Public attitudes toward alcohol – and wine in particular – have shifted sharply in recent years. Once seen as a cultural pleasure, woven into food, hospitality and social life, wine is now framed as a public health threat. “No safe level” has become the dominant message. But while alcohol risks are real, the story is not as simple as that slogan.
Firstly, “no safe level” is technically true for almost everything. There is no safe level of driving, no safe level of sun exposure, no safe level of eating bacon. Risk is part of life, and we manage it through context, moderation and behaviour. Alcohol is no different — yet the nuance has been stripped away.
Secondly, the science is often presented in a way that turns tiny risks into frightening headlines. Relative risk percentages are quoted without explaining the baseline, dramatizing modest increases in small risks. Population studies don’t separate moderate drinking from binge drinking, and blur correlation with causation. Thus the public is left with numbers that exaggerate harm and erase real differences between drinking patterns.
Public health researchers have long noted that alcohol risk depends heavily on pattern and context – something that rarely survives translation into public messaging. The goal is to reduce harm, but when the message becomes absolute – “any amount is dangerous” – it misleads as much as it informs. People end up believing that a single drink carries the same risk profile as chronic heavy consumption, which is simply not true.
Thirdly, the conversation has become moralised. Wine is framed not as a cultural and agricultural product but as a vice, and that shift reflects more than science. WHO alcohol messaging has been strongly shaped by Scandinavian temperance traditions that treat all drinking as harmful, regardless of pattern or context. That ideological tilt was mirrored in the United States, where the major NIHfunded MACH15 randomised study designed to test the real risks and potential benefits of moderate drinking was shut down before it began, because its findings might have challenged the “no safe level” narrative. When ideology overrides evidence, the distinction between harmful drinking and moderate consumption disappears, and the public is left with a moral message in scientific guise.
This is not an argument for minimising alcohol harm. The harms are real, and communities see them firsthand. But effective public health communication should help people understand how risk works, not simply warn that it exists. People can make informed decisions when given clear, contextual information. What they are getting instead is a slogan.
Effective public health communication should help people understand how risk works, not simply warn that it exists. People can make informed decisions when given clear, contextual information. What they are getting instead is a slogan.
The irony is that oversimplified messaging can backfire. When people sense that nuance is being withheld, they may dismiss the entire message – including the parts that matter. An honest approach would acknowledge both sides: alcohol carries risks, and those risks depend heavily on dose, pattern and context.
Wine doesn’t need special pleading. It needs accuracy. Treating all drinking as equally harmful doesn’t make the public safer; it just makes the conversation less truthful.
John Penney is a local wine experience guide, educator and writer. This article is based on the much longer and more detailed piece on wineinsights.org
