WELLNESS
Which is a wild statement for someone who likes to invent cocktails, indulge in a Friday post work champagne and enjoys a sundowner more than a pigeon enjoys a packet of crisps. But here we are folks, and do you know what, we're not mad about it.
Before we get into the details, we have to be honest with you, alcohol has been in a slow decline for us since we got a Whoop at Christmas. For anyone looking to change their health, a Whoop when you follow what it tells you, is life changing. Gone are the days of late nights and eating too close to bedtime. And with it, alcohol was cut down too. Because nothing sobers you up faster than seeing a red recovery after days of green. But we're not the only ones who are sans alcohol and we don't think that the increasing numbers of non-drinkers or at least mostly abstainers are solely down to Whoop alone.
Last year the world drank 2.7% less wine than the year before, which seems like nothing until you add that it's down 14% since 2018 and that Italy, which more or less invented the concept of a glass of wine with lunch, dropped their consumption by 9.4% in the last year alone.
So if it's not everyone wearing a Whoop strap that's caused it, then what is it?
Maybe Red Wine Isn't So Good
Everyone's uncle at a party would tell you that a glass of red is good for the heart. The Italians drank it daily and lived to ninety. Big alcohol did the rest, and we were all happy to believe it without question.
Then the WHO went and published a statement saying there is no safe amount of alcohol, full stop, and reminded everyone that it's been classified a Group 1 carcinogen for decades, sitting in the same category as asbestos 😳 and tobacco. The bit that really landed was that the WHO reckons half of all alcohol-related cancers in Europe come from light and moderate drinking. To put that into perspective, this is the two glasses on a Friday kind of drinking, which is most of us.
And it worked. Gallup, who've been polling people since 1935 so they know their shiz, found that only 54% of US adults now say they drink at all, and the ones who do have gone from four drinks a week to under three. For a nation that loves a drink and has a whiskey decanter in the office, that's a big deal.
Gen Z Are Mostly Abstainers
Gen Z drinking is down 25% in four years and it wasn't high to begin with. The most interesting explanation we heard is that whilst older generations drank to escape reality (we can't deny that), Gen Z want the opposite. They stay sober "to stay in the room" present rather than absent and fully aware of how they're coming across. Getting drunk on a date now reads as a bad strategic decision rather than a good story.
There's also a less flattering theory. In-person socialising has collapsed, we all know it. The average time spent with friends fell from around 30 hours a month in 2003 to 10 by 2020 and it's worst of all for the under-24s. Alcohol is largely a social drug. Fewer nights out means less drinking. Not really a wellness triumph.
Sober Became The Norm
This is the one that changed fastest. Not so long ago, turning down a drink meant an evening of interrogation or inventing a course of antibiotics. Now there are alcohol-free bottle shops, zero-proof menus that go beyond cranberry juice with a sad lime and enough people talking about being sober that it's more a badge of honour than likely to get a side eye.
Alcohol-free beer, wine and spirits are a fast growing market, and nearly all of that growth is zero-alcohol rather than low-alcohol. Nobody's looking to take the edge off. They want the drink without the drink.
And Our Thoughts?
Honestly we've never felt better. The puffiness that we didn’t know was there has gone, our skin looks better - not dermatology dr better but just better and we're waking up with almost always a green recovery. Sleep is a big improvement and who doesn't love a good night's sleep? Even if you get your eight hours after a few glasses of wine, you can still wake up feeling like you had one too many, not in a Steven Bartlett way but more a "not feeling our best" way.
Weirdly we're not craving a cold glass of rosé. And if we had, we'd probably have drunk it. Which is why we're not about to stop writing about cocktails, and why this isn't a piece telling anyone to quit. We'll still make the basil one if we feel like it. We'll still have champagne on a Friday just because. We'll still choose a mocktail over a cocktail if we're not in the mood for tipsy. The difference is that it's now a decision rather than a default and that folks, is exactly the life balance we are looking for.