Could I limit myself to 100 bottles of wine in a year?

Back in January, I wrote about my new year’s resolution to cut down on my drinking. The thought of total abstinence was too bleak, so my plan was to limit myself to 100 bottles of wine in 2024. Not quite the NHS’s recommended limit of 14 units of alcohol a week – roughly one-and-a-half bottles – but not a million miles away. I envisaged taking Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays off and then confining myself to half a bottle a day for the remainder of the week. Although I also intended to do Dry January, thereby building up an eight-bottle credit. So 100 bottles in 11 months was my aim. Surely that was achievable?

First, the good news. I managed not to drink for most of January. (I know that’s a feeble boast, but I have to clutch at straws here, as will become clear.) Looking at my NHS ‘Drink free days’ app, where I faithfully recorded every alcohol-free day for the first few months of the year, I can see that I only drank on eight days in that ‘dry’ month. However, I can also see from my ‘drinking log’ that I consumed eight-and-a-half bottles across those days – a foretaste of where things would go wrong in the remaining ‘wet’ months.

The long and the short of it is I got through my 100-bottle quota in the first three months of the year. The problem wasn’t that I over-consumed at home. I did go above my half-bottle limit sometimes, but I also managed to confine myself to 250ml on occasion. No, the issue was drinking on nights out.