"Alcohol
Call me a dinosaur but I have always been led to believe that a glass of wine contains 1 unit of alcohol and a bottle of wine contains 6 units of alcohol. UNTIL NOW...
There I am having a quiet drink, flicking through a magazine waiting for big brother to come on - help me please! I'm sipping my lovely cold Chablis (it was on offer) and casually perusing an article about South African wines. I read that these days a standard bottle of wine can have an alcoholic content of anything between 11 - 15.5 percent.
I didn't think about it until today when I happened upon an alcohol unit calculator on a science website as you do. So I popped in my new found figures and... Oh Hello! 15.5% equals 11.625 units per bottle! That's nearly double what I thought it was! When the hell did that happen and why didn't I know about it?
I thought the legal amount of alcohol you could drive on was 2 units. According to Home Health UK supply cheap, simple, reliable home health tests experts now say that, "the legal drink drive limit can't be safely converted into a certain number of units, as everyone absorbs alcohol into the blood stream at different rates. However, an average man (12-13 stone) should consume no more than 4 units and an average woman (9-10 stone) should consume no more than 3 units."
But just for arguments sake let's imagine that 2 units is still the drink drive limit. Order a glass of wine in any regular wine-bar or restaurant and 99 times out of a hundred you will get 175ml of wine which is more than 2 units! A pint of lager is over 2 units.
We desperately need more information about alcohol. A friend told her fabulous grandmother that the recommended alcohol intake for women was 14 units per week, she replied, "surely they mean a day dear!" In the record industry, they usually reckon one bottle equals one unit be it beer, wine or vodka!?
This huge increase in the potency of my favourite tipple does of course explain why the unexpected package of books, cds and a lawnmower turned up on in the post - wine and internet shopping really don't go well together! They were very understanding about the lawnmower, living in a top floor flat and all."
So, it's the little glasses of wine we want to get back to, I guess they were about 100ml? Can anyone remember? - watch out in bars for those bucket sized ones! I have to say that even the 175ml ones look huge to me now let alone the 250ml!! That's 4 units of wine!! One bottle a week MAX!!! (And that's just for recommended amounts and not what we can deal wth or risk...)
Happy working it all out!
FMF xx
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