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Caitlin Moran: the great white‑wine conspiracy

‘Our mothers could cook dinner without banging back a bottle of gavi. Why can’t we?’

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Mark Harrison

Fans of conspiracy theories may remember that it has been posited that, in the Eighties, the CIA deliberately aided the introduction of crack cocaine into America, with the specific intent of destabilising the African-American community.

Whether or not this actually happened, the jury’s still out, but I can tell you one thing: I’m pretty sure almost exactly the same thing happened with British women and white wine.

Let us consider two things for a moment. One: the universally agreed fact that British women cannot handle wine. We can’t. We just don’t have the enzymes. The ADH isozyme, to be precise. While the women of Italy, Spain and France have had thousands of years to develop the DNA that allows them to handle a bottle of…

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