The wine list arrives unasked. That is how it is in most restaurants: it lies on the table before you have sat down, or it is pressed into your hand shortly after you have taken your seat. The message is clear, even if nobody says it out loud. Somebody has to pay the rent.
Restaurants earn well on alcohol. The margins on food are often thinner than you think. On wine they are reliably right. A glass of wine contributes more to the bill than most main courses, and the interest in the guest ordering a second one is understandable in business terms. Advertising, menu cards, the placing of the aperitif the moment you sit down: none of that is chance, it is system.
At the same time the trade has been talking for years about sustainability, responsibility, a holistic approach. What is usually meant by that is regional produce, less food waste, shorter supply chains. When it comes to alcohol, this debate conspicuously stops.
Yet the question is ancient. And the answers the tradition has developed are more precise than what campaigns and brochures recommend today.
Aristotle knows three positions: the one who succumbs to pleasure, the one who avoids it, and in between the virtue he calls temperance. Not avoiding, not overstepping, but the right measure, at the right time, from the right motive. That sounds simpler than it is. Precisely there lies the practice of virtue: in repetition, not in a single decision.
C. S. Lewis sharpened this in the twentieth century to the term temperance. Temperance, he says, does not mean abstinence but the right measure: going as far as is good, and no further. Whoever abstains entirely for good reasons deserves respect. But whoever condemns pleasure as such, or looks down on others who exercise it responsibly, has misunderstood the matter.
Thomas Aquinas adds that even abstinence is a virtue only when it is reasonably ordered, that is, not as mere renunciation but for a good reason. What decides is not whether someone drinks or not, but whether the action is coherent with reason, conscience and situation.
The same logic is found in the Bible. Paul does not forbid wine, he forbids drunkenness, the loss of inner guidance. And the wisdom literature of the Old Testament puts it so precisely that you could almost write it straight onto the menu: wine in measure is joy. In excess it leads to bitterness.
What this means for the restaurant trade is not a moral demand. It is more an invitation to honesty. The interest in selling is legitimate. Alcohol has belonged to table culture, to ritual and conviviality, for thousands of years. But between selling and persuading lies a difference. The guest who orders the second glass because the evening was lovely and the guest who orders it because the system brought him to it are not in the same place.
The point of virtue ethics is not: I am strong because I never drink. It is: I am free because I can enjoy without being ruled. This freedom does not arise through prohibition but through practice. And if you believe the old sources, it is the real goal, not abstinence.
One reservation belongs here, and it is to be taken seriously: medically, alcohol is not harmless. Drinking less lowers the risk of alcohol-related harm, and that holds especially in cases of dependence, pregnancy, medication or personal vulnerability. Virtue ethics does not replace medical caution. It describes what freedom can look like in the favourable case.
Restaurants that take this seriously do not have to give up alcohol. But they could stop treating it as a matter of course.