Things catch up with us.
With our health certainly it happens iteratively over time.
I’ve poo pooed the Drink with Moderation Movement and avoided the trendy Dry January palaver, blithely using wine as my connection to community and social fun since the late 90s.
Till very recently that is, when my doctor told me to dial it back.
No pointers toward specific ailments thankfully, but with acknowledgement that it is time rheumatically to be smarter and more conscious of the impact of alcohol on my body.
She suggesting firmly that I cut consumption and offer my body short periods of detoxification to recalibrate its own status quo.
I hated the conversation, but she knows my body and is simply right.
I read a slew of New Year’s posts on Dry January, watched the crowing of people on the social nets lionizing their abstinence, and decided—just not my way.
I stepped back and approached this from a wholistic health perspective, rethinking my physical and mental wellness, not correlating this to, for example, giving up gluten due to allergies.
Stopping for a month is not the goal.
The thing is that for me wine culture, the natural juice community round the globe is a piece of myself I hold very close.
I have many friendships that are born of it, connections with many producers that drive broad conversations that truly inspire me.
My place at the end of my local wine bar on Tuesday nights. A meeting on a cold winter day with a new business contact. The gestalt of it all is just who I am.
I’m rarely looking for the buzz, and almost never open a bottle of wine and drink it through at home.
I often however, do open three or four of them and sip them cross a week, letting my palate geekiness hone its skills. Appreciating how these wines and places and people and approaches come together.
After reading my friend Simon Woolf post on his response to the trendy abstinence movement, I found my own.
I’ve decided to simply change and relax, recalibrating like I now do with extreme skiing as my knees have gotten worse.
I’ve just personalized it, knowing my strengths and my weaknesses around this with three decisions:
-At my haunts (and when on the road), rule of thumb is now half pours.
Couple, three or so half-pours allows me to create a course of the evening from bubbly to whatever cross an evening. Half the alcohol, all the pleasure.
-At home its harder, so I’ve moved to designing the evening like a tasting—drinking a producer cross some vintage or approach, starting with a decision, ending with some notes to myself, often a note to the producer as well.
-Once a week, I simply don’t drink at all for two days straight, making these evenings work ones, dedicated to personal writing projects that can benefit from the more clear focus and added hours of productive play.
And sometimes all of these rules simply break. Buddies with bottles at the end of the bar go late into the night.
So be it!
This is not religion. This is not a test of my concentration or least of all some test of my discipline.
It’s wellness and is definitely–if we are lucky–a long game.
It’s about being smart and not beating yourself up when you fall short. Like I calibrate what I eat and how often. Then blow it away and go find the best pizza on a whim.
I don’t believe in the rigidness of schedule but very much in the importance of habits strung together over time.
Alcohol is obviously a toxin and if I was an alcoholic, I’d walk away from this.
If I didn’t truly love wine, its innate poetry as a social language and its importance to me as something that just makes me happy, I’d as well find a different poise.
I just really like this approach as it fits both my health needs and how I want to live.
It’s a freezing cold, early Sunday morning as I write this.
I’m doing some research and plan to drink half pours of Pet Nats from two tiny wine projects in Cal tonight. Heading out later to find them at my local shops, enjoying the planning, the chats with experts while shopping, and I’m quite certain the wine itself.
If this is not something you personally have to consider or care about, all good.
If you are doing a Dry January or something similar, just another view from a fellow wine lover.
In this case, rather than walk away from something important to me, I’ve simply double-downed to find a way that suits both sides of the equation.
The why of why it matters and the why of where the problem is.
So far, so good.
