White wine glasses tend to have smaller bowls than red wine glasses. This is because white wine tends to be served chilled, whereas red is best served closer to room temperature. The smaller size of the white wine glass bowl will reduce the heating effect that the drinkers hand has upon the wine, helping it to stay cooler for longer.

Red wine glasses have characteristically wider bowls intended to encourage the wine to breath. Bordeaux glasses tend to be tall with a wide bowl that is excellent for full bodied wines like Merlot or Cabernet. Burgundy glasses will have a larger bowl. This doesn’t mean that they are intended to hold more wine (although they are particularly good for this). The larger bowl is intended to hold the aromas that are released by the wine into the glass. A large part of the taste and enjoyment of wine is actually experienced by olfaction. In other words, the smell gets up your nose.

So now you know a little about why there are glasses which are specifically intended for white wines and glasses which are specifically designed and suited for reds. Time to crack open a bottle or three and put the theory to the test…

Recently, here in Sussex, there have been a few high profile reports of tragic incidents in which youngsters, infuenced by peer pressure (combined with booze), have drunkenly bundled into a car only to end up in a nasty accident with people hurt or even killed. The combination of peer pressure and strong drink can lead even the most well behaved and timid teenagers to make rash and potentially fatal decisions.

A few weeks ago a friend and colleague took a short holiday, leaving the family home to be looked after by his son and daughter aged 16 and 15. Both children had always been trustworthy, reliable youngsters who didn’t show any interest in hanging out with the kids drinking alcopops in the local park. They were both subject to the same peer pressures as any other kids their age, leading them to make some questionable but harmless fashion choices, but they weren’t what could be called ‘troublemakers’.

Some of the sons friends apparently suggested that they might have a party on the Saturday night and the boy, feeling pressurised, agreed. By the time Saturday came round word had spread and the mini party for a few close friends had escalated into a full blown teenage rave. There was nothing the son could do but go with the flow and try to keep things under control as groups of youths clutching bottles of super-strength cider, spirits and wine started to turn up at the house.

At around midnight the neighbours came round to get the noise turned down but their visit was met with a tirade of abuse from a bunch of apparently drunken youths. It was shortly after this visit that one particular young man suggested that they should ‘go for a ride’. Apparently he was hell bent on stealing a car to go joy-riding around the estate. When somebody pointed out the car keys to my colleagues van, which was parked in the drive, the youth exclaimed that he didn’t need to ‘nick a motor’ after all.

My colleague’s son tried to dissuade the lad from taking his dad’s van but the drunken boy, full of booze and bravado, wasn’t listening to reason. By this stage the bullying lad had recruited a band of partners in crime and was hell bent on taking the van out for a spin. Anyone who was refusing to go with him was mercilessly ridiculed and pressurised with name calling and threats from his gang of cohorts. So a band of about 6 youths (girls and boys) piled into my collegues van, the engine was noisily revved up and they took off across the estate. There was nothing that my colleagues son could do to stop them. His sister, by this stage, had consumed too many blue alcopops and was lying almost unconscious on the bathroom floor.

Inevitably it all ended in tears but, luckily, nobody was badly hurt. The band of drunken van thieves tore around the estate roads for about 15 minutes before the alcohol soaked driver lost control on a bend, smashing the car into several parked vehicles before piling into a gatepost, writing off the nearly new Citroen Berlingo van.

Obviously the police were called, statements were taken, parents had to retrieve their kids from the police station and recriminations started to fly around. My friends Berlingo van, which he’d recently proudly obtained on van lease, was completely written off and several of the neighbours’ cars had were badly damaged, along with a number of neighbourly relationships.

How easily this story could have ended with people in hospital or even dead. How could this situation have been avoided? What could the son and daughter have done to prevent the situation from escalating to the degree that it did? There is strength in numbers so if a group of potentially threatening young people turn up hell bent on a boozy party what could my colleagues children have done to turn them away? They didn’t want to be humiliated and seen as kill joys by their peers.

Incidents like this one are occurring all too frequently up and down the country. Peer pressure is often responsible for death, injury and tragedy but what can young people do to avoid these pressurised situations and where can they turn when backed into a corner by aggressive, troublemaking peers?

What is it that makes many people look forward to Friday or Saturday night when they will go out and drink so much that they can no longer stand properly or talk or even think clearly? Is it a desire to escape from whatever daily toil they are involved in, or escape from unhappy relationships? Not every stumbling, slurring drunk has a crap relationship and stress at work. Reasons of this type are manifold but are they the real drivers behind peoples desire to get ‘out of it’. I don’t think so.

