My eight-year-old son’s eyes widened when I unwrapped a Christmas present I got from my parents: a bottle of cherry brandy from the Lyme Bay winery in Axminster. ‘Can I have some?’ Humphrey asked, for he had been hitting the cherry brandy hard over the summer. Not the alcoholic kind, of course, but the cherry brandy-flavoured lollies sold by the ice-cream van that parks outside his school on a hot afternoon. How could I refuse?

Ashley Dalton would be scandalised. The junior health minister said this month that the government is looking into banning the sale of non-alcoholic versions of booze to teenagers in case it ‘normalises drinking’ and becomes a ‘gateway’ to the real thing. Children will be allowed to vote at 16 under this government, but not drink a Lucky Saint.

The sale of cherry brandy lollies to schoolchildren – brace yourself, the van sells apple cider lollies too – will surely go on the list next. Why, a young lad at Gordonstoun in the early 1960s famously ordered a cherry brandy in a pub because it was the only drink he’d heard of and started to get delusions that one day he might be King.

When I told Humph that this was alcohol and he wouldn’t like the taste, he shrugged and went back to playing Mario Kart. I’m surprised that someone in the government doesn’t want to ban that as well, in case it encourages irresponsible driving later in life by making them think they can throw turtles at other motorists.

When I was a boy, we didn’t have such a range of alcohol imitations, but we drank plenty of Shandy Bass and Top Deck Limeade and Lager and ate those beer jellies that looked like a pint with a frothy head. I don’t think they turned us into future alcoholics. Have lashings of ginger beer now been excised from Enid Blyton? What about the foaming tankards of butterbeer that Harry Potter enjoys at the Three Broomsticks? Since Ms Dalton once said that a person who identifies as a llama should be taken seriously, she probably finds J.K. Rowling problematic in so many ways.

The odd thing is that this proposal comes at a time when young adults are increasingly choosing to drink alcohol-free or low-alcohol drinks (up to 1.2 per cent ABV) themselves. A Drinkaware report in October found that the proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds who order imitation booze has risen from 28 to 49 per cent since 2018. The quality has improved so much (Guinness 0.0 and Thatchers Zero cider are especially good) that Gen Z, earnest folk that they are, don’t feel the need for the real thing. Far from being a gateway, the fake stuff is an attractive alternative. Why should it not be so for teens?

If they ban teens from having 0 per cent beer on the grounds it ‘normalises drinking’, how long before they tell parents to stop setting a bad example? Humph accompanies me to watch rugby on Saturdays, where the post-match ceremony in the bar involves the best players downing Guinness. Is this rotting his impressionable mind or does he realise it’s just something silly that grown-ups do?

Similarly, when we go on our summer holiday to France, a country that served wine with school lunches until 1981, our children are not shielded from their parents liking a glass. When we try the crémants at Bouvet-Ladubay near Saumur, Humph and his teenage sister get to taste sparkling apple juice. Is Madame Ladubay’s pomme pétillant a gateway to the hard stuff? Surely not.

Last year, Humph joined me on a dégustation in caves dug into the cliff outside Montsoreau. For €9, I was given a shallow tasting cup called a tastevin (yes, that’s really the word), resembling a silver ashtray, and could sample 21 Loire wines, from Sancerres to Saumur-Champignys, each bottle standing on its own barrel beside a candle. Humph eagerly joined in – not with the tasting, of course, but I encouraged him to sniff each wine and say what aromas he could detect and to compare the depth of their colours. At the end, I bought three bottles of my favourite red – a St Nicolas de Bourgueil, only €28 a bottle – a couple of cases of some cheaper but still quaffable wines, and three divine Coteaux du Layons that went down well with foie gras. Humph got an Orangina.

Ms Dalton might see this as grossly irresponsible: to expose a child to such normalising behaviour. I see it as education. He learnt that you can appreciate the sight and smell of wine without drinking it, that his father can sip as well as glug and, above all, that wine is something adults enjoy. Taking your son wine-tasting may be a gateway, but it can be a gateway to heaven – when the time is right. But that would require a member of this Puritan government to understand what pleasure is.