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The research outcome: summary and conclusions on the reduction in wine consumption in Italy.

Article Excerpt
Why have Italians, since the early 1970s, begun reducing their wine consumption in the absence of drinking-control policies, passing from higher to lower intake amounts, and attaining the consumption decrease recommended by the international bodies for health protection?

We tried to answer this question starting from hypotheses that had never been tested, even if they had been circulating for a long time among alcohol experts. Reaching an exhaustive answer was not easy. We had to proceed step by step, adopting different methodologies to approach the matter. First of all, through the collection of quantitative data, we chose to describe alcohol consumption changes in Italy since 1970, matching them with a number of indicators describing Italians' food consumption and lifestyle changes. We then looked for potential generating mechanisms. Examples of such were changes on the individual level. In studying these we were aided by a qualitative methodology exploring and highlighting linkages between the changes that occurred in the individual's ways of thinking and living and the decrease in alcohol consumption.

This summary contains our research findings, and some final considerations drawn on the basis of them.

Reduction in alcohol consumption and social change

After describing temporal trends in alcoholic beverage consumption in Italy, and having defined drinkers' profiles as well as the factors affecting consumption, our hypotheses is that the declining wine consumption curve that had started at the end of the 1960s could have been affected by or related to:

* Economic and market factors (wine price, family purchasing power, the market);

* Demographic increase of that part of population that does not drink or drinks less (in particular elderly people);

* Changes in dietary habits;

* Changes from rural to urban lifestyles, associated with mass urbanization;

* Changes in the occupational structure, with a substantial reduction of the agricultural sector and manual jobs combined with an expansion of the services sector;

* Changes in the role of women;

* Transformations in the family structure and consumer tendencies;

* Large scale diffusion of health-conscious lifestyles.

To test the above-listed hypotheses, we resorted to a number of documentary sources: traditional and "grey" literature (proceedings of specialist conferences, local reports dealing with health-related matters or the agricultural economy) and, for the more recent years, documents taken from internet websites. Also, we used individual data gathered from archives of ISTAT, from the "Osservatorio Permanente sui giovani e l'Alcol," and from ad hoc researches carried out in Tuscany between 1997-2002, none of which, however, pertained to the period before the beginning of the declining phase of wine consumption.

Therefore, this part of our research was largely based on documentary reconstruction. Whenever possible, information focusing on wine consumption and the correlation between it and the temporal trends of those variables pertinent to the hypotheses was drawn upon, as well as the analysis of the original archives. In our opinion, the main difficulty in this research lay in the impossibility of analyzing the data relating to the years preceding 1970 with statistical programs, as data was unavailable on an individual basis for that period which represented the turning point in the wine consumption curve. Despite such constraints, some conclusions were reached through our research. In particular:

1. Trends in wine and alcohol consumption in Italy were consistent with international trends towards a convergence of alcohol consumption, consisting in a decrease of traditional drinks and an increase of new drinks, especially among the younger generations, due to substitution or overlap. This pattern was also present in Italy, where the trend towards convergence of alcoholic consumption in different areas of the country was supported by a steeper reduction in wine consumption in regions where such consumption had historically been higher. Wine nonetheless has remained the preferred alcoholic beverage in Italy, representing around 70% of the total alcohol consumption.

2. As far as can be inferred from our analysis of individual ISTAT data available since the 1990s (i.e., since the final part of the wine consumption curve's downward slope), the consumption decrease was not homogeneously spread among all the drinking categories. In fact, a decrease of non-drinkers and a parallel increase of moderate drinkers have been shown, with the number of drinkers growing, especially among young people and the female population. The decrease was therefore driven mainly by a decrease in heavy drinkers (more than half-liter per day) within the adult male population, the category that used to give the largest contribution to the average consumption.

3. Based on such evidence, it could be argued that a self-regulation mechanism developed within the Italian population, apparently rejecting "prohibitionist" approaches (which were, however, largely absent from the cultural and political debate in Italy) while showing a preference for moderate drinking habits. We were unable, through literature or indirect data, to affirm...

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