Thanks, Martin, for your kind appreciation and for sharing your thoughts.

With respect to the stratification of drinking habits: the upper limits of light-to-moderate drinking were taken from the WHO. They seem to assume wine to have 12% (I rarely encounter wine that lower than 13.5%). When you convert those volume percentages to grams of alcohol you arrive at 25 g/day. Some papers set the limit lower at 20 grams, but that is an academic exercise, with little repercussion on the statistics of the outcome.

You are absolutely right to say that binge drinking is probably not a good idea, even if the daily mathematical average over a week remains within the confines of moderate drinking. It's like packing the sum of a weekload of friendly pats into one big slap. One is nice, the other is a knock-out.

And yes, the hedonic losses are never considered in any research.