(Claude Auguste)
Dry January is approaching. Another year, another attempt, another effort to declare an entire month a zone of moral purification. What began in 2024 as a pop-cultural crusade – against alcohol in general and wine in particular – could, this January, lose some of its impact for the first time. The first wave of campaigning was loud, shrill and missionary: a perfect alliance between two milieus that otherwise have nothing in common. On the one hand, religiously charged abstinence preachers who define alcohol as a moral danger. On the other, the hyper-conscious wellness faction of urban bourgeois society, which declares asceticism a virtue. Both have found in wine an opponent well suited to symbolic politics: too old, too free, too sensual, too difficult to control.
Yet something could shift this January. There are signs that many people no longer fully subscribe to the narrative of wine as a societal problem. Interpretive authority is crumbling. Weariness is growing. The self-aggrandisement of recent years – wine as an enemy, enjoyment as a cause for suspicion – seems worn out. Because people can only tolerate campaigning zeal to a limited extent. And no one discovers in abstinence an identity that lasts longer than the calendar month framing it.
Of course: many people will reduce their consumption in 2026 too. That is also good and sensible. But there are worlds between a thoughtful pause and a moral mission. And that is precisely where distance emerges. The question arises as to whether the war on wine can still be explained without becoming shrill. Without exaggeration. Without threats. Without attempting to devalue enjoyment culturally.
The coming debate will probably become loud once again. But whether it still has the same force as in previous years remains to be seen. Because people realised long ago what lies behind the messages: not a genuine health debate, but a power struggle over interpretive authority. Not risk awareness, but control. Not education, but indoctrination.
Wine will endure this January not because of heroic defence, but because of normality. Because enjoyment does not disappear. Because culture remains. And because, despite being willing to change, there is one thing people find very difficult to tolerate: moral instruction without taste.