Dry January: origins, current affairs and prospects
The challenge of the Dry January, not drinking alcohol during the first month of the year, began as a movement in 2013, but it is older than people think. A month of national sobriety is witnessed as early as 1942, when Finland instituted sober january to support the war effort against the Soviet Union.
The modern version dates back to 2011, when a British girl, Emily Robinson, decided to give up alcohol to prepare for a marathon, which she discovered several benefits from: more energy, quality sleep and an overall improvement in well-being. Her personal experience turned into a collective reflection when she joined 'Alcohol Change Uk,' a charity committed to raising awareness of the harm caused by alcohol, which led to the birth of Dry January in 2013, with 4,000 participants.
By 2024, membership had surpassed 215 thousand, while by now millions of people around the world adopt the practice of abstaining from drinking for a month, a growth in which even celebrities contribute to the popularity of the movement and which testifies to the interest in a healthier lifestyle and a conscious relationship with alcoholic beverages.
The benefits, in addition to those already mentioned and later certified by a study at the University of Sussex, consist of lasting change at the physical level and saving money during the abstinence month; on the other hand, a study in the British scientific journal 'The Lancet-Discovery Science' in 2021 points out that temporary abstinence does not necessarily reduce alcohol consumption in casual drinkers.
While reactions to the campaign in the United Kingdom and the United States have been generally positive, in Europe, particularly in France, Dry January has become a cause for political and cultural confrontation, as for many French people giving up a glass of wine at the dinner table is an affront to national culture and tradition.
In addition to territorial initiatives that have been passed down for generations, such as in Italy in the Marian month of May, mention should also be made of the American sober curious movement from the TV series 'Emily in Paris,' active especially in October. The soft drink market has also prompted more and more people to question their relationship with alcohol.
As always in such cases there are also contrary responses, see the come over october, the campaign devised by US wine writer Karen MacNeil to counter the growing anti-alcohol movement and promote the convivial nature of wine.
The decline in wine consumption
In this regard, Alessandro Torcoli, director of 'Civilization of Drinking,' told 'The Post', "Since the 1980s, wine is no longer a food and is almost no longer drunk at lunch and is drunk less at dinner: it is becoming something hedonistic and intellectual," perhaps the main explanation for the crisis in the sector, while at the same time more and more wine shops are opening and initiatives such as tastings, sommelier courses and wineries open during the grape harvest are proliferating.
The data say that wine consumption, except for the increase seen during the lockdown, is falling year by year. The reasons range from global warming, which leads to drinking less and less red wine because it has an increasingly higher alcohol content, to a new way of experiencing sociality, due to the economic difficulties of recent years, as people go to restaurants less and on those occasions tend to order a glass rather than a bottle of wine, new habits that weigh on the choice of type of wine, with white rediscovered recently as a luxury and quality product. Not to mention overproduction, rising raw material costs, which leads to a general increase in costs, and, linking us back to climate change, the emergence of new places of production at the expense of traditional ones.
The collapse in wine consumption over the past 70 years-from 125 liters per head on average in the 1960s to 55.8 in 2010-is due to the different way of drinking it, as people always drink cheap wine, but more high-quality wine on occasional occasions.
This is also why some producers are trying new avenues, such as the production of dealcolati wines (i.e., with an alcohol content of less than 0.5 degrees), legal in Italy since last December, to meet the needs of worlds such as the Arab world, so much so that the no/low sector, alcohol-free or low-alcohol drinks, had sales in 2023 double what they were 5 years earlier.
Other possible countermeasures are to focus on wine tourism and environmental sustainability, while it does not pay to have a simplified way of consuming wine, see the lack of success of wine in cans in Italy, a reality in which from easy and immediate consumption we are moving toward consumption that is increasingly complex and linked to certain specific circumstances.
The cab service for drunken teenagers in discos.
This does not mean that road accidents related to excessive alcohol consumption are no longer present. In this sense, Italy has made significant progress in recent years in preventing alcohol-related accidents and promoting road safety.
One of the most recent and significant measures, dating back to August 2023, was the establishment of a cab service to take drunk teens home from nightclubs. The goal is to provide a safe and responsible solution to ensure that young people can get home without an accident after an alcoholic evening.
This measure has received wide support from local authorities, law enforcement, and road safety organizations, although road safety cannot be delegated solely to the authorities.