WITH Wednesday's unanimous decision by the UK Supreme Court to dismiss a legal challenge from the Scotch Whisky Association and rule that Scotland can set a minimum price for alcohol, the issues of booze and our relationship with it are once again in the headlines.

The judge's announcement means legislation approved by the Scottish Parliament five years ago can now be enacted, and Scotland can become the first country in the world to use a minimum price-per-unit law to tackle alcohol abuse, and the social and health-related problems it causes. Slàinte mhath, as they probably don't say in whichever club the seven members of the UK Supreme Court adjourn to for G&Ts when the sun is over the yardarm.

Not everyone is cheering, though. On Thursday's edition of the BBC's Question Time programme, Sun columnist Rod Liddle took issue with the ruling. “It penalises the poorest people in society and I find that appalling,” he said. “Whenever these sort of discussions take place it's always the poor that get hit by it.”

There was more. “When politicians talk about binge drinking they don't mean someone having a nice Sancerre,” he added. “They mean a poor person buying a large bunch of cider because he fancies a drink. So I'm absolutely opposed to it ... Don't deprive the poorest people of this country of their pleasure.”

Sitting next to him – and preparing to disagree – was Fife-born crime writer Val McDermid. “This is not about depriving poor people of their pleasure,” she replied matter-of-factly. “It's about preventing people from killing themselves with excessive quantities of alcohol that they buy incredibly cheaply, for as little as 16p a unit. Hundreds of people are dying every year in Scotland from alcohol. It's one of our biggest social problems.”

For the record, McDermid also made a plea for the monks of Buckfast Abbey to start selling their product in plastic bottles: it would ease the burden of Accident and Emergency units in Glasgow dealing with bottle-inflicted injuries at weekends, she said. The audience laughed. Then when they realised she was serious, they stopped.

So which panellist was right? Essentially, both were, and it's that fact which goes to the heart of our societal relationship with alcohol and which is also, in timely fashion, the subject of a new book, Rough Spirits & High Society: The Culture Of Drink. It tackles the history of alcohol, how various cultures have used and abused it, and dips into what drink says about British class divisions and attitudes to public morality. The book's author is drinks expert Ruth Ball, also the founder and “head alchemist” of a company making bespoke, hand-made liqueurs.

The truth is that booze is never really out of the headlines in one form or another. For as long as there has been strong drink to be had and damage to be caused as a result of it – damage to property, to other people, to the social order or merely to the drinker's vital organs – alcohol has been a cause of concern. In the 18th century it was gin and whisky that exercised the country's moral guardians. More recently it's alcopops or the cheap, strong beers and ciders the minimum pricing legislation sets out to address. You almost wonder why the stuff was ever legal in the first place.

But legal it is and legal it pretty much always has been, so its place in the domestic, social and cultural life of the country is assured. And not just in our country or in our time either: Rod Liddle's assertion that there is one rule and one drink for the better off in society, and another drink and another rule for everyone else, has more historical weight behind it than even he could guess, as Ball's book reveals.

In the Egypt of 3000 BC, for example, workers and slaves drank a beer called hqt (pronounced “heket”) but the ruling classes drank irp, a wine imported from Palestine. This, then, was the Sancerre of its day. The hqt doesn't sound too bad, though. It had an alcohol by volume (ABV) measurement of 5 per cemt and the daily allowance for a slave was the equivalent of about 10 pints.

The Romans and the ancient Greeks had intricate and well-established rules surrounding who was allowed to drink alcohol and when and in what quantities, and although their historians mostly concerned themselves with upper-class drinking habits, they're the first civilisations to have left written accounts of them. Young, well-heeled Athenian men formed drinking clubs with names like The Wankers and The Erections – early forms of Oxford University's notorious Bullingdon Club, no doubt – while the Romans held dinner parties called convivium at which drinking rituals took place. Sometimes women were even allowed to take part. The poorer Romans made do with taverns where they drank watered-down wine, but thanks to the preservational properties of volcanic ash, the ruins of Pompeii contain several such howffs – complete with cheeky graffiti about the landlord and rude claims about the sexual availability of the barmaids. Some things never change.

Even the Aztecs had complex rituals surrounding alcohol. They drank something called pulque, made from maguey, a member of the agave genus of plants. It was available to warriors, priests, nobles, the pulque makers themselves and, for some reason, pregnant women. Anyone older than 52 was also allowed to drink it whenever they liked (looser rules involving old people and drink are common across almost all cultures) and so too were those born on a specific day in the Aztec calendar. However these people were looked down on and barred from holding public office.

