One of Us Got Sober; One of Us Wrote a Book About Wine
By Michelle Wildgen
Last month marked the eighteenth anniversary of my husband getting sober. There were other attempts before that last day—weeks and months when he’d go without a drink, then relapse. But this one stuck. When people ask him why he finally quit drinking, he points out the things he’d already lost to it—a job, friends, the semblance of a life—and says, “I didn’t want to lose the next thing.” Which was me.
Our meeting in college at a neighborhood dive bar was something of an omen. Since we began dating, so much of our time had been spent around the ritual of alcohol: the dining out with pairings for every course, the gin and tonics on the first warm day of spring, the red wine in winter and the rosé in summer. There was a reason the two of us meshed in this way: I come from drinking people, and I had spent years drinking way too much, right along with him. In college, it all blends in. Same thing when I worked in a restaurant, where drinking was a professional obligation, one I approached with devotion and attention.
During those drinking years, we’d weathered illness in family members and the stress of a move halfway across the country so I could go to grad school. But after we moved to New York, his guard rails had come off. I never knew if he’d make it on the 6 o’clock train or 11 o’clock train, or whom I’d have to deal with when he arrived, the actual person or the man trying to imitate him.
The veneer of fun became awfully thin. I had hit that moment around thirty when I no longer bounced back so easily. After one night when we accidentally stayed out until dawn—spending nearly eight hours inside a dark bar on West 46th Street—I was so ill that I knew I was never going to drink that way again. I’d gotten a taste of what it was to poison myself, and that was the last time. I would learn to behave like a normal person, who only had wine with dinner.
But when Steve attempted to get sober, I largely stopped drinking with him too. We drank herbal tea, seltzer, things that might have sounded depressing to me before. But now I knew what “depressing” was—it looked a lot like being drunk at 6 a.m.—and not drinking turned out to feel good.
Even when I did drink, when I was traveling or not with Steve, I took away before-dinner drinks and after-dinner nightcaps. I had to keep narrowing the window. I felt so much better, but I still liked a drink the same way I liked a great plate of pasta: both are delicious. The restaurant industry had also shown me how wine elevated a great meal, and I wanted to keep that in my life. But I’ve learned to put these rules in place, because I will never be someone who forgets to eat and I will probably never be someone who doesn’t want the glass of wine, even when she turns it down.
I often think of Carolyn Knapp’s description of cold white wine, in Drinking: A Love Story: the pale straw color, the delicate glass, the sheen of condensation. Of course it’s hard to stop drinking. We’ve made it beautiful.
I had hit that moment around thirty when I no longer bounced back so easily. After one night when we accidentally stayed out until dawn—spending nearly eight hours inside a dark bar on West 46th Street—I was so ill that I knew I was never going to drink that way again.
For years after leaving the restaurant business, I still thought of myself as a restaurant person. In my work as a writer and editor, I always tell the reader what a character is eating; I use food as character development; I depict restaurants as a kind of professional theater and a way of life. I had good friends from my restaurant era who’d moved into wine importing, and a few years ago I began thinking about their stories of visiting winemakers in the fields, and fancy dinners after long cold days in European tasting rooms. It felt like the makings of a new novel.
By this time, Steve had been sober for more than a decade, and my drinking had settled into something normal, even on the lower side of normal. Wine now interested me as a topic to research, not as a substance to arrange my life around. Still, once I began working on the novel in earnest, I had to drink a little differently, with intention. I couldn’t just knock wine back. I had to pay attention and compare terroirs and varietals, fix them in my memory.
Once, I had to taste wine after wine at vineyard after vineyard, which was barely a drop compared to what a professional wine drinker has to taste, but it felt endless to me. For the first time I can remember, I did not want to feel the effects of alcohol. This was how I learned to embrace spitting wine. When you have to taste a few dozen wines, spitting is how you respect the process by staying alert to appreciate what you’re drinking. I had to learn what real wine people know, which is that you have to work around an essential aspect of wine if you want to keep enjoying it.
It would have been nice to share the vineyard visits and the research with Steve, who would have enjoyed it twenty-five years ago, back when drinking was still a thing he enjoyed. But it doesn’t matter. He has his work that I don’t participate in, and I have mine. Over time, natural boundaries have emerged around a substance I drink and he doesn’t, but it no longer feels so radioactive for him to be near it. And yet I never forget how easily that could change.
Wine now interested me as a topic to research, not as a substance to arrange my life around.
Now and then I think of a dinner we made back when he was still drinking. Why this one, I don’t know: it was lamb chops with potatoes and sautéed greens and lots of spicy zinfandel. I remember sitting down to that meal in our little apartment in New York, and admiring the rare splurge on lamb, how delicious the wine was with that meal. And I thought, How do we have this if he stops drinking? It will never be the same.
I was right: we would not have those treasured dinners, and life would not be the same. But by the time he got sober, I had realized those dinners were over, anyway—you don’t savor drinking wine with someone who can’t stop. I no longer wanted that life to stay the same. This is the thing about living with an addict: it can take a while before you hit a bottom too.
Talk to people who have stopped drinking or even changed the ritual of it, and you often hear a similar tone of wonderment in their voices. We cannot believe this works. It feels clean, a colleague once said to me, of waking up after a sober night. I knew exactly what he meant. I too loved waking up with no hint of headache or uncertainty or lingering chemical depression.
I often think about how much of his brain space my husband has freed up by simply not drinking at all. There is something to be said for it: the energy he once spent strategizing his drinking, I often spend strategizing calorie consumption and drinking is part of that. It’s not sexy. I would even say it’s a little disordered. Which means that when I throw off the shackles of worrying about what I drink and eat, it can feel like a triumph, because it is tedious to regard wine in the same prosaic way I might think about carbs. Wine deserves more. I’ve spent years thinking about what’s involved in making wine, the centuries of tradition and the endless cycle of its production, and I want wine to remain in that elevated place in my mind.
I still have complicated feelings about my drinking, even though I am so much more careful than I once was. I worry that I will always want it more than I should. I anticipate that glass of wine, the ritual of relaxation it is a part of. I love the aesthetics of that swooping, thin glass and the body and color of the liquid itself. Wine deserves my attention and even my gratitude, but maybe not my obsessive focus. I try to honor a good bottle. I give it great stemware, a good meal, so it can be everything it ought to be.
Michelle Wildgen‘s novