KEY POINTS:
It was a headline to chill the blood. Like "Osama: 'We have nukes' ". Or "NZ First landslide sweeps Winston into power". Or "Mercury Energy diversifies into healthcare". Or "Four More Years: Bush exploits constitutional loophole". Or "He's back! O'Neill suggests Australia should co-host 2011 World Cup".
The headline in Britain's Independent was "Middle-class wine drinkers 'at risk'."
What now? I wondered. What scaremongering research have they come up with to spoil one of the few consolations available to hard-working folk washed up on the stony shores of middle age?
It turns out the British Government is launching yet another campaign against "booze culture" only this time middle-aged wine drinkers are under the wowsers' implacable scrutiny.
If you thought lager louts who down a colossal amount of beer at their local before staggering out into the night looking for trouble and an arse-rattling curry, or young women who turn into feral trollops after bingeing on vodka and Red Bull were the unacceptable face of boozy Britain, think again. Apparently the real problem drinkers are out in the leafy suburbs.
Given that the lout and the trollop and their various companions in excess show no sign of moderating their wild ways, you'd think the British anti-booze brigade had enough to be going on with. However, their model appears to be the War on Terror, in which the US and Britain prematurely declared mission accomplished in Afghanistan and galloped off to sort out Iraq once and for all. Almost six years after liberation, Afghanistan seems inexorably headed back to square one.
However, the hallmark of obsessives is that they don't know where to draw the line and the bureaucrats waging the War on Fun are nothing if not obsessive. They're here to save us from self-indulgence and our failure to resist temptation, whether we like it or not.
This new campaign targets "well-off, middle-aged people who drink wine at home". Leaving aside the point that middle-aged citizens, whatever their means, have surely earned the right to drink as much wine as they like in their own homes, where does this leave the gigantic propaganda campaign against drink-driving?
For decades now, we've been bombarded with increasingly graphic and gut-wrenching images and messages intended to deter us from driving while under the influence of alcohol and bring those who do into public contempt. While some may have recoiled from the heavy-handedness of aspects of the campaign, we couldn't dispute its validity.
And it cannot be denied that it has succeeded in changing attitudes: these days being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle is almost as damaging for a public figure as having a laptop crammed with kiddie porn.
Many people's response to the onset of middle age and the unacceptability of drink-driving was to start buying wine by the case and having a glass or three with dinner. After all, as we'd been told for years, that's what they do in civilised drinking cultures like France and Italy. But not content with driving us out of the pubs and restaurants, the social engineers now want a seat at our tables so that they can monitor our intake.
How many glasses are acceptable to these busybodies? We're familiar with the various formulae but given that individuals differ in every other respect, why should there be a one amount fits all when it comes to wine?
Experience tells us what's just right for most of the gathering is far too much for the bloke boring everyone rigid with a never-ending account of his trip around Latin America (what is it about that continent that brings out the inner bore?). Or the woman who thinks she's being tantalisingly coquettish but comes across as silly and perhaps a little desperate. And vice versa: some people are at their most charming after the second bottle is broached.
Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker - what an appropriate name; he sounds like a ruthless mine owner in a Dickens novel - wants to change the view it's "acceptable to drink to get drunk".
Well and good, but can't he grasp that getting drunk can be - and in the case of the middle-aged, wine-drinking middle class usually is - an unintended byproduct of drinking? That's the nature and part of the appeal of intoxicants: they alter our chemical balance and consciousness, sometimes faster and more dramatically than we expect.
On any given night the pubs and clubs are full of people - usually too young to know better - who drink to get drunk.
Middle-agers tend to have found out the hard way that, first, that's not a sensible way to drink and, second, if you're going to overdo it, better to do so in the privacy and convenience of your own home.
