Is drinking a bottle of wine four nights a week a problem?

You can still function and be an alcoholic!
If U can't go a week without a drink you have a problem with alcohol

I definitely drink too much What's helped me is not drinking in the week. After 4 days of no alcohol I get to Friday night and drink much less than I used to when week day drinking as well.

Said by someone who I bet consumes more then the op. The minimising and sneers are very typical of heavy drinkers.

Yes, I would say that's indicative of a problem. It's far more than recommended.

Id say it’s a problem. It’s a huge amount of alcohol…

When you say that there is no problem, OP, do you recognise the damage that it will be doing to your body and the potential for it to become a serious problem in future?

This was me for a while - it helped me cope with a high pressured job, my young children, ailing health and the worst one,.my abusive husband. Do you also have other stresses or traumas that the alcohol is helping you with? I was happy to say I LOVED wine. My manager politely said it was a crutch that might become a problem. It maybe was a problem already. Anyway, I thought about and thought lets see ifnl I can stop. I did stop no bother. Didnt return to drinking that much ever again. 1 or 2 bottles a month now. At moment, nothing for 4 weeks. As you are asking I would suggest stopping it to see how you get on. Or pull back to one glass per night so a bottle lasts 4 nights. Use a tiny glass and take tiny sips. Put the glass out of reach - if you have to move rooms to get it, you might drink less/slower. My skin looked better after I stopped. Its a lot of chemicals for the liver to process. All the best.

How did your manager know how much you were drinking @Movingonup313 ?

Completely without judgement, if you need a bottle of wine to "relax" then it does sound like a problem.

Yes it is

There’s no doubt that there are health implications with regularly drinking three times the recommended amount a week. Whether that aspect of it is a problem for you is really down to how much you value your health. Does this constitute a drinking problem is a different angle. If you can’t stop doing it for any meaningful length of time then yes, I’d consider that a dependency.

DSM5 defines alcoholism as having two or more of the following:

1. Drinking More Than Intended
2. Failed Attempts to Cut Back or Quit
3. Spending Excessive Time Drinking or Recovering
4. Cravings and Obsessive Thoughts About Drinking
5. Neglecting Responsibilities
6. Continuing to Drink Despite Relationship Problems
7. Giving Up Activities You Used to Love
8. Drinking in Dangerous Situations
9. Continuing to Drink Despite Physical or Mental Health Problems
10. Needing More to Feel the Same Effect
11. Withdrawal Symptoms When You Stop or Cut Back

Of course there is some individual variation, but it's not as much as you might think. Those guidelines were informed by a lot of international research and are based on the level at which the risk is low enough that most people are ok with accepting it, eg similar level of risk to driving a car wearing a seatbelt. There is no zero risk level of drinking, as many pp have said, alcohol is a poison, but most people are happy to accept some trade off for something they enjoy.

However you can be doing quite a lot of internal damage without being visibly blotto, or having memory loss.

One bottle of wine a week would be fine but 4 bottles is probably a bit excessive and I’d be trying to cut that back xxxx

yes it's a big problem called functional alcoholic. stop drinking so much

It’s not doing your liver any good - you might be ‘functioning’ okay (as you see it), but for how long?

Yeah I’d say that’s pretty excessive, especially since it seems like you are relying on it to relax. You must spend a fortune on wine!

It’s 2.5 medium glasses per night. Far too many units for a woman. Alcohol is classed as carcinogenic so you’re doing yourself a lot of harm even if it may seem moderate and not a bottle per day. you mustn’t be feeling exactly fresh and alert day to day, it’s shocking how people acclimate to the shitty feelings and latch on to them like some addict anchor dragging them further down to rock bottom alcoholism.

It will catch up to you unchecked so my advice is cut down to 3 bottles for a few weeks and then 2 for another month or so before levelling out at 1 per week.

Ask for a liver function test at the GPs. I generally only used to drink 8-10 units of wine a week ( alcohol tends to make my rosacea flare up). However I had blood tests as part of an over Fifties check up and my liver enzymes were outside normal range most them mildly elevated but one moderately ( the one that indicates alcohol misuse!).
i had the tests done a few weeks after the Xmas/ new year festivities where I had drunk more than usual even getting slightly drunk on Hogmanay and out seems as though my older liver couldn’t hack it. My BMI is 24/25 and my diet is pretty good so not fat but I could still have a bit of a fatty liver.
my tests slowly went back down after cutting out alcohol and I’m now a bit scared to drink any!
TLDR: get you liver tested, it can be affected with no obvious symptoms and if you wait until you have symptoms you can’t always recover fully

I don't understand the confusion here.
The OP was very clear.
"If someone drank a full bottle of wine to relax 4 nights a week every week"

Yes OP its a lot. I have done 4 bottles in a week. I love wine🙄.

Not good for us. The sugar, the alcohol, the fatty liver it causes.

It's really not good.
My lovely realistic GP says try to keep it to 2 bottles a week over 3 nights.
He thinks it's important to let the liver rest.

I know friends have much firmer GP's who are very anti alcohol or will say one bottle max a week.

Get your bloods done to see how you are doing.

@Wbeezer is on the money with her post. Silent damage being done.

I would consider anyone who “needs” alcohol to unwind and relax to have a problem. Nobody needs alcohol. We can enjoy drinking it in moderation, but none of us need it.

Its more strain in your body than you realise. And it feels worse in mid life. I do drink but can go weeks without, I still have the odd hangover though. I wouldn't drink 4 times a week, especially not a bottle of wine each time. I do think lots of people drink like this though.
I'm very wary of habit forming drinking having been with someone with a bad drink problem.
If you have a fitness watch like a Fitbit or similar it shows the stress on your body, it gives you a of a window on the physical aspect of drinking, bad sleep, heart rate all that. It's not good. Feels good at the time but it's a poison from a physical point.

Just popping on to say I found the the book “Sober Curious” really helpful in re-framing my “but I’m totally functional/can skip days no prob/have never had to drink in the morning” attitude to drinking. Might be worth a look OP if you’re questioning your drinking habits ❤️

I wouldn't necessarily think of it as a drinking problem unless it stopped you doing things that you'd otherwise like to do because it would mean missing one of those nights, made excuses to drink if you were elsewhere, or similar. Or if your behaviour when you had drunk a bottle was poor in some way. Or if you couldn't really afford it.

I would think of it as a health issue - like being overweight is.

I used to drink that much over the course of a week when I was student. And probably close to until my early 30s. Stopped as hangover became an issue and became more concerned about health. Some of the student drinking was problematic because my behaviour when I was very drunk was sometimes a bit unhinged. But when I stopped binging in that way, that stopped.

I got breast cancer in my 50s, though. And drinking so much earlier in life could well be why.

Are you male or female? Last big thread on this had a massive drip feed and ended up being a bored man