From the Editor’s Desk: Drink (Premium)

In October 2018, Mary Jo Foley and I visited Dublin, Ireland for work, and my wife came along so we could explore the city as well. We’d visited several times in the past—the first time in 1993—but Dublin has evolved at a heady clip in recent years, and there’s always something new to see. And we enjoyed some old favorites, of course, like Trinity College, Grafton Street, and the Guinness Storehouse. But we also had some new experiences, among them a visit to the Jameson Distillery, where the three of us went on a tour.

That tour was quite interesting, and I wasn’t surprised that I preferred their Irish Whiskey over the other bourbons and whiskeys we tried in a blind taste test. But it ended, predictably, at a bar in the distillery where we could use a coupon to get a small glass of whiskey or one of a few Jameson-based cocktails. Ever the purist, I chose the whiskey, but Mary Jo and Stephanie went for the cocktails.

I immediately regretted my decision. Not only could I have a shot of Jameson at almost any time in almost any place on earth, but the two cocktails that came out were pretty, distinctive, and tasty. I was also quite taken with the cocktail accouterments that the bartenders used to create these concoctions. It was like watching a 19th-century chemist in a laboratory, with various liqueurs, syrups, bitters, dried fruits, and other items melded with whiskey and frothed egg whites into something unique and wonderful.

By this point, my wife and I had spent plenty of time at bars, but it was mostly to eat and drink a few glasses of wine. That alone was a major step up from our early alcohol experiences, which involved an escalating evolution in the quality of the beer we drank. I recall, for example, being taken with darker beers like Nut Brown Ale in the early 1990s, at a time when most of my friends were drinking weak American beers, and then by such things as Hefeweizens and various Belgian and German brews.

This is a great example of how life escalates, how one’s tastes mature and change over time. The dark side of this, of course, is that it’s hard to go back. Once you’ve moved on from the Budweisers of the world, you don’t want that thing anymore. You want something better. And better, almost universally, is more expensive. But alcohol is worse. Alcohol is not good for you.

When I did the Keto diet in 2017, I lost a lot of weight, but I also experienced a curious and unintended side-effect: I lost my taste for beer. Not just cheap, terrible beer, but all beer. I can’t really explain this, other than to say it happened, and while I have tasted some beers since then, I have never had a full glass of beer even once. I have, instead, had a lot of wine. And, more recently, many, many cocktails. Too many cocktails.

The wine escalated as everything else did. It started, in some ways, in 1998, when Steph and I went on our first trip after the birth of our first child. We visited Portland, Oregon, and a friend recommended that we visit a winery near there, called Oak Knoll. We did so, and we enjoyed it enough that we started getting cases of Pinot Gris shipped to our house in Phoenix, and then later in Dedham.

Over time, we visited Napa Valley and Sonoma multiple times, became opinionated about wine, and became a lot less enthralled by Pinot Gris (and Pinot Grigio, the European original). By the time we moved to Pennsylvania in 2017, we were buying wines from Sebastiani and other Sonoma wineries, another escalation in quality. But then we discovered the incredible vineyards of this state, an unexpected wonder, and that was that: most of our wine now comes from grapes that are grown just a few miles from our house.

Our affair with cocktails came out of that Ireland trip, of course. My wife was also enamored of the experience we had at Jameson, but she resolved to do something about it and learn how to make cocktails herself. This is interesting to me on many levels, but I’ve long thought that activities like software development, beer making, winemaking, cocktail making, cooking, playing a musical instrument, drawing, painting, and the like are all interrelated, and use the same parts of the brain, and that each is yet another way we can express ourselves as individuals.

And, sure enough, my wife turned into quite the mixologist. She learned as one does, by researching, by interacting in this case with bartenders, and by doing. She tried some classics, of course, and she made her own variants of those. But most impressively, perhaps, she made her own designs, from scratch, intuiting that certain flavors would go well together and not being afraid to dump and restart when needed.

And then the pandemic happened. Oh, the pandemic, that gift that just keeps on giving. We blame so much on the pandemic and we will likely look back later and blame even more on it in the future. The toll seems endless.

2020 was a year of many indulgences as we tried to cope with the creeping dread that enveloped our world and isolated us from each other. Stuck at home like bears in hibernation, we overate the wrong foods, over drank the wrong drinks, and pretended that the home exercise equipment we bought could in any way replace the gym we had used regularly to that point. Weeks turned into months. And by the time the year ended, the only place we had visited was North Carolina, a fraught experience in which we dropped off our daughter at college after a delayed start, and after she had graduated from high school without having a prom or proper graduation ceremony.

We stopped eating poorly pretty quickly in 2020, but we didn’t really stop drinking. And by the time semi-normal travel started up again in 2021, we had shifted into a new relationship with alcohol. It’s not something I’m super proud of, but the real issue is that cocktails are made of strong stuff, and they are often made with sugar. And these two things combined are not good. Not good at all.

I had the epiphany that year that my earlier experience walking away from beer could be replicated and I remarked to my wife that I saw a future in which I didn’t drink alcohol at all. This seemed far-fetched at the time, and it may even seem that way today. But it would be healthier, and it would save a lot of money. And I still feel very much that it can happen. Will happen.

But every journey starts with a single step and so in 2022, my wife simply stopped drinking as often, and I eventually joined her. Then, later in the year, we resolved to drink less of the hard stuff by drinking far fewer cocktails. My wife has started looking into mocktails, and friends recommended a no-alcohol wine. This month, we’re not doing Dry January, but we are doing a drier January, and that will evolve into a drier 2023 as well. We’re stepping off that superhighway.

That said, we also went to a winery yesterday. This was a more intentional experience than, say, just drinking wine because you’re planted on a couch and killing time—and brain cells—watching TV. And it was a social event, with friends, because of course it was. But I feel like wine is a step down from cocktails. And that less wine is a further step down. And that that’s how we get to where we want to be.

Here’s to a healthier 2023.