If You Drink Wine and Drive, You're a Bloody Frenchman?

I never saw a booze-bus in Europe, and now that we're in Australia, we see them every other weekend. My French husband Maxime shakes his head in wonder at them. He got tested twice the other day on one of his forty minute Odysseys in search of decent bread. But it doesn't stop him enjoying wine when we go out if he wants to. He knows his limits. Although ... Maxime's limits seem to be quite large.

In more than twenty years, Maxime's only been stopped and breathtested twice in France. On the first occasion, we were in the pretty village of Villefranche de Conflent. At dinner, Maxime ordered a bottle of wine as usual, seeming to overlook the fact that I was pregnant and wouldn’t be drinking half of it. I nursed a token glass while he made his workmanlike way through the rest. 

'Orrrgh, your breath reeks of alcohol!' I complained when he tried to kiss me after dinner. 

My sense of smell got hypersensitive when I was pregnant (it’s the closest I've ever come to having super powers). I coughed and waved away the last of Maxime's alcohol fumes and then we got in the car and started the half hour drive back to our hotel.

Just a few hundred metres from the restaurant, however, we spotted some flashing blue lights.

'Oh. I don’t have my driving documents with me,' remarked Maxime.

 'Oh Maxime,' I sighed as the gendarme signalled to us to pull over.

'You’ve just come from the restaurant?' asked the gendarme. 'What did you have, a beer or two?' 

'Err, something like that,' said Maxime, trying to sound offhand. I strove to make the pregnant nature of my form more obvious in a bid for sympathy.

'Please breathe in here,' he said. Maxime did so. 'Hmm,' mused the gendarme.

Oh God, I thought. I’m pregnant, it’s late at night, and now I’m going to have to walk home from Villefranche de Conflent.

‘It’s zero,' said the gendarme. ‘OK, you can go.'

I don’t know how that happened. If the gendarme’d used my nose instead of the breathalyser, Maxime’d probably just be getting out of jail now.

The second breathtest occurred in the Doubs, after Maxime had consumed half a bottle of wine, a beer and a drinking glass full of farmer’s homemade absinthe at a local farm. Again, Maxime was exonerated by the breathalyser. The conclusion we came to is that Maxime must carry a special French version of the alcohol dehydrogenase gene giving him super alcohol metabolising powers.

But despite the fact that drink driving laws cause Maxime no particular problem personally, he is still very upset about the ‘police terrorism’ in France as are many of Maxime's friends, especially a winemaker friend of ours called Seppi (short for Joseph). Seppi told us he'd written to the government to complain about the drink driving laws. 

'The state is systematically destroying French culture, strangling the French wine industry,' he explained. 'They stake out village wine fetes with gendarmes. And what happens as a result of the persecution of wine? The young people get drunk on alcopops and beer!' 

Just like those culturally retarded Anglo-Saxons across the Channel, he was implying. Maxime is in wholehearted agreement with Seppi. The wine lake, according to Maxime, is a problem not because there are too many producers in France making bad wine, but because Sarkozy cracked down on drink driving. Friends in the restaurant industry agree, upset because people don’t order a bottle of wine with lunch anymore.

But despite all this, now that we're in Australia, the Aussie police would be unlikely to catch Maxime over the limit irregardless of the battalions of booze buses, since not only is he the fastest metaboliser in the West, but, he’s been inspired by his new life in Australia to start a health kick: he's started to cut down on wine and chocolate. He splashes out on a Mount Mary or visits wineries and terrorises tasting room staff less often than he did. Mind you, there's a limit to everything: the Bruny Island cheese parcels keep on arriving on our doorstep with a a surprising frequency.

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