(Editorial team / animated image: runwayml / Study: Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) in collaboration with similar foreign institutes, 2025/26)
Maps such as the one above sometimes tell us more than entire studies. At first glance, they reduce Europe to colours – red, blue, with a few indecisive transitions in between. Yet behind these colours lies one of the most stark indicators of all: premature mortality. This refers to falling ill and dying prematurely, usually before the age of 75, not as a matter of fate, but due to preventable risks. Lifestyle, diet, social circumstances – all of these are reflected in this map. Alcohol consumption too. And the type of alcohol consumed.
The red and dark red zones show where this premature mortality is particularly high. What is striking is the geographical concentration: large parts of Eastern Europe, but also eastern Germany. These are regions where men and women (the latter to a lesser extent) die disproportionately early, where risks are not mitigated but exacerbated. In contrast are the blue zones – southern France, Spain, Italy and large parts of the Mediterranean region. Here, excess mortality is significantly lower, in some cases dramatically so.
And this is precisely where the key observation that interests us begins. For this map is not a study of alcohol. It says nothing directly about wine, consumption or abstinence. And yet it reveals a pattern that cannot be ignored: where wine is part of everyday life, where it is seen not as an exception but as an accompaniment to a meal, this form of premature mortality occurs less frequently. Not never – but significantly less often.
That does not mean that wine makes you healthy. Such a oversimplification would not only be wrong, but precisely the sort of oversimplification that we are currently viewing critically in other debates. What this map suggests, rather, is a link to lifestyle. Here, wine is less a cause than an indicator. A sign of something bigger: regular meals, social integration, a different relationship with pleasure and moderation.
Things get interesting where this pattern breaks down. Eastern Austria and Hungary, for example – both regions with a strong wine culture – nevertheless fall into the red zones. This suggests that wine alone cannot compensate for other factors. If one’s diet is unbalanced, if smoking plays a greater role, or if social or economic factors dominate, then the potential benefits of moderate wine consumption do not apply. In such cases, a cultural element does not provide protection, but is, at best, a mere sideshow.
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At the same time, it would be too simplistic to construct a moral hierarchy from this. Even in the blue regions, there are people ;klnjljlhjlhlhjlhlj who do not drink wine – and yet live to a very old age. Conversely, there are plenty of wine drinkers in the red regions who are affected by these risks. The map is not proof, but an indication. A pattern that recurs, but does not explain everything. Cannot explain everything.
What it does make very clear, however, is that culture and everyday life play a greater role than many current debates suggest. The difference lies not merely in the glass, but in the context in which it is found. Is it drunk to accompany a meal – or to compensate for something? Is alcohol part of a meal – or does it replace it? Is enjoyment embedded – or isolated?
That is the point: not that the South does ‘everything right’ and the East ‘everything wrong’, but that ways of life become ingrained over the long term – in bodies, in statistics, in colours on a map. Wine is part of this, but only part of it.