In England and parts of Germany, extreme drinking at universities often looks much the same as in the US. But in countries where wine is more popular than beer, such as Italy, France, Spain and Greece, bingeing and drinking games are rarer and generally frowned on.
Yet it cannot be just a question of wine being harder to stomach in greater quantities than beer, since the case of Greece shows us that drinking games have a long history. A favourite game played in ancient Greece was kottabos, where the goal was to fling the lees or residue from the bottom of your terracotta wine glass and hit a disk balancing on a little pole. Another popular drinking ‘game’ consisted of competitive improvised speechmaking on a theme. We see this played in Plato’s Symposium, where the participants are each required while drinking wine to offer a speech in praise of love. Dionysus, the god of wine, is allegedly the judge.
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