Extraordinary news from France, where the government has decided that wine-drinking is bad for you, a conclusion that wine and health specialist Roger Corder has suggested is ‘flawed’.

A national cancer organisation called INCA has found that alcohol increases the risk of certain cancers by 168%. The Ministry of Health has seized on this and tried once again to panic the citizenry by telling them wine will kill them.

Corder – one of the acknowledged experts on the health-giving properties of red wine, and the author of numerous peer-reviewed studies on the subject, as well as the popular book The Wine Diet – says there are myriad factors linking wine and health.

For example: instances of colo-rectal cancer in the UK stand at around 6-7 in every 100 people. Drinking alcohol may increase the risk by 20%.

But wine drinkers with a healthy diet can cut their risk of heart disease by half. Again – this is backed by research. See decanter.com news stories passim for all details.

‘What’s the overall equation?’ Corder asks. ‘Telling people wine is dangerous to counteract a very moderate risk is not good balancing of information.’

Corder’s a measured sort of bloke, as befits the Professor of Experimental Therapeutics at the William Harvey Research Institute, part of Barts Hospital in London.

He’s not one to indulge in theories about the pharmaceutical industry being behind it all, as Denis Saverot, editor of Revue du Vin de France argued cogently on decanter.com last year.

Nor is he the type to scratch his head, look across the Channel and wonder, mouth agape, how the world's greatest wine-producing nation got into this fix?

As far as we’re concerned, all we can say is, this is what comes of having a teetotal president. Look what happened to America under Bush.
Adam Lechmere