Yes, I was shocked at Adrian Chiles. But if the ‘wine police’ try to stop me enjoying a glass with dinner...

NO, I don’t drink beer and never have, not even in my student days when my only tipple was cider. I simply don’t like it. Ditto cocktails. I’d estimate that, at most (and only because I was persuaded to ‘go on, try one’), I have had three or four cocktails in my life, most recently in a Paris hotel a few weeks ago when the persuader was my son.

I can’t for the life of me remember what was in it – apart from something gingery because I love ginger – but I might as well have been downing a glass of too-sweet lemonade. Nor do I like spirits. I have been known to have the very occasional gin and tonic in the summer, but, once again, I’m not pushed.

And all the pretentious nonsense that accompanies the drinking of gin these days would be enough to make me give it a wide berth, even if I craved the stuff.

To be honest, when I pitch up at Danns, my local pub at the harbour in Greystones, maybe once every ten days or so, to join a couple of my late husband’s friends for a quick teatime drink, I generally drink tonic water. Yes, just tonic water. And I love it.

I also love wine, my other drink of choice for the past 30-odd years.

Berating

I’m not a connoisseur by any means. I simply know what I like. And my tastes also change. I used to be a Merlot woman, but now I drink more white than red.

If I do drink red these days I opt for a nice light Pinot Noir.

I’m also moving away from the ubiquitous Pinot Grigio – unless I’m in Venice, a place I spend a lot of time, and where you can get a very fine glass of local Pinot Grigio for around €3.

At home, nowadays, I have reverted to Sauvignon Blanc, or, occasionally, a fruity Riesling.

To have a glass of wine after a hard working day is a joy. To enjoy a few glasses at the weekend with friends is, well, one of the great pleasures of life.

I don’t have any hard and fast rules about when I drink wine. I go for weeks sometimes without any at all.

Generally, I don’t indulge on weekdays but tonight, for example, I am meeting a friend for a bite to eat and we will, inevitably, have a glass of wine. We might even have two.

God only knows what would happen to us, two adult women with minds of our own, if we dared to pour a third glass each.

To listen to all the latest statistics being released and to the general berating of women for daring to enjoy a few glasses of wine, you could be forgiven for thinking the sky would fall in and that myself and my friend would be carted off straight from the restaurant to the nearest A&E with acute liver failure.

Now of course, alcoholism is no joking matter. We all know that, as a nation, we have a serious problem with what my teetotal mother would still call ‘the demon drink’.

It endangers physical and mental health. It destroys the lives of those who can’t manage it in moderation and it devastates their families.

I know two marriages that have been torn asunder because of alcohol and another one that teetered on the edge for years because of it.

But I also know lots of couples who enjoy nothing better than to sit down to dinner together over a bottle of wine. It’s pleasurable. It’s relaxing. It’s fun.

After all, even Jesus of Nazareth seemed to have clocked that reality.

The importance of wine – and the best of wine at that – was certainly acknowledged by all on the day of that celebration in Cana. And what were he and his disciples drinking at the Last Supper?

Pleasurable

And yet all we seem to be doing nowadays – from the recent Global Burden of Disease Study which placed Irish women seventh in the world for daily alcohol consumption, to Adrian Chiles’s Drinkers Like Me programme that featured on BBC this week – is to focus on the doom and gloom that surrounds something that, for most people anyway, is a very pleasurable activity that enhances rather than destroys their lives.

Who among us, for example, drinks 100 units of alcohol a week as Adrian Chiles admits to having done? Or what’s the comparable statistic for any average person in their 50s when it comes to the relentlessness of their drinking?

Adrian Chiles says there hasn’t been a single day since the age of 15 when he hasn’t had a drink. How representative is that? Not at all is the answer.

I didn’t watch the Adrian Chiles programme. I’d already been bombarded with all the details and, quite frankly, why would I want to watch a programme about drinking that bears no resemblance to most people’s relationship with alcohol, and only seeks to shock and scaremonger?

Similarly, when I turned on the radio last week to find the global study being discussed and a medical consultant talking about liver damage in women I turned it straight off again.

Bombarded

Am I in denial? No, I’m not. Yet last Saturday night, after pouring myself a glass of wine, so bombarded with negativity had I been all week, that I suddenly wondered about the size of my own glass.

For if we believe all we hear, then most women, apparently, are drinking wine out of goldfish bowls, totally negating the notion that one glass equals one 100ml unit. And so the 14 units a week ‘rule’ goes out the window.

Well, no woman I know drinks wine out of huge glasses but, for my own satisfaction, I measured the size of mine. Just a smidgen over 100ml. Yes, I actually poured the wine into a measuring jug.

And as I looked at that lovely plummyred wine settling just above the 100ml mark, and was then thinking about checking out the size of another glass that I sometimes use, I suddenly heard my late husband’s voice in my head asking me what in the name of God I was doing? So I copped myself on.

Drinking red wine can benefit your health, we’ve been told. Drinking alcohol can take ten years off your life, we’ve also been warned. Well, do you know what? Life is for living. And while those who have deep-rooted problems with alcohol need to be helped to moderate or stop their drinking, most of us don’t.

And so for those of us for whom a few glasses of wine here and there is one of the great pleasures of life, can we please just be allowed to get on with it?

Or, as a friend said to me last week: ‘I can’t take any more of the preaching. Would they ever just go away and leave us alone.’

There’s only one response to that: Sláinte!