Drinking It All In

Dissection of a drinking life.

You’re back, the liquor store employee yells to me from across the sea of bottles. She adds a wave. I cringe. What if I’m trying to be discrete? Don’t they teach that at customer service school? No singling-out liquor store customers for visit frequency. Was my discomfort trying to tell me something? I’d been in an hour earlier and now I was back with an emergent wine need. For the record I haven’t yet drunk my last purchase, I want to call out to customers, Honest, I’m not a problem drinker. 

I do, in fact, drink regularly but then I do everything regularly, I’m a creature of extreme habit. And moderation. A creature of extreme and moderate habits. I used to be that way with cigarettes, now it’s food and wine. Greek yogurt with fruit every morning for years; for the decade previous it was an apple and cheese. Two rye crispbreads with a skim coat of peanuts-only peanut butter, banana on the side, and a cup of mint tea with milk at 10:38 am. A whole wheat wrap with lettuce and three slices of processed chicken at lunch. It works. It’s worked for years. Why change now? I’m freakishly regular and wine has its place in that order. When I get home from work I prepare a cheese snack for my dog and a cheese and Melba toast and wine snack for me and we sit and eat and I drink. I don’t need much but anything less feels like I’m just being mean to myself.

Do I have a problem? Since I’m a female of a particular vintage living in the western hemisphere in the 21st Century it’s a given that I’ll be preoccupied with what is and isn’t good for me and obsess accordingly. It’s what we do, put all our actions under our own tiny gilt microscopes. Should I be eating this, thinking this, doing this, feeling this? Is it bad for me? Is it wrong? But in the case of my wine drinking self-doubt seems unnecessary. After all do I care what the answers are? I pathologize. I unpathologize. I repathologize. Is my wine drinking problematic or just a routine that happens to have an alcohol by volume rating? 

My son and daughter-in-law live in Florence. Where would Italy and Italians be without wine? One of the first discoveries my kids made was that five euros buys you a bottomless glass of red. They’d gone to a restaurant and the server placed a carafe on the table unasked. Seeing their confusion, the folks at the next table explained that wine is standard issue, like water, the carafe refilled no matter how many times emptied and all for a total of five euros. They’d made a similar discovery when living in Berlin. There was a neighbourhood bar whose stock-in-trade was remaindered bottles of wine purchased from other establishments. The proprietor offered the inventory self-serve style to their own clientele. A few euros deposited in a massive brandy snifter on the counter got you a wine glass and all the wine you could drink. It being Europe, however, drinking all you could was not the goal. It was not a contest. Getting drunk was not the point. That would have been gauche or however you say that in German.

Drinking is aged in naughtiness on this side of the Atlantic. It’s difficult to get a clear sense of what is and isn’t problematic. We Canadians drink by permission of the government with its twist of puritanism and reeking of paternalism, an infantilizing arrangement, alcohol a forbidden fruit. There’s an amount and frequency of drinking that’s permissible and other amounts and frequencies that are not. There are times and occasions that are acceptable and other times and occasions that are not and the rules, the controls, can have the unintended effect of inflating instead of decreasing alcohol’s allure. Drinking with others is acceptable, drinking alone is not. But I don’t want to have to be with others just to drink. That would be silly. I’d need to be with someone every day of the week. This isn’t Coronation Street.

A glass of wine a day is good for you, that was the rule of thumb for decades. By that standard I’m good-and-a-half. More recently, however, experts have decided that a glass of wine a day will kill you. That being the case I’m already half dead, may I rest in peace.

I’ve isolated wine’s effects on me, they are two. If I’m already in a lighthearted mood it elevates it. If I’m in a solemn mood I may as well be drinking water. There is no effect. Except I like the taste. There is no moment of what I associate with classic drunkenness: empty bottle, falling down, passing out. Perhaps drunkenness is the right metric only for determining whether I’m a drunk and not whether I drink too much. Surely they’re different.

My employer gives each of its employees a Christmas gift, an object of our own choosing. We all get the same amount of money and each of us spends it as we wish. Hair extensions. Yoga pants. A TV. Mirror. Coffee table, coffee maker, luxury coffee grinder. Computer parts. Golf club. Veterinary services. One person donated the whole amount to charity. I got forty bottles of red wine. There’s not much I want that I can’t drink. Salt and vinegar chips would be a close second but I don’t have room to store a hundred bags.  

Perhaps my criteria for choosing wine is key to determining whether I have a problem. Price. It has to be cheap. I got maximum milage out of the money the company allotted me for my gift, finding a wine that was not only inexpensive but on sale. As luck would have it I have very low standards. With wine it’s always a question of quantity over quality: how much will my wine dollar buy? Quality is wasted on me. At the other extreme I have friends with wine apps on their phones who use words like mouthfeel and legs and nose and terroir and I drink what they drink when they’re drinking but I almost invariably get a headache the next day, my metabolism accustomed to the unfiner things. Those carafes of red in Italy are probably right up my alley. 

My parents were consummate drinkers, walking advertisements for the drinking life. Good cheer poured from them when they socialized although they were similarly cheerful when sober. I sat on the stairs during parties, concealed, listening to the laughter, the music, smelling the smoke from cigarettes allowed only to guests, all these becoming the charms I associated with adulthood. The benefits. Other times they dressed up and went out to to dances and parties where alcohol was served. In between, it played no role in their lives other than as decor. My father built a rec room and then he built a bar in the rec room. He liked building things. He had no special affection for alcohol but after decades of working in a factory and living frugally a bar and bottles and glasses of every size and shape were a sign that he had arrived. Alcohol was a trophy.  

Back then he’d take me with him to the liquor store. They displayed one of each of their products taxidermy-like behind glass. You completed an order form and gave it to a man in a white button-up shirt behind a counter who disappeared into his shelf-lined cave and emerged with your selection in hand. Same with beer, beer had its own store, and it was all kept in a refrigerated storeroom out back ready for drinking the moment you got home. Such mixed messages. By the time I reached drinking age the order forms and counters were gone and you helped yourself to the inventory. Alcohol anarchy. I fell in love with a man who taught me the joys of cheap dry red and expensive whiskey and the rest is history. Instead of a bar I store my Wine Wednesday online sale purchases above the fridge. I have arrived. 

At least part of what drives my love of drinking wine is knowing that one day it will end. It happened to my parents. Moderate though they were they got to an age where they lost their taste for it. Of all the diminishments of capacity they experienced this seemed to me the cruelest. They’d been so good at it. In my case I run the risk of losing my taste for it not because of age but because of boredom. The downside of being a creature of extreme habit is the revulsion. Eventually I hit a wall. It happened with my decade-long apple and cheese breakfast. I still can’t look an apple in the eye. When I finally get sick of something it’s for good. That being the case I should probably just shut up about my wine drinking and enjoy it while it lasts. Salut.