(Editorial team / animated pic: runwayml / Study: Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) in cooperation with foreign institutes of the same kind, 2025/26)
Maps like the one above sometimes tell us more than entire studies. At first glance, it reduces Europe to colours – red, blue, with a few undecided transitions in between. But behind these colours lies one of the hardest statistics of all: premature mortality. This means falling ill and dying early, usually before the age of 75, not as a matter of fate, but because of preventable risks. Lifestyle, diet, social circumstances – all of this is written into this map. Alcohol consumption, too. And which alcohol is consumed.
The red and dark-red zones show where this premature mortality is particularly high. The geographical concentration is striking: large parts of Eastern Europe, but also eastern Germany. Regions where men and women (the latter to a lesser extent) die disproportionately early, where risks are not mitigated but intensified. Opposite them are the blue zones – southern France, Spain, Italy, large parts of the Mediterranean region. Here, premature mortality is significantly lower, in some cases dramatically so.
And this is exactly where the real observation that interests us begins. Because this map is not an alcohol study. It says nothing directly about wine, consumption or abstinence. And yet it shows a pattern that cannot be ignored: where wine is part of everyday life, where it is understood not as an exception but as an accompaniment to food, this form of premature mortality occurs less frequently. Not never – but significantly less often.
This does not mean that wine makes you healthy. Such a simplification would not only be wrong, but precisely the kind of oversimplification that we are currently viewing critically in other debates. What this map suggests instead is a connection with lifestyle. Here, wine is less a cause than an indicator. A sign of something larger: regular meals, social integration, a different relationship with pleasure and moderation.
It becomes interesting where this pattern breaks down. Eastern Austria and Hungary, for example – both regions with a pronounced wine culture – nevertheless lie in the red areas. An indication that wine alone compensates for nothing. If the diet is one-sided, if smoking plays a greater role, if social or economic factors predominate, then the potential benefits of moderate wine consumption do not take effect. Then a cultural element does not become a protective factor, but at best background noise.
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At the same time, it would be too simplistic to construct a moral hierarchy from this. There are also people ;klnjljlhjlhlhjlhlj in the blue regions who do not drink wine – and nevertheless grow very old. Conversely, there are enough wine drinkers in 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 would suggest. The difference lies not solely in the glass, but in the context in which it stands. Is drinking done to accompany something – or to compensate? Is alcohol part of a meal – or does it replace one? Is enjoyment embedded – or isolated?
That is the point: not that the South gets “everything right” and the East gets “everything wrong”, but that ways of life leave their mark over the long term – on bodies, in statistics, in colours on a map. Wine is part of this, but only part.