I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first read the headline, I shook my head and tried again. But it was true. Some obviously misguided health authority in France had announced plans to conduct a ‘Dry January’ campaign heightening public awareness of the ills of alcohol…
Wine is as much a part of French Culture as the French
Language and the Roman Catholic Church..
The idea was to make a positive impact on the ongoing problem of excessive drinking in France, and all the other problems that go with it. French national health agency Santé Publique France said it had plans to hold a Dry January campaign as soon as this coming year. But French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron stepped in quickly and quashed the idea. Macron’s office declined to provide any background or reasons for the cancellation of the abstinence program, but it’s believed Macron was concerned about the potential backlash from both drinkers and the French Wine Industry, which is worth (US)$ billions a year in global exports and employs more than half a million workers.
Santé Publique walks it back
Health Minister Agnes Buzyn was quoted, in The Times, as saying, “a campaign is being developed […] but that’s not necessarily the format we’ll decide on.” A meeting to further discuss the plan is now scheduled for February. No date has been mentioned for a revised version of the campaign itself.
Relief in the vineyards
Maxime Toubar, Chairman of the Champagne Winegrowers’ Association and Co-chairman of the Champagne Marketing Board, had lunch with Macron last week, and reported to the wine industry website Vitisphere, “The President assured us that there would be no Dry January,” he said. “You can let people know that there will be no ‘Dry January,’ [Macron] told us.”
Not without precedent
The proposed Dry January program was not something that Santé Publique whipped up out of thin air. A similar campaign in the UK was billed by its organizers as a big success. But opinions on that point were at best mixed. And it sure wasn’t going to fly in France.
“It’s as though you tell drivers to go at 30 m.p.h. for one month of the year and as fast as they like the rest of the time,” Christophe Château, Communications Director for the Interprofessional Committee of Bordeaux Wines, was quoted as saying. “We fight binge-drinking and total abstinence and call for reasonable drinking all year long.”
The French National Association of Prevention of Alcoholism and Addictions estimates Alcohol is still responsible for 41,000 ‘avoidable deaths’ annually in France – even though per capita wine consumption in France has dropped 28 percent over the past 20 years.
~ Maggie J.