How to drink: Nordic or Med style?

In the popular imagination, the French and Spanish drink a glass of good red wine with their dinner of fresh cheese and vegetables every evening. The Danes and Finns stick to water all week and spend Friday night drinking highly-taxed beer until they can no longer walk.

These ideas of a north-south divide in drinking habits are about to come under the political spotlight, thanks to a new alcohol strategy from the European Commission.

Announcing the document’s publication last month, Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou described alcohol-related harm as an European problem that needed an EU strategy. Despite traditional cultural differences, he added, alcohol abuse "is a problem that is spreading: we don’t have the geographical and cultural barriers we used to have".

Before the last barriers fall and a final EU-wide strategy emerges, lobbyists have plenty to say about both sides of the north-south divide.

In the northern camp, the European wine industry committee (CEEV) is launching its own campaign to encourage more southern-style drinking habits around Europe.

"In Mediterranean countries, moderate alcohol consumption is a normal part of life," according to George Sandeman of the CEEV. "It contributes to life in general, a life that is healthy. There are opportunities to bring the best practices of Mediterranean consumption to the rest of Europe."

With this in mind the CEEV has won Commission approval to try out a ‘responsible consumption’ campaign based on lessons learnt in the south.

In Mediterranean countries, Sandeman explained, "per capita consumption is higher, but fewer drinks are consumed per occasion. In other parts of Europe you are talking about drinking in shorter time-frames, maybe weekends, and it tends to be heavy drinking".

"We want to change the culture…so it becomes unacceptable to consume inappropriately and abuse the product," he said.

The CEEV project aims to set up a wine information council with all the information on moderate consumption and wine in one place. It will also launch a campaign to discourage ‘binge drinking’ through information from doctors, local authorities, and wine tourism.

The project will eventually include all member states, starting later this month with France, Spain, Italy and Portugal, as well as northern drinkers Germany and the UK. By 2009, the CEEV hopes the whole wine sector will sign up to new wine communication standards promoting ‘responsible drinking’.

The CEEV knows there will be a lot of pressure to show that its project is the best way to tackle binge-drinking and alcohol-related health problems: the Commission has committed itself to review the situation in 2012 at the latest.

Public health campaigners, however, say southern-style drinking habits are far from ideal.

"Many medical problems come with high consumption," according to Michel Craplet of Eurocare, a lobby group whose members include several Scandinavian temperance groups. "If the north turns from northern to southern drinking patterns it will turn from social to medical problems," he said.

"Industry is not giving objective information on this," he added. "The south is starting to binge-drink too."

Eurocare and other public health activists were disappointed not to see the Commission propose tough alcohol-control measures in its strategy.

Instead of romanticising Mediterranean habits, now is the time for Europe to learn from its members in the north, says Craplet, a psychiatrist specialising in alcohol abuse and author of Consume with Moderation. "I hope problems will be solved by northern measures, like higher taxation and better control of marketing," he explained. At the same time, he added, alcohol education should be used to tackle social problems in the north.

So far industry groups other than the CEEV have not publicly come out in favour of either side of the debate.

Helmut Wagner of the industry-funded European Forum for Responsible Drinking said there was no sense in hoping Sweden or France has all the answers for all of Europe. "There are distinct differences between northern and southern drinking cultures: EU alcohol policy should reflect that," he added, suggesting that Kyprianou’s "cultural barriers", for now at least, remain in place.

In the popular imagination, the French and Spanish drink a glass of good red wine with their dinner of fresh cheese and vegetables every evening. The Danes and Finns stick to water all week and spend Friday night drinking highly-taxed beer until they can no longer walk.