UK wine consumption: glass half empty or too full?

    The health minister of the UK government, Dawn Primarolo, has announced that 125ml wine glasses may be made available on a mandatory basis in bars and restaurants to those consumers who want the choice, as part of an effort to improve the population's health and drinking habits. While this appears to be a positive step, it does not address the cultural root cause of problem drinking.

    The UK government plans to make smaller wine glasses the norm to improve the nation's health.

Under the government's new plans, on-trade venues would be compelled to offer 125ml wine servings, although they would still be free to offer 175ml and 250ml glasses. The initiative seems to be aimed at the UK's middle aged, middle income female consumers, whose consumption of alcohol has been growing most quickly in recent years.

    The measure appears to be a positive health move despite the obvious connotations of nanny state intervention. According to the 2008 National Audit Office report regarding alcohol's effect upon the NHS, one in four adults in Britain drinks excessive amounts of alcohol, which can be prejudicial to their health.

    While wine glasses have been getting bigger, the wine poured into them has been getting stronger, with 14% alcohol by volume (ABV) becoming the norm, up from 12%: a proportional increase of 17% in strength rather than just a nominal 2% rise.

    Given that people tend to consume what is put in front of them, making it mandatory to offer smaller glasses could be beneficial, although this raises logistical problems. The initiative may fail if the government does not enforce a proportional, straight-line pricing policy, as consumers seeking value for money might otherwise opt for larger measures. Offering 'wine doggy bags', as venues have in France since the advent of tougher drink-driving laws, could encourage consumers to feel more positive about self-imposed control rather than feeling compelled to finish a bottle. A more effective ploy may be to use embarrassment or social acceptability to modify behavior, by only offering smaller measures in appealing wine glasses while serving larger quantities in less attractive half-pint glasses.

    The initiative also disregards the important role that bar workers can and should play in monitoring the sobriety of consumers: as some staff feel pressured by their employers to serve drinks when they consider doing so to be irresponsible, a more productive strategy might be to find a way to alleviate this problem. The plan's most obvious shortcoming, however, is that it ignores the fact that consumers now more often drink at home, where serving measures are subject to less scrutiny. In order to improve the nation's health, the UK's drinking culture has to be changed, not just the size of wine glasses.