"I get the weirdest things from single malt," declares Geoff Kahnert, holding his glass of amber liquid aloft as if it were holy water. "I just got roasted marshmallow."
It's a Wednesday night at the liquor store and the 52-year-old product consultant is leading a class of 17 connoisseurs on the finer points of Scotch whisky.
Some of these dedicated students can name their favourite brands simply by their aroma. Others know the variety of wood used in the barrels where they age. The die-hards have even made pilgrimages to Scottish distilleries.
It never used to be like this. Thirty years ago when Mr. Kahnert started in liquor retail, purchasing alcohol was like stepping into the old Soviet Union. No credit cards. No tastings. Customers filled out orders with a pencil chained to the counter and surly clerks disguised bottles in brown paper bags.
But times change. Provincial governments now invest millions in advertising. And, putting the lie to its big-brother name, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario holds classes almost every week in grandiose stores such as Toronto's Summerhill location -- a 35,000-square-foot shrine to alcohol built in a renovated train station with marble floors, a tasting bar and more than 6,000 labels in stock.
"It's part of our lifestyle now," says John Begley, general manager of the Summerhill LCBO. "It's okay to go home at the end of the day and have a glass of wine with your dinner."
Or more. A lot more. In 2005, Canadians downed the equivalent of 7.9 litres of pure alcohol for every drinker and teetotaller over age 15. And many of us drink often -- consuming about 30 per cent more than the world average.
The social cost of our new lifestyle is staggering: $14.6 billion in 2002, and no doubt more in the years since. The health care bill alone is $3.3 billion -- higher than the price tag to treat cancer.
We spent 1.6 million days in the hospital because of illnesses and accidents caused by people under the influence of alcohol.
For the first time, more people died from liver cirrhosis -- regarded as a benchmark of a country's problem drinking -- than on the roads in drunken car crashes.
And the International Agency for Research on Cancer is about to announce a link between alcohol and two of the most commonly diagnosed cancers as well.
Yet government has treated alcohol like a gold mine, with policies that encourage us to drink and even handicap the struggle for sobriety once people become addicted.
Until now. Health Canada is set to unveil a proposed National Strategy on Alcohol that will include 41 recommendations drafted by experts in alcohol treatment, addiction research, provincial liquor monopolies -- even distillers and breweries -- to shift alcohol's innocent image as a benign indulgence and curb dangerous drinking.
"Alcohol has a huge toll on society, and that toll is slowly increasing," says Juergen Rehm, chair in addiction policy at the University of Toronto's faculty of medicine.
"It is always surprising why a society like Canada is willing to tolerate such a high cost. The majority of Canadians drink, and in their heads, 'The cost of alcohol is the alcoholics. It's not us.' And that's just wrong."
We suspected frat boys were prone to binge drinking. And this is backed by the Canadian Addiction Survey, a major study of drinking and drug habits. It found that young men, including teenagers below the legal drinking age, imbibe at least five drinks at a time -- a level researchers deem hazardous.
A bigger surprise is what the survey reveals about the rest of us. In 2004, 79.3 per cent of Canadians confessed to drinking, which, contrary to our growing obsession with fitness and diet, is nearly a 10-per-cent jump from a decade ago.
And these numbers tell only part of the story: The level of drinking professed in the survey accounts for just 32 per cent of the bottles actually sold in liquor stores, bars and restaurants. Whether we are deluded or deceptive, Canadians grossly underestimate the number of drinks we quaff.
