There are many ways to make a barman eye you suspiciously, but one of the most effective is to ask him whether he stocks moderately alcoholic beer. Not non-alcoholic, just low. Moderation in all things may be a virtue, but it's damned difficult in our culture of rocket-fuel booze, as I found on my attempt to spend a week drinking only wine with single-figure alcohol content and beer with less than 4 per cent.

Why the mission? I'm a gregarious creature who believes that time spent socialising in bars is never wasted. And I enjoy having a good libation while holding forth. But that doesn't make me a drunk. I'd begun to notice, however, how in recent years my hangovers have worsened and my pre-slurring capacity has shrunk shomewhat. I blamed this on advancing age - until I started looking at the labels.

Over the past 20 years the alcohol levels of our drinks have steadily spiralled. Consumer culture, with its promise that more of anything is always better, has boosted the befuddling powers of our booze, to the point where one small 330ml bottle of Carlsberg lager can be enough to put a woman over her government-recommended limit of three units a day.

In theory, that shouldn't be a problem because we've all been bombarded with advice about alcohol units and exhortations to be healthy livers. But pushing sense into pixillated heads can prove pointless. A study by the Psychiatry Research Trust shows that about only one in ten of us watches our units - and more than 7.1 million people in England alone drink more than the recommended guidelines.

Attempts to preach moderation date back to early civilisation. The first such recorded speech, from the writer Eubulus in about 400BC, features the Greek God of frolic, Dionysus, telling a men's drinking party to stick to three glasses: “One to health, the second to love and pleasure, the third to sleep. When this bowl is drunk, wise guests go home. The fourth bowl is ours no longer but belongs to hubris, the fifth to uproar, the sixth to prancing about, the seventh to black eyes, the eighth brings the police, the ninth belongs to vomiting, and the tenth to insanity and the hurling of furniture.”

Our shelves are full of furniture-hurlers. While back in the early 1990s you would have had to rummage around the off-licence to find wines with double-figure proof labels, the challenge now is to find ones that are 9 per cent and below - and still enjoyable. I thought I'd also challenge myself to find beers of the old “cooking” strength.

Moderate ale has a long history. “Small beer” was the staple of much of England for centuries, as water was unsafe to drink, and the alcohol killed harmful pathogens. Its strength - about 3.5 per cent alcohol - is the same as many beers throughout the 20th century. In the 1950s there were typically two sorts of beer, “mild” and “bitter” at 2.5 per cent and 3.5 per cent respectively. Try telling that to staff in a 21st-century bar.

At one of my Brighton locals, the Battle of Trafalgar, the manager looked baffled when I asked for sub 4 per cent beer. He offered me a non-alcoholic Kaliber, then said: “No one's ever asked for less alcohol before.” Down the road, at the Eddy, the barwoman was more forthright. “We're all here to get pissed, mate.”

Dragging friends to unknown pubs in search of less hedonistic substances proved tricky, so it quickly became a mission for the wife and me, seeking bars offering one of three “low” lagers: Becks Vier (4 per cent) Peeterman Artois (4.2 per cent) and Coors C2 (at a properly abstemious 2 per cent). Two work-experience students at The Times spent a fruitless week trying to track down such places. On our travels we found only Becks Vier for sale. Kate, my wife, wasn't impressed by the flavour. “It tastes like they aren't really trying,” she said.

It did taste a bit thin. I wonder if this is due to our brains getting used to stronger stuff. Alcohol knows all the short cuts to our primitive pleasure centres. In this respect, it's just like fat and sugar. In response, the brain's pleasure centres grunt, “more, more, more”. So, rather like junk diets, junk drinking may perhaps be tackled through self-restraint, until our tastes learn to appreciate more subtle, less harmful stimuli, and stop craving the nuclear option.

Faced with the dearth of low beers (and don't even think about asking in a bar for moderatealcohol wine) we faced a choice: drink fattening shandy or stay home. The home drinker has a better choice of non-trashing tipple. Marks & Spencer even launched earlier this year three red, white and rosé wines labelled L%wer Alcohol, at 9.5 per cent.

M&S says the bottles contain five units of alcohol, allowing two people to share a bottle and stay within daily drinking recommendations.Indeed, the Verduzzo 2007, Raboso Rosé 2007 and Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 (all at £3.49) proved very palatable.

Part of the trick is that the bottles are three-quarters the usual size. Reducing portions is a proven way of cutting consumption, but I did wonder about taking such a bottle round to friends for dinner. The implication might be: “We are as tight as two coats of paint,” or worse, “We think you drink too much.” However, when we took one round to Tom and Debs, they happily opened it and pronounced it good. We downed it in one and then our hosts opened a big bottle of champagne. Oops.

