Having just recovered from a week confined to bed due to swine flu, it has struck me that I may have stumbled upon an, as yet, unreported consequence of the pandemic.
For the past seven days not a drop of wine has passed my lips - only right and proper, not really ill if you can still face knocking back a glass of wine. But, my point is, that's a week's worth of wine consumption that is lost, never to be recovered.
Let's say I would have normally drunk a couple of glasses of wine on four of those evenings, that makes 8 glasses of wine that have remained undrunk, directly due to swine flu. Multiply that by the number of people in this country who are statistically likely to get swine flu this year, and who are also wine drinkers.
OK I admit I don't have those numbers - but I'd love to know if someone else does. In 2008 UK wine consumption stopped growing and levelled out for the first time in years - could swine flu be the thing that actually leads to a drop in wine drinking in the UK?
No comments:
Post a Comment