Ethanol occurs naturally in ripe and over ripe fruit. The pulp of ripe palm fruits contains ethanol at concentrations of around 0.6 to 0.9% and this rises to around 4.5% as the fruit becomes over ripe. Many mammals, including early humans, will have experienced the mild effects of ethanol ingestion through consuming such fruit. Is the drive towards alcohol consumption that many people experience (myself included) part of our genetic programming rooted in our ancient ancestors having gotten tipsy on rotting fruit? Where’s the corkscrew?

Hm. The Nurse wonders, fruitlessly, whether they’ll make alcohol a class A drug while they’re at it.

A quick online search shows there aren’t any figures available for cannabis-related damage. But alcohol trails destruction, unhappiness and chaos behind it wherever it goes. Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians and chairman of the Health Alcohol Alliance, agrees. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7090864.stm) He says that it’s time we began treating alcohol in a similar way to drugs: “If you look at the burden of damage to society, it’s hugely greater for alcohol than for drugs.” 

In fact, there were 8,386 alcohol-related deaths in 2005 and alcohol-related damage costs the UK taxpayer an estimated £18 billion a year. In an effort to solve the problem the government has introduced a hugely complex cross-departmental Alcohol Strategy. This behemoth includes a public information campaign to promote sensible drinking, an independent review of alcohol pricing and promotion, toughened enforcement of underage sales by retailers and plans to introduce more help for people who want to drink less. Well, there goes a few billion more pounds of our tax money.

It seems out of proportion for cannabis to remain illegal while alcohol - the UK’s most dangerous and destructive drug - remains legal. Our nutty drug classification system, with its non-inclusion of alcohol, must represent the most glaring irony of our time.  Rather than reclassifying cannabis, why not legalise it and deal with the consequences? Whatever the consequences, they’ll never be as appalling, ugly and expensive as those of alcohol. 

The report said that if an individual was to routinely consume this much 2 times in a fortnight then they would potentially be causing themselves harm. But there are many people who think nothing of consuming 2 pints of beer in their lunch break, or to routinely sink upwards of 4 pints of beer or cider every night in the pub, increasing this to 8 or 10 pints at weekends. Also, many people are actually drinking the high-alcohol-content beers, wines and alcopops without any real appreciation how much alcohol they are consuming and the harm that they are doing to themselves.

There are an increasing number of young people who, lacking adequate parental guidance and boundaries, start drinking at a very early age. A recent report from Derby City Hospital cited the case of a young man who died at the age of 21 from liver disease. He’d started drinking at the age of 8. If this lad had been told that if he continued to drink he wouldn’t see 22 would he have stopped? Who knows. But if this lad had been restrained by his parents from hanging out with those who were supplying him with booze he may still be alive today.

Is it really surprising that our hospitals are full of alcoholics and that kids as young as 8 (and younger) are routinely subjecting their livers and their brains to a toxic onslaught when high strength alcohol is cheaper than water or juice? And what about the example that is set by parents and those in the public eye (they call themselves celebrities)?

Kids are educated that all drugs are bad, except alcohol, which is OK because it is legal. In fact most kids don’t even think of alcohol in the same context as drugs. There’s no denying the misery and harm that involvement in drugs can cause and most youngsters grow to appreciate this fact. But the very same youngsters may think it’s nothing more than a bit of fun to drink alcopops until they can’t remember what they’ve been up to and spend the following day nursing a hangover from hell.

It’s time for a big change. It’s time that the alcohol industry took responsibility for the effects of what they produce and maybe a few more high profile celebrity deaths due to alcoholism and the affects of alcohol may provide a sobering influence upon our alcohol soaked younger generation.

We here at Amateur Brain Surgery think that the visual warning system should be extended even further. Food packaging has been required to tell us how much fat, salt, lead and heavy-metals are in our foods for some time. But who actually reads these labels? In fact, who actually reads at all? Some supermarkets have been trying a simple traffic light indicator system to tell shoppers which food products are the most healthy. The supermarket accurately recognised that it is only the Guardian reading middle classes who can actually read and therefore everyone else needs simple stop or go instructions presented pictorially. Why not take a few snapshots of the ‘typical’ consumers of various foods and present these images on the packaging. Those shoppers who aspire to become (or already are) obese, crisp-noshing burdens on the national health system would quickly be able to recognise the foods that would best support their aim.

And what about alcohol? A few choice images on the back of various alcopop bottles accurately reflecting the state that some people get into after over-consumption may go some way towards dissuading the ever-so-slightly more sensible from over-imbibing. The image of a young girl getting shagged up against the wall of a rancid toilet cubicle whilst puking down the back of her young casanova would be one picture that I would use. Another would be of a young man getting his face stitched back on after being glassed in a booze fuelled punch-up at a club. Forewarned is forearmed. But would anyone actually take any notice?