Searching other supermarkets' shelves and websites turns up several contenders. Summer fizzies such as Ca' De' Medici's Lambrusco Rosato (Waitrose, £2.75) at 4 per cent, and Moscato d'Asti's Elio Perrone (thewinesociety.com, £5.50) at 5 per cent, certainly fit the low-booze bill. But they are incredibly sweet. Perhaps my taste buds need re-educating. Likewise, I had to forget all memories of sickly Liebfraumilch and Piesporter to enjoy Germany's Maximin Grünhauser Abtsberg Riesling Kabinett (thewinesociety.com, £10.95) at 8.5 per cent.

The difficulty in finding moderate-alcohol booze is, the industry says, down to low demand. But few makers are doing anything to stimulate it. Drinkaware is an “independent body funded by the drinks industry and retailers to raise consumers' awareness of what they are drinking”. So, would it like to see lower-alcohol drinks better marketed and more easily available? “It's not something for us to comment on,” says Adam Vincenzini, its spokesman.

The Portman Group, set up by Britain's drinks producers to “raise standards of alcohol marketing” and “to be socially responsible”, appears similarly conflicted. Its priorities as a self-regulating body for the drinks industry seem exemplified by a ruling it made this year in response to a complaint by a homelessness charity that 500ml cans of Skol Super, Kestrel Super, Carlsberg Special Brew and Tennent's Super encourage drunkenness. All these cans contain 4.5 units, despite the Department of Health saying that men should not regularly exceed 3 to 4 units of alcohol a day. The Portman Group rejected the complaint because it decided to interpret the Government's sensible drinking advice as “guidelines rather than strict limits”.

So it's up to us as individuals to try snuffling out any low-booze drinks that suit our palates. The task may unearth some delights. At the end of my semi-abstemious week we headed for Al Rouche, a local family-run Lebanese, for mezze. Out of habit I ordered a bottle of Almaza beer and found, on reading the label properly for the first time, that it comes in at only 4.1 per cent. It's hoppily satisfying stuff, but nowhere on its front are there any joyless words such as “low” or “less”. In non binge-drinking Lebanon, it seems, 4.1 per cent is perfectly sufficient.

John Naish is the author of Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)

Grape stuff without the punch

Conal Gregory, Master of Wine, says that summer is an ideal time to try wines, beers and ciders with lower alcohol and sometimes lower calorific content. The challenge for the producer is to retain as much fruit flavour, grape varietal and geological character as possible.

The lighter alcohol is usually achieved in two ways: either by simply picking earlier, resulting in less ripe grapes, hence reduced sugar and less to convert into alcohol, or the winemaker stops the fermentation, leaving more sugar in the final wine.

When considering calories, though, alcohol has a far stronger influence than sugar. The approximate conversion is that one gram of alcohol equates to seven calories and one gram of sugar equates to four calories. But watch the high calories in dessert wines. A 6.5 per cent German eiswein can be 1,524 kcal per litre.

English wines are traditionally light in alcohol, reflecting the long, slow ripening period. The most popular whites - often naturally 10 per cent - are made largely from Mueller-Thurgau, Reichensteiner and Seyval Blanc vines, yielding dry and lightly aromatic styles.

Riesling is light when sourced from the Mosel Valley in Germany and Luxembourg, but often disliked for its petrol-like aroma. White vinho verde from Portugal's northern region and the country's largest delimited appellation has wider appeal as it tends to be dry with good acidity, notably from Alvarinho, Loureiro and Pederna vines. Morrisons offers a 9 per cent example (£3.19). The late-ripening prosecco grape is native to northeast Italy. In Treviso province, it makes a light white that is often frizzante (semi-sparkling). Look for Bisol, which makes a great summer drink when poured over white peach juice (Bellini).

If it's low-alcohol ciders you're after, try Bulmers Light and Magners Light. Yates's Wine Lodges plans to trial less calorific ciders this autumn.

Five to try

McGuigan Chardonnay; 9.5 per cent/vol; Tesco, £5.99 - Good Inviting kiwi fruit, dry, stylish from SE Australia

WeightWatchers Riesling; 9 per cent/vol; Somerfield, £4.99 - Slightly spicy petrol aromas; medium-sweet melon taste

Rosso delle Venezie; 10 per cent/vol; Sainsbury’s, £5.15 - Appealing good fruit, supple and balanced from corvina grapes

Raboso delle Venezie 2007; 9.5 per cent/vol; M&S, £3.49/50cl - Strawberry pink, dry light fruit, cranberry juice

Sutter Home Fre Merlot; 0.5%/vol; Waitrose, £2.99 - Ruby-red, hot baked fruity aromas, raspberry taste, quite sweet

Explore Food & Drink

• Gordon Ramsay

• Heston Blumenthal

• Recipes

• Wine

• Real Food

• Anjum Anand

• Eating Out

• Video Recipes

Times Recommends

• How to season a wok
• Chicago Rib Shack hits back at its critics
• Gordon Ramsay: Indian barbecue