http://proof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/why-and-how-i-drink/
Why (and How) I Drink
By Paul Clarke
A Negroni. In a bar. In a glass, please. (Philip Greenberg for The New York Times)
I recently took a business trip to Las Vegas, which in my line of work meant searching for good drinks. But while traveling to party towns like Vegas or New Orleans is part of the package when your job is related to spirits and cocktails, there are plenty of occupational hazards that come with the territory. For me, the biggest drawback may be confronting the ugly side of alcohol.
I love a good drink, but the alcoholic slushies being sold by the yard in the spring break atmosphere of these cities have all the appeal of a day-old Big Mac left to ferment in the sun. Whether it’s the tall, green plastic flasks of sweetened grain alcohol marketed as “Hand Grenades” to tourists on Bourbon Street, or the Big-Gulp-sized piña coladas served in Eiffel Tower-shaped go-cups toted by visitors stumbling along the Strip, these drinks and the people who regularly slurp them don’t make my job any easier.
As I walk among the party crowd – en route to someplace a little quieter and more subdued, where the drinks are served in modest proportions and in actual glasses – I want to approach the occasional Scripture-quoting soul-savers who also frequent these places, and say a little defensively, “I’m not actually with them – I’m just here to watch.” Not that it would be likely to make any difference, of course; my search for a proper Negroni, no matter the size, is for many people on par with the debauchery of Mardi Gras, simply because of the shared element of alcohol.
These flip sides of the drink equation call to mind G.K. Chesterton’s observation (helpfully posted by a reader in the comments section to my first Proof post) that’s become something of a chestnut in imbibing circles: “The dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.” Early in my drinking life, when I would meet my high school friends beneath a remote river bridge near my Oklahoma hometown to drink warm beer or cheap gin mixed with Sprite, I fell soundly into Chesterton’s dipso category (which for a 17-year-old is pretty much par for the course).
As I matured, however, so did my relationship with alcohol. While it seems obvious in some ways, I eventually realized that different forms of drink have different tastes (and not simply the taste of the things you throw in to mask the alcohol), and that some of these drinks actually had some real appeal. While I still have friends who view the taste of beer, wine or spirits as secondary, at best, to the potency of the drink (whether they view this as a positive or a negative depends on the person), over time I came to value the flavor and character of a drink much more than the inherent buzz.
That’s not to say that I’m either disingenuously oblivious or unappreciative of alcohol’s chemical side. When I sit at a local bar and sip a Last Word or a Toronto Cocktail, I enjoy the slow suffusion of warmth and the language-loosening properties of drink that enable a preternaturally shy person like me to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. But to end the observation there, myopically viewing alcohol’s effect as the be-all and end-all reason for drinking, or to see an inevitable progression from one or two drinks to nine or ten, misses the point of a good drink as entirely as those who down quarts of frozen margaritas during an epic Vegas bender.
I drink because I like it, and for reasons that usually place “effect” a step or three down the list. I love the spicy sweetness of whiskey and I’m a total sucker for the herbal ballet of a good vermouth; when tasting well-made spirits and cocktails composed from them, I can admire the skill of a talented distiller, along with that of a bartender who understands what they have. While plenty of spirits and cocktails are so artlessly made as to make me consider early retirement, there are great new things being done by bartenders and distillers, making this an exciting time to be a drinker.
Drinking also satiates my historical and culinary curiosity: as a fan of obscure and sometimes obsolete spirits and cocktail ingredients, I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time searching for liqueurs, bitters and other products that appeared in bar manuals from the 1860s through the 1950s, but which disappeared from bars decades ago. Recreating these drinks and having the chance to taste them gives me a richer perspective of other eras and places, an experience I usually find far more satisfying than the simple buzz I could get from something as pedestrian as a vodka and tonic.
But in addition to these reasons why I drink, there’s another factor that comes into play. As paradoxical as it may sound to include it, in a roundabout way I’m also drinking for my kids – but before you leap to the comments section and spit out an accusatory fireball, please hear me out.
During my formative-drinking years, when alcohol was still a relative novelty, I had something that many of my harder-drinking friends did not: parents who demonstrated a responsible relationship with alcohol. My father and sometimes my mother would crack a cold beer on hot days, and wine was regularly served at dinner on weekends and special occasions to everyone including the kids. They kept a decently stocked liquor cabinet, but usually only opened it for drop-by guests and the occasional dinner party, which were celebrated in good cheer but were seldom if ever followed by awkward phone calls the next day.
This open yet modest approach to alcohol was in contrast to the paths taken by the families of some friends and neighbors, whose habits ranged from over-indulgent to abstemious and were sometimes an odd mix of the two: it was not lost on me during my secular Bible Belt upbringing that some of my hardest-drinking friends – whose relationships with booze were often of the vomit-in-the-shrubbery, loss-of-all-personal-control variety – were from religious homes in which alcohol was seldom if ever served.
Knowing that my 6-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son will likely start to experiment with alcohol in – let’s be realistic – about a decade, give or take, I fully realize that every time my wife or I take a drink around them, a message is being sent. There are several directions this can go, and I understand I’ll never have total control over any of them. If completely banishing alcohol from our home would protect them from any of its hazards later in life, it’d be an easy choice, but as my old hard-drinking friends demonstrated, that’s just a bit too simple and naïve to be a realistic option.
Instead, I try to mirror the moderate approach taken by my own parents, leavening this with the lessons I learned from these hard-drinking friends who had more rigid upbringings, along with those I pick up from watching the unique slice of life visible in Las Vegas and New Orleans: when it comes to alcohol, an extreme approach at either end of the spectrum can be bad news. Too much is always too much, and none at all can also be too much; but tacking an even course between the two is usually just enough.
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