A government-commissioned inform is advising French university canteens to hold wine-tasting sessions. Photograph: Photodisc/Getty
Most countries struggling to understanding with the flay of teenage binge celebration try to apart bottle and drinker. In France they do things differently. A government-commissioned inform is advising university canteens to hold wine-tasting sessions to learn the immature in the virtues of assuage consumption.
According to Jean-Pierre Coffe, a air wave presenter and distinguished epicure who co-wrote the study, universities should give immature people an preparation in booze as well as in academia.
"Why is there passionate preparation and not viticultural education? You can clarity booze too," he told French radio. He believes students can be taught the joys of celebration with restraint. "Drinking is not celebration a bottle. Wine is pleasure. It"s similar to love. It"s the same."
The report, that was commissioned by Valérie Pécresse, the apportion for higher education, gives a far-reaching range of recommendations on how to urge students" consumption. But the offer surveying "initiation to a assuage expenditure of wine" has captivated majority attention.
Jean-Robert Pitte, a former executive of Paris"s Sorbonne, believes lunchtime canteen tastings would yield the undiluted event for students to clarity to splash sensibly. "In sequence to equivocate the sum freak-out that happens each Friday night and Saturday night … we wish to try to learn students a clarity of responsibility, to concede them to ambience booze in really assuage quantities, and to show them that it is both a pleasure, great for their health … and a piece of their inhabitant heritage."
But the proposal, that comes as France faces up to the actuality that the teenagers are entering in to the same celebration day to day as their counterparts in the UK, has left down less well elsewhere.
Alain Rigaud, boss of the inhabitant organisation for the impediment of alcoholism and obsession (Anpaa), thought it intolerable that reputable total could still be advocating those arguments. "It"s genuine to think we"re going to revoke binge celebration in this way," he said, dismissing Coffe"s and Pitte"s offer as selling for the booze industry.
Pécresse, who perceived the inform on Wednesday, was additionally discerning to boot the recommendation. "Yes to preparation of taste, no to booze at lunchtime for students," she said.
In November, the Paris city gymnasium launched an recognition debate directed at the capital"s 15-25-year-olds, notice of the dangers of "le binge drinking".
Experts hold such complicated and fast drinking, unknown in a nation that has relied on watered-down booze being since to young kids as an introduction, increasing by about 10% in between 2005 and 2008. According to the Paris authorities, a fifth of 17-year-olds right away splash at slightest five eyeglasses of booze in a singular sitting at slightest 3 times a month.
