Oregon contemplates a .05 Alcohol limit

Dinner for two. 

You can order a bottle of wine, but be careful drinking it.

Jerry Evans. Wine with dinner?

Oregon contemplates moving the legal limit under which a person is presumed intoxicated from .08 to .05 blood alcohol.

It will change how people drink.

Should we change the current standard? 

"I'm personally of the opinion that .08 is probably OK," said Jerry Evans, owner of a well known fine dining restaurant in Southern Oregon, the Jacksonville Inn. It serves beer, wine, and mixed drinks in an upscale setting. 

He said his patrons have generally already adjusted to the don't-drink-and-drive environment. "It would not be a total detriment to our business if it were .05 because, generally, there's a designated driver anyway."  He contrasted a dining establishment like his from a place that will get hurt, places where "their primary business is dispensing spirits, and there are a lot of them around. It would have a very adverse affect on their business."

He said the way people drink has changed from the past. "It's not uncommon at all" for someone to be drinking water, not wine, in a party of four. "There's always a situation where somebody will have an actual drink, but the designated driver doesn't, or [the designated driver] will have one or maybe two, but stop at that."

Going forward, if the law changes, the designated driver had better stop at one.

A person gets to .05 quickly--and stays there. Alcohol gets absorbed slowly, at .015 per hour. A drinker/diner has likely paid the check and gotten into a car well before he or she has fallen back into legal territory, if they were over the limit while at the table. That second drink gets most women into the "presumed intoxicated" zone. A third drink gets most men there.

Here are two charts, one for men and one for women from the National Highway Safety Commission, the agency encouraging states to lower blood alcohol standard. The areas marked in red are presumed intoxicated under the current .08 standard. The areas in yellow would become presumed illegally intoxicated under the .05 standard. 

First MEN:

Now WOMEN:

Two drinks, and a 180-200 pound man is at the new limit. He had better stop drinking at the appetizer stage, or he will be legally intoxicated when he drove home.

A bottle of wine--a standard fifth--has 25 ounces of fluid, five 5-ounce drinks. A man and woman of typical American weights who share a whole bottle, the man drinking three and the woman two, would both be illegal to drive, at dinner and for a long while after. Neither party, if experienced drinkers, might feel intoxicated, but they are legally drunk.

Valley View Winery Tasting Room

Wine Tourism. It is common now for Oregon wineries to have tasting rooms. The economics of boutique wineries involve marketing wine by linking a brand to a place that showcases the vineyard and wine. Wineries frequently have music on weekends. They are constrained and confounded by complicated land use rules regarding permitted agricultural use (grape production and winery), and a commercial use (restaurant and event center), but many wineries serve food when they can and push the boundaries of wine factory vs. event center to meet the customer appetite for a wine environment experience where they linger and enjoy a view and farm ambience. 

Mark Wisnovsky, the owner of the long established Valley View Vineyard in the Applegate Valley of Southern Oregon, said that the old pattern of locals and tourists coming to a winery, tasting three to five different wines, and then buying some bottles or a mixed case to take home is simply no longer the way most people visit wineries or buy wine.

People go to stores, to Costco, actually to buy wine. He adjusted by charging a "tasting fee", because in effect they are serving wine, not providing samples for purchase there at retail price.

Will a .05 legal drinking limit change wine tourism? He said it would. 

"People don't carry around breathalyzers, so they aren't going to risk a DUI because the penalties for a DUI are so severe. It will have an impact." An unnecessary one, in his opinion.

"It is a solution in search of a problem," Wisnovsky said. He said he disagreed with the premise that the real problem with drunk driving was that person who had had two glasses of wine rather than one, and then drove. 

 Feel sober, legally drunk.

Over his forty years in the wine industry Wisnovsky has lots of observations of alcohol's effects, and he says the person who strayed from .05 to .08 is "absolutely not" the problem person. 

"The problem is drunk driving, absolutely a serious problem. Anecdotally, when I look at people who get busted for DUIs, they are in the .15, .20 and beyond range." The problem, he said, are "serious drinkers" who drink well over the .08 standard. Under the new standard "you are going to ensnare in your trap relatively innocent people."

"Since they want to enact a new law they need to show that there are accidents caused by people by people testing in that range, and I question that. I don't want to discount drunk driving but I want laws that are effective reducing it. There is a lot of distracted driving out there, people talking on the phone, petting their dogs, fiddling with the radio, which may be equal significant," Wisnovsky said.

Still, he thought the wine tasting room experience would continue, at least in Southern Oregon, even under a .05 standard.  Wineries will end up being affected like other places that serves alcohol. People will drink less or have a designated driver.

So far the public debate has been pushed forward by legislators open to Oregon following the example of Utah, the first state in the country to adopt a .05 standard. Oregon Governor Kate Brown endorsed the change. 

We have not yet heard from the beer, wine, and restaurant industries as organizations. They have lobbyists. They donate to campaigns. 

The issue is new and there is not yet reference to it on Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association, the Oregon Winegrowers Association, nor the Oregon Beer and Wine Distributors Association websites.

But I expect organized pushback.