How Do The French Moderate?
As French cities burned in the spring of 2023 (trash cans and vehicles set on fire) during the protests over new legislation to raise the retirement age, one news reel played again and again on stations around the world…the image of a couple sitting at a café table, enjoying a glass of wine, while flames lick the streets at a short distance behind them.
Will nothing come between the French and their wine?
And how are they seemingly able to sip it, to enjoy it leisurely, to moderate it?
Or are they?
As an importer of French wines, and producer of Pinot noir in Oregon, (and even via the influence of French cuisine from my hometown of New Orleans), I was seduced by the idea of “drinking like the French.”
And many of my clients harbor this same gauzy, romantic notion.
(And this all served the French winemakers and importers like us, well. The US is the number one importer/consumer of French wines.)
I repeatedly tell my clients, women who are no longer happy with their relationship with alcohol, that curiosity and fascination are the essentials keys! Why? Because it makes the journey much more fun, and less personal - less about something any of us did “wrong.” When we’re in a state of curiosity and fascination, it takes us completely out of self-judgment.
So, let’s be exceptionally curious and question absolutely everything about our old beliefs and stories - such as “my life will be less fun without alcohol,” or beliefs like “the French can moderate.”
That’s my interest here. Just questioning. Because poking holes in these old stories leads to freedom.
Having owned a winery and French wine import company for twenty years, and having spent considerable time in Burgundy and Champagne with very close ties to small-family wine producers, and now more recently, spending half the year in Paris, I can share my perspective. And it’s a perspective that’s also informed by hours and hours of research about consumption and alcohol-related disease data in the US and Europe, plus anecdotal conversations with French friends, as well as Americans living in Paris, both in-person and via a Facebook group of American expats with 15,000 members.
Yet still, these observations are just my own. Is there a limit to the helpfulness of sweeping generalizations? Yes! And is an entire country hard to generalize about? Positively!
With that out of the way, let’s get into it.
Here’s what appears moderate about French drinking culture to me:
The French have a café culture rather than a bar culture. Outdoor café tables are arranged to sit with friends or to face the street or square and watch the world go by. That feels very different than the practice of bellying up to a bar.
Wine glasses at typical French cafés are small. I mean really, comically small. To us Americans, we might joke about the thimbleful of wine. Even in the US, the size of glasses has changed. Once on a big Zoom call, I held up my wedding crystal from almost 30 years ago - the 30-year-old wine glass was dwarfed by the more current glasses.
Here’s a cheeky one…service in France is not exactly brisk!! LOL, I challenge you to try to get several glasses fast at a happy hour in France! And it does seem like the French can draw out a glass of wine! (But often with a cigarette in hand. Maybe we could try picking up the habit of smoking to see if it slows our habit of drinking? 🤣)
Moderation is a prized virtue in France. From the time they are children, it appears to me that the French are taught to pay attention to how their body feels (“it’s hot today so we will eat cooling foods”), and to not “take” too much of anything. Moderation in what to eat, in how many compliments to give, in how expressive to be, in how much exercise to get, in how much self-improvement to take on, in everything! Up until recently, you rarely saw people in France eating while walking down the street. And you’re less likely to find French kids eating in front of the TV. We hosted a French teenager for the summer and he loved the American optimism and spirit. He was perplexed when we took him to Portland’s famous food carts. It all looks very “gras,” (very fatty) he said!!
Can I just say it…being overweight is far less socially acceptable so another powerful control on drinking in France is watching one’s figure.
Public drunkenness is not considered funny or normal. It’s embarrassing. Shameful. See #4. And even much more so for women.
The French have been more socialized to eat food with their wine. Really, food first. So the association of wine always with food starts very very young. When our daughter was 17, she was invited to an overnight with a bunch of French teens and the kids were adamant that they had to eat a meal of raclette (cheese and bread) if they were going to be drinking.
My American expat friends in Paris also reminded me of something else…it is customary in France to wait until all the guests have arrived before opening and serving the wine. That would cause a small riot or at least some angry guests in the US, wouldn’t it?
It definitely sounds leisurely. And polite, right? But is it really so moderate?
Wine consumption has fallen dramatically in France from the high in the 1960s of 120 liters of wine per capita per year, to now 47, but that is still up there.
According to figures from World Population Review of per capita consumption of pure ethanol, France (13th) is ahead of both the UK (20th) and the US (39th). (If that surprises you, I believe that would stem from more total adults drinking in France, while in the US there is a greater discrepancy with many adults abstaining altogether and other adults drinking more heavily).
Santé Publique France says 41,000 adults die annually (in a country of 67.5 million) from alcohol related disease, making it the second leading cause of preventable death after smoking. (In the US the number of alcohol-related deaths is 140,000 out of a total population of 332 million, making it the fourth leading cause of preventable death).
French health organizations have reported that one-third of the French drink too much. Santé Publique France advises no more than 10 glasses of wine per week, with a glass being no more than 10cl which is equivalent to only 3.4 ounces. (Try pouring that amount into your favorite wine glass to see if that amount is worth the headspace and trouble!) The French agriculture minister said a few years ago, “Wine isn’t an alcohol like the others,” to which the health minister responded with the stern rebuke, “The alcohol molecule in wine is exactly the same as those in any alcoholic drink.”
