Waugh used the absence of wine to characterise the various dystopias of the novel. During his dreary war service leading "C" Company in various pointless journeys across an England immiserated and brutalised by war, Charles's decline is reflected in his choice of drink:

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o'clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille.

Wine is also absent from Charles's father's house. When Charles returns home after his first term at Oxford, old Mr Ryder makes a show of hospitality:

"What do you like to drink? Hayter, what have we for Mr Charles to drink?"

"There's some whisky."

"There's whisky. Perhaps you like something else? What else have we?"

"There isn't anything else in the house, sir."

"There's nothing else. You must tell Hayter what you would like and he will get it in. I never keep any wine now. I am forbidden it and no one comes to see me."

At the excruciating dinner party Mr Ryder holds ostensibly to entertain his son (at which he drinks barley-water), the food and the wine are equally tasteless.