I Used to Drink

I have a life long romance with wine and maybe a half-life love affair with beer. My uncle Alex Anguert introduced me to French wine when I was ten or eleven. He also taught me to play chess and be kind to ladies. He and I were the only wine-lovers in our family and I can't say when the sense of being bigger than the stifling little life we had left off and my raw admiration for the taste of wine began.

I didn't have a sweet tooth, ever. As a six-year old, I loved raw rhubarb, and I drank strong tea. I loved big, earthy tastes and fat creamy ones. The crisp fat on a skillet-cooked lamb chop, grilled mushrooms, well-cooked bacon baked in custard with lots of black pepper and stinky cheese were my childhood treats.

So I was over Manischevitz and into scratchy Bordeaux by the time of becoming a bar-mitzvah. I liked the smell of smoked fish and smoky whisky. And I liked the way my different preferences made me feel: they made me feel special, they set me apart.
There was more. My sense of taste was a private, walled-off place where the grown-ups couldn't get me. Their truth didn't matter in there, I knew what I knew.
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Now, in another person's narrative, this would be the place where the foundation of meaning in my life begins. I'd start a career in the kitchen, I'd open my first restaurant when I'm 15, leave home a year later and apprentice myself to André Soltner. It would be the beginning of the Gourmet Hero Journey. But that's not how it went.

In fact, my love of wine led me to a wonderful side-effect: the buzz. It's funny how we try to diminish the meaning of the effect of a glass or two with a simple little almost onamotopoeic word: buzz. It was so much more than a buzz, that first bloom of a wine head. It was distance in a world that was too close, it was privacy in a world that was so invasive. I could leave town with my wine and they couldn't get to me. By the time I was sixteen and off to college, the deal was sealed: I could calibrate how much 'they' could get to me, I could tune my brain.

The instrument wasn't perfect and I made a lot of misjudgments, but overall, it worked. Better yet, wine was a tool that grew in usefulness the more I knew it. A glass of wine became medicine for lots of ills: boredom, lonliness, longing for meaning, anxiety. It became the natural companion of sociability.
At this point, a lot of people would stop. I took it further. I discovered a world in which wine was the object of admiration. Sort of like fancy handbags in the suburbs or muscle cars in Alabama. To know wine was to be part of a world, and what a world it was. The people who loved wine looked and felt like the family I wished I had. They were interested in things and they were capable of becoming interested in new things. They respected knowledge, they respected taste. I felt at home for the first time.
And then I went deeper. I found out that beer is as old as civilization, that the turn from hunting and gathering food to producing it is intimately tied up with the discovery of brewing. I learned that the act of brewing made water supplies safe at the same time that increasing population density made water unsafe. Places that brewed (or made wine) were healthier than those that didn't.
There was more, lots more. The organization of medeival breweries provided (along with shipbuilding) a model for the industrial revolution.

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So wine, and later its more complicated cousin beer, came to be a hobby, a religion, a clubhouse, a textbook, a friend. As time went on, my world and its got closer. Most importantly, wine became an answer to a whole lot of questions. Was I bored? How about a glass of wine? Was I purposeless? Lonely? Sad?
I wrote The New Short Course in Beer. I taught classes, I got invited to Europe. I gave tastings and I visited wineries.
In some tiny circles I was the beer guy. It was an identity.
Like any other religion, wine had its anti-christs. There were the flaming prohibitionists: the Baptists and the Moslems. But there were also the cerebrally-eviscerated middle-class Jews and the buzzed-down budweiser heads. When I started to teach wine classes at university,
there were priggish and provincial academics. Wine-love came with its built-in friends and, conveniently, with built-in enemies too.
One week in 1981, I tasted Saison Dupont and Chimay Blue. I made a new friend and I wrote The Short Course in Beer. In a few years, wine and beer became my friends, my clubhouse, my flag, my allegiance.
Wine and beer were something I drank and something that medicated my cares. Then it became an identity: something I was.More to the point, they were a source of meaning in my life. I was that wine guy, then I was that beer guy and I really enjoyed that.

There was enough to know that not everybody knew it. That world was attractive enough that people wanted to know more. The folks who already knew were an attractive crowd: they spoke languages, cooked good, gave parties. I felt at home.
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Now that's gone. Just as I expected it would, some doctor came along and said my drinking days were over. So what? That is, so what happens when a love affair and an identity mask die? Who am I?

Stay tuned.