Starting in the 1990s in France, public health campaigns and public policy contributed to reducing consumption and the associated harms from alcohol. The French enforced strict drunk driving policies and passed strict laws prohibiting advertising of alcohol under many circumstances and never to children. A product cannot promote consumption nor can it state or imply that it will relax you, cause you to have fun or make you sexy. (Around that same time, governments in the UK and US were relaxing laws and tax policy so advertising of alcohol - including targeting women and youth - increased, and ABV (alcohol by volume) of products got higher. This article supports that idea, that advertising of spirits in the US surged in the early 2000s).
While France has always had a predominant wine culture, the popularity of cocktails and “Le Binging” have certainly arrived thanks to globalization. On the other hand, much like in the US, younger French people are less interested in wine and in alcohol in general and that has many in the government and the wine industry panicked and even proposing to implement wine appreciation studies in school. (Alcohol was served in French schools or parents sent up to a 1/2 liter in their child’s lunch until 1956 after which it was no longer allowed for students younger than 14, and was only officially prohibited from being served in high schools in 1981).
As in the US, in the last few years, the production and sales of sophisticated, non-alcoholic beverages is taking off in France. I was honored to be a guide of sorts for this phenomenon for an article that appeared in Forbes, entitled, Alcohol Free Drinking In Paris? It’s A Thing. Here’s Your Guide.
So if you ask me how is it that the French can moderate, I will say this:
I think a lot of that life-long French conditioning to associate alcohol with socializing and lingering with friends and less as a stress remedy makes a big difference. (And might the existence of a healthy social safety net make it a little easier to linger at a café, ie income taxes that pay for healthcare, retirement and free university?) And the impact from the prohibition on advertising alcohol can’t even be measured. Think of the trillions of gigabytes of images we’ve absorbed in the US from ads and pop culture of alcohol being depicted as THE solution, let alone wine memes.
And yet, a brain is a brain whether in France or anywhere else — so a drug like alcohol activates the brain’s reward pathway and fires up the neurotransmitter dopamine which says, let’s do this again (and again). Indeed, it turns out that habit forming things are….actually habit-forming!! 🤣 And a liver, brain and gut have to weather the impact of the ethanol no matter how it arrives in the body.
I WAS “drinking like a French person.” Wine only, with meals, socially, mindfully, cutting myself off. And that’s exactly how I developed a dependency! (Plus dry skin, occasional acid reflux, waking in the middle of the night beating up on myself, feeling tired, like I was on a hamster-wheel, disappointed in myself.) I feel so absolutely great now, that I wouldn’t dream of going back to “moderating.” (Check out my never-before-published before and after photos!!)
A couple of dear friends, French winemakers, appeared genuinely shocked, disappointed even, when they discovered that I was no longer drinking. But deeper into the conversation, she revealed that she sleeps very poorly due to drinking, and he confessed that he is now drinking rarely to try to lose twenty-five extra pounds.
Do we want to know how/if someone is moderating, or do we want to know if they feel GREAT?
And even more so, does it matter? The biggest shift came for me the day I truly understood that there was zero point to comparing my drinking to other people in the Oregon wine industry, in France, or anywhere else.
The only question worth asking was how do I (underlined) feel? And maybe would I feel better with a little less, or with none, for right now?
And lastly, it’s worth considering that what we admire (or romanticize) about the French “espirit” or “joie de vivre,” or a certain “je ne sais quoi” might have more to do with a quality of slowing down, taking time to enjoy oneself and the company of others, and to savor life, and less to do with the beverage in the glass.
Footnote:
You can watch this French broadcast, in English, for a quick look at French drinking culture through the decades, from footage of school children drinking wine in the cafeteria, to the alcohol lobby's recent successful fight to stop the government from supporting Dry January! Or this excellent article Americans Are Drinking As Much As During The Civil War/Hard Liquor Sales Are Up 60 Percent Since 1990s about consumption now and how US beer, wine and spirits companies win at competing for what they call “stomach share.”
For a little comic relief (a must-see, especially if you’re old enough to remember this commercial)….Ahhhhhh, the French Champagne!!…drunk outtakes of Orson Welles in the Paul Mason commercial.
Please share this post if you think it might be interesting to others, and book a free call if you’re ready to move the needle on this issue for good!
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Martha Wright is a New Orleans-born wine industry veteran turned sobriety/mindful drinking coach working in small groups and 1:1 in her own practice, Clear Power Coaching, as well as serving as Senior Coach within This Naked Mind. Using her background as a winemaker, and as a recipe-developer, right-hand and wrangler for Food Network chefs, her unique path to giving alcohol the pink-slip focuses on kicking up the lusciousness and fun in our lives (plus of course understanding the neuroscience of habits, uncovering unconscious beliefs, and honing coping tools). She splits her time between Paris, Portland, Oregon, and New Orleans where you can find her sleuthing out the best street-food markets, coffee shops and non-alcoholic venues, hosting NA meet-ups, or playing ping pong.