Just drink better

Many people find Christmas a challenging time, especially those who normally follow the BMA’s advice on how many units are safe to consume. If you work in wine, drinking, obviously, is an occupational hazard. Christmas is the event we’ve been training for. But it also means an extra helping of self-loathing come the barren landscape that is January and the wearily predictable, New Year, New Me resolutions.

There is of course Dry January, which seems to have attained national treasure status. A wine writer who shall remain anonymous, does the classic, no frills, version. “I drink at least a bottle of wine every day for 11 months,” he cheerfully told me in October, “but I religiously stay off the sauce in January to give the old liver a rest”. I bow to his zen-like discipline.

Then again, I have friends who ‘give up drinking at home’, which, on the face of it, would appear to be a sensible compromise, but in reality I suspect would be hard to police, while others ‘save it for the weekend’ which sounds suspiciously like binge drinking. You can’t be half pregnant.

We are being scared into submission. We live in a world in which, rather like a narrowing corridor, safe units are constantly being revised – downwards I might add – and we are told that the only safe drinking is no drinking. Surely not? But, then again, why not? Remember the days when doctors endorsed cigarettes – “Physicians say Luckies are less irritating!” and “More Doctors Smoke Camels”.

To combat the booze police, I seek comfort in what mental health professionals call ‘rationalizing’. In 2013, I read a profile of the historian Peter Ackroyd in the New York Times. “I used to drink spirits, but my liver said no,” Ackroyd told the reporter, who added. “These days, [Ackroyd] only drinks wine, but lots of it: a bottle with dinner at a restaurant (he always dines out), and another bottle when he gets home at night.” Ackroyd was 64 at the time, and by all accounts was no gym bunny, but he’s still going strong at 76 (although one suspects his heroic intake has probably been reduced).

But habits, rather than motivation, are the key to life changes and so I have taken a leaf out of Fred Sirieix’s metaphorical book of life. The super-smooth maître d’hôtel and host of Channel 4’s First Dates, says he simply “can’t drink sh*t wine”. A no brainer you might think, but, maybe because he’s French, this particular pronunciation landed with a certain Gallic gravitas. Either way, I often find myself drinking stuff that is technically wine – i.e. fermented grape juice – but which is so ordinary that I derive no meaningful enjoyment from it. What’s the point?

So rather than taking whole months off (impossible); having a dry home (too Mormon) or going nuts on the weekend (seriously?), I have decided to try to restrict my intake to the good stuff. Of course, ‘good’ is subjective but it’s fair to say it will cut out faceless supermarket wines that normally do the weekday heavy lifting. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the week will be dry, but it will be drier and better.

Before Christmas, I mentioned this to another hack, this time the editor of a national wine magazine who said that he also decided upon a similar course of action a few years earlier but then confessed that it was quite disingenuous. “I’m sent so many amazing samples, I very rarely drank ‘bad’ wine, a situation that has become quite problematic because there’s quite a lot of it.”

Plus ça change.

Michael Karam is a journalist, editor and wine writer. He is the author of Wines of Lebanon and a contributor to Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine and The World Atlas of Wine.

Michael Karam’s latest book ‘Wines of Lebanon: The Journey Continues’ is available from Académie du Vin