Drinkers in good form

Press, 17 January 1986, Page 16

Drinkers in good form

While the popularity of smoking may be declining in Britain, that of the other social habit, drinking, certainly has not. Recent statistics show:

• —National consumption of alcohol has doubled in 30 years. • —Wine sales have increased; beer has fallen; red wine has given way to white. • —The British spend $lOO million a day on alcohol — a fifth of the household shopping bill. • —ln the last 25 years, wine’s share of the drinks’ market has increased almost fourfold. Christmas shoppers spent $3 billion on wine alone, most of it on the lighter, dry white varieties. • —Beer sales have dropped from 82 per cent of the market in 1950 to 57 per cent in 1984. Mild and bitter are giving way to lager, which should have half the total beer market in 1990, compared with just a fraction 25 years ago. • -Lighter-looking drinks are in vogue, such as white wine, white rum, Vermouth, pale whiskies like Cutty Sark and J and B, and colourful frothy cocktails, in what the British Brewers’ Society sees as a mistaken belief, especially by

women, that “lightness in effect goes with lightness in colour.” • —The best-selling liqueur in Britain now is not Drambuie or Bendictine as it used to be, but Bailey’s Irish cream, closely followed by Malibu, a coconut and “light rum” mixture. More than ■ • one-third of the milk from Irish „ cows now goes into liqueur bottles. • —Each Briton drinks some 12 pints of pure alcohol each year. In 1918 it was 10 pints, falling during - the 1930 s and picking up very ■ slowly after the second world war to stand at 6.34 pints in 1950. • —Problems caused by drink are reflected in the rise of hospital admissions. Twenty-five per cent of men in acute hospital wards are ” now there because of drink. For - women, the rise has been even higher — the numbers of those . with drinking problems, while still well below those of men, have „ trebled in the last eight years. • —An official of the campaigning • organisation, Action on Alcohol , Abuse, Mr Don Steele, says that - Britain grants 3500 new liquor licences a year and fails to enforce • existing laws.