By Morgan Whyte

In my first job, the second month in, my manager asked me to guess the first thing she was going to do when she got home: “Have several glasses of wine,” She said. As a 16-year-old, this shocked me. I couldn’t believe that at 4pm that was all she wanted to do.

Almost everyone over the age of 17 in Scotland drinks. Young people are social drinkers, preferring to drink in large groups in pubs, clubs and outdoor settings while older women prefer their quiet “wine O’clock” time. “Wine O’clock” usually starts after work or after any other duties up and lasts until they go to bed.

The Institute of Alcohol Studies highlighted that 70% of female ‘binge drinkers’ who reported drinking in the past week consumed wine on their heaviest drinking day.

What initially started as a generational inside joke is now becoming less funny as new statistics from the Office of National Statistics show extreme alcohol dependency and early deaths. Middle aged women are the most at risk of liver related alcohol deaths in the UK.

It seems that women aged 45 and over are consuming wine as soon as they finish their daily duties. Statistically men consume more alcohol than women, but women over 45 consume significantly more than their younger counterparts. Young women aged 16-24 consume the least alcohol despite popular stereotypes.

It’s impossible to discuss this topic without mentioning the influence of the binge drinking festival/party culture of the 1990s. Today’s middle-aged women were heavily influenced by celebrities such as Drew Barrymore and Lindsay Lohan, both heavy drinkers in the 90s and early 2000s. The cocaine fuelled, binge drinking, and paper-thin-model lifestyle was heavily glamourised by magazines such as Vogue where nearly every edition featured a cover photo of a glamorous, blonde, skinny woman sporting sharp collar bones and stick thin arms. It had no where near the level of diversity that Vogue has today.

The generational impact of the horrible celebrity culture in the 90s is clear. Young women today don’t drink as much as they did back then, yet the women of that time still suffer the consequences of the societal norms they were raised with.

Many women of that generation have died.

Freya Murphy, a college receptionist born in Glasgow in the early 90s, said: “I’d say it’s part of the culture here. Drinking is such a big part of Scottish culture.”

Suki O’Connor, a librarian also born in the 90s, said: “Pressure could be a factor, economic pressures, a sense of despair about politics and the environment.”

Kathleen Gemmell who works in student services is 59. She said: “I think it is just a sign of the times, the culture, COVID, all that’s been going on in the past few years. That’s probably making people drink more.”

Donna Wilkins, aged 40, said: “I think it is down to boredom, along with the accessibility of alcohol and our culture. I don’t drink and that shocks people, even my doctor. It is just so normalised.”

Aikarerini Koukousianou, also aged 40 from Greece, said: “The drinking culture here is very different from Greece. Whereas there you’d just have a glass of wine with dinner, many people here just drink to get drunk.”

It is clear that the drinking culture in the UK does not just affect young people but also those of earlier generations. The 90s binge drinking, drug abusing culture has not been fully eradicated just yet.

The Wine O’Clock Phenomenon