all mothers think underage drinking is acceptable under some circumstances. The survey found also that mothers of teenage daughters underestimate the occurrence of underage drinking among their own daughters and misjudge the seriousness of the issue. The Council created a website to encourage the conversation, between mothers and daughters on underage drinking, as well as the website to inform their daughters on the danger of drinking.

The partnership of Beam Global Spirits & Wine with this initiative is in the line of the group’s strategy of preventing over drinking, drunk driving and underage drinking through its drink smart® responsibility platform.

This initiative is quite welcome as a lot of parents are occasional drinkers and might not have the understanding that wine and alcohol are cultural products, needing to be consumed with moderation and requiring the exercise of a better judgment. This program should be developed in many countries where underage drinking is very often the consequence of the lack of awareness and education of the parents on wine and alcohol.

The European press – whether on line or off line – on the wine business in Europe gives the readers very mixed signals on the state of the industry. I’d like to try – “try” being the key word – to sort out what I read lately and what it means in comparison with the “New World” wine industry.

First of all, today is the opening day of the famous “Futures” week in Bordeaux. Journalists and wine professionals gathered to taste the 2007 vintage still in barrels and that will be on the market at the end of 2009. This tasting will allow importers and buyers to set a price for those expensive and luxury bottles of wine – usually between 30 to a few hundreds euros for the most famous names (Haut-Brion, Palmer, Petrus and other Yquem). Those estates represent hardly 5% of the Bordeaux wine market: there are thousands of other properties whose wines will be sold between 2 to 10 euros for the luckiest.

Surfing on the wave of those luxury wines are a few upscale on line wine stores, such as 1855.com introduced on the Paris stock exchange and vins-fins.com (fine-wines.com). Both companies just released their new projects: expanding their business by opening their catalog to international fine wines. They might very well succeed because the wines they sell are the very symbol of a lifestyle full of elegance and classicism.

At the same time, France, Italy and Great Britain are campaigning against alcohol consumption. “Alcohol” is the key word. There is a strong confusion, in the mind of the law makers, between wine, beers and spirits, all labeled “alcohol” and demonized. In France, the “Evin” law prohibits advertising on any kind of alcohol, including wine, in the press and on TV. The law is used by a very strong and active network of anti-alcohol lobbyists, subsidized by… the French government. This lobby won two court cases lately: one against Heineken that had to close its French site (by so, making all French wine sites and blogs illegal) and an other one, against a newspaper who published an article recommending a few Champagne brands before the holidays (what about freedom of the press and freedom of speech?). At the same time, Champagne wines are so much in demand that a law included more villages in the Champagne “Controlled Appellation” area. In Italy, a law against wine (this link was provided by my friend of OpenWineConsorsortium, Ronald) might be passed by the Parliament. In Great Britain, one of the most important markets for imported wines, a campaign against drinking was recently launched to prevent “binge drinking” and female consumption. “Binge drinking” is a real and true concern for everybody since it affects mostly young people: they get badly drunk in the evening – so much as they can’t stand on their feet anymore or are getting very violent. Women are a totally different case: they are the buyers of wine and food for the family and as such are very much targeted by marketers, producers and retailers. They are also – except for a few of very young women who sometimes join the “binge drinking” crowd – moderate drinkers. Unfortunately recent medical studies, in UK and in the US, linked alcohol consumption to breast cancer: more than one glass of alcohol a day could increase the risk of breast cancer. Worse, in England, Dr. Janet Treasure identified a new female drinking pattern, the drinkoresia: women are drinking without eating to compensate the calories taken with the alcoholic beverage. The damages done to the stomach are very fast and deep, which is a subject of concern for public health.

After the worries and the horror stories, the dream: Spain made wine a part of their patrimonial history and just allowed 32 millions of euros to support the export of Spanish wines. Spain wants to become the n.1 exporter in the world. By doing so, Spain joins the club of “proactive” countries, such as Australia or California – wine producing areas giving themselves the financial and human means to develop their wine industry.

What kind of logic can we find in this contradictory information coming from wine producing or loving countries? There is a confusion between wine and spirits: wine is not as strong as spirits in alcohol contents (even in warmer countries); it is part of a lifestyle and a cultural subject. Young men and women are not getting drunk on wine in bars and night clubs but on hard liquors and cocktails. Law makers should be educated about what wine is about: when we educate our young people, we should also educate our legislators and other people who think they know about wine better than the professionals. Those countries need a strong wine lobby to protect its interests.

On the other hand, those countries are also producing the most exclusive and expensive wines: the most famous brands are from France and Italy (as well as Spain). Those brands won’t have any problem to keep selling but by promoting repressive policies, France and Italy are badly hurting the lesser brands and producers. Whether expensive or cheaper, good wines are the ambassadors of their country of origin. Do our governments really want to destroy part of our history and culture? I bet they don’t but they don’t really know what they’re talking about. Without lessening the dangers of overdrinking, they should consider wine as a beautiful story shared all over the world by millions of amateurs.