WITH only a score of shopping days until Christmas, supermarkets are loaded with cut-price booze, including champagne grazing the £10 ($16) a bottle mark. Retailers love promotions because they lure people in to buy other goodies too, and Christmas, like the football World Cup, is prime time. The cheapest deals will be ruled out if the government gets its way. The coalition has long promised to combat "irresponsible" drinking. Alcohol consumption in England and Wales has been falling since the mid-2000s, but related hospital admissions have not. Scotland, with a bigger booze problem, brought in a ban on quantity discounts in 2011 and a 50p minimum price per unit (10 ml) of pure alcohol to come into effect in April 2013. This week the Home Office announced its own measures, which include a 45p minimum price per unit and an end to bulk discounts. The main target is supermarkets selling beer for less than bottled water. If the minimum price goes through, a can of strong lager could not be priced at less than £1.56, or a bottle of wine below £4.22. The government thinks this could cut drinking by 3.3% and save lives. Suppliers and most retailers (Tesco is an exception) are outraged at measures which, they say, would penalise the poor and the thrifty without tackling problem drinking. But whatever they do to tippling, they are likely to shape Britain's £37 billion drinks industry. It is under pressure now. Volumes are falling, prices are rising and competition is fierce. Just what lies ahead if the minimum price becomes law - and it may not: Scotland's has run into trouble at the European Commission, which thinks it will discriminate against low-cost suppliers from Europe - is unknowable, as no country has yet introduced one. Would a minimum price produce windfall profits, and if so for whom? Around 30% of wine sold off-licence goes for less than 45p a unit, estimates Ian Anderson of Accolade Wines, Britain's largest wine supplier. Andrew Leicester of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, reckons that if alcohol consumption does not change, some £1 billion a year could be transferred from the demand to the supply side. If it drops a bit, as seems likely, revenues may still rise. Retailers will want to hang on to any increase (after all, suppliers" costs will not have increased). But Richard Dodd, of the British Retail Consortium, doubts the government would let them keep a big uplift from booze sales. Some fear a windfall-profits tax. A second question is how firms will push their products if prices cannot be slashed. David Ware of SymphonyIRI, a grocery-intelligence firm, thinks that 70% of the booze sold by supermarket chains in the past year was sold on promotion. Some cheap brands may simply disappear. Talk of "premiumisation" abounds: extra profits are likely to go into reinforcing brands, jazzing up presentation and convincing customers that a value product is now worth a quality price. A few worry that the new regime will lead to a sharp drop in sales, not a surge in profits. They hint darkly at new "booze cruises" to France and smugglers in white vans. But the measures may prove less cosmic than many think. Kevan Mulcahey, of Kantar Worldpanel, a consumer-research firm, points out that the alcohol industry is changing anyway. The market is declining quickly (though from a high level). It would take a steeper minimum price to shift behaviour much from its path. And if the new rules stop heavy discounting (which may already be waning), so much the better: alcohol should be promoted by appeals to style and quality, he says. Now to convince the Eurocrats.