More wine is drunk per head in the Vatican than in any other place on earth, according to the California Wine Institute, which keeps an unforgiving eye on these things. Each of the Vatican’s 850 or so inhabitants drinks on average 74 litres of wine a year. Holy Moses! But do the sums and you see that 74 litres works out at little more than a glass a day, an intake that in Fleet Street in the 1970s would have viewed as a sign of morbid asceticism.
That’s not to say, however, that the Church is a model of sobriety. On the contrary. There have been no in-depth surveys of the drinking habits of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, of course, but the Geographical Review, an American academic journal, has found that more alcohol tends to be consumed in states with high Catholic populations than in states with high Evangelical Protestant populations.