There was a religious dimension to this as well. The Aztec gods who ruled over the taking of drink were the Centzon Totochtin, 400 divine rabbits which each represented a different form or aspect of drunkenness, and the goddess Mayahuel, who had 400 breasts, one for nursing each rabbit. Among these supernatural bunnies were Techalotl, the god of dancing; Tezxatzoncatl, the god of being so drunk you see as well as if you were looking in a mirror made of straw; and Tequechmecauiani, the god of being so drunk you accidentally hang yourself.

So the Greeks, Romans and Aztecs all knew how to make alcohol, were sophisticated enough to apply ritual and lore to it, and canny enough to restrict its access and through that demonstrate social standing. But, though they also knew about drunkenness and the ability of alcohol to incapacitate individuals, their relationship with drink was essentially celebratory. It was all champagne to them, so while they understood class divisions they were little concerned with another idea that would come to grip Europe – the link between alcohol and moral laxity. This idea began after the Reformation, but it became most potent with the arrival on the scene of mass-produced spirits such as gin and whisky from the late 17th century onwards. In many ways it still pertains today.

In Europe in the Middle Ages, people drank mead (made from honey) or ale, which was made without hops and spoiled quickly. The introduction of hops meant ale could be stored for longer and also produced more cheaply because it now required less malt, and by the 17th century everyone was drinking these new, hopped ales.

Prior to the Reformation, meanwhile, the Catholic church had been sanguine where alcohol was concerned. Certainly, drunkenness was a sin, but the church was also happy to make excessive communal drinking of beer and ale a feature of religious feast days. After the Reformation, things changed. The use of wine was still accepted by agitators such as Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox – in fact Calvin accused the church of having stolen wine from the people and demanded that ordinary communicants be given it alongside their bread – but laws were also enacted which clamped down on the hours taverns could operate, fined drunkenness, and effectively banned the practice of buying a round.

A century on, the English Puritans took aim at taverns too, one Puritan writing in 1631 that alehouses were “nests of Satan where the owls of impiety lurk and where all evil is hatched”. That didn't stop The Mayflower leaving England for the New World in 1620 loaded with beer, however. In fact one story has it that the ship's famous landing place in what would become Massachusetts was only chosen because the booze had run out.

But it was with the arrival of spirits that a full-on moral panic took hold in Britain. It required time, dedication and a strong bladder to get absolutely slaughtered on beer or wine, but gin and whisky were a different matter entirely. Spirits like these were six times stronger than the beer the working classes drank and four times stronger than the wine the upper-classes preferred. On top of that, William III de-regulated the sale and production of British-produced spirits and so, from the early 18th century onwards, establishments known as gin palaces or dram shops increased in popularity as the populations of the country's cities increased.

There were several ill-conceived attempts to ban gin between 1729 and 1743 but William Hogarth's famous 1751 engraving Gin Lane (published as a pair with Beer Street) shows how futile they were – a drunk mother sits on a flight of steps, her leg covered in sores, while her child falls head-first over the wooden rail. Presumably to its death. To contemporary audiences this scene will have brought to mind the sensational case of Judith Defour, tried, convicted and executed in 1734 for killing her infant daughter by abandoning her naked in a field and selling her clothes to buy gin for a day-long bender.

Almost exactly a century later, in a typically clear-sighted piece of reportage, Charles Dickens described the world of the gin palaces in Sketches By Boz, his first published book. Touring a few establishments in Drury Lane, he witnesses drunkenness, fights and all-round wretchedness. “Gin-drinking is a great vice in England,” he writes. But, he added, “poverty is a greater [vice]; and until you can cure it, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, with the pittance which, divided among his family, would just furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number”.

Others took a different view of how to cure drunkenness and alcohol abuse. Instead of tackling its cause, they looked at its effects and sought to either persuade people to give up alcohol or (the nuclear option) to pressure the government of the day into banning it completely. The first approach was the aim of the various Temperance organisations which started in the early 19th century and flourished throughout the Victorian period. The second was the one favoured by organisations such as the Scottish Prohibition Party (SPP), founded in Dundee in 1901, and an offshoot of it, the Prohibition And Reform Party, which later merged with the Communist Party of Great Britain. The SPP's Edwin Scrymgeour was elected MP for Dundee in 1922, beating Winston Churchill, and is the only person ever to be elected in the UK on a prohibition ticket.

Nearly a century on again, alcohol is still a political issue and we still anguish over our relationship with it. Or we do when we're not celebrating it, or revelling in our reputation for enjoying it a little too much. Last week's legal victory for the Scottish Government is an effort to put that relationship on a more even footing – an apt phrase under the circumstances. But harder to shift are our ingrained attitudes to drunkenness and over-indulgence, and the nagging suspicion that, despite studies revealing the extent of problem drinking across society, it will always be viewed through the prism of the poorest.

Rough Spirits And High Society: The Culture Of Drink by Ruth Ball is out now (British Library, £16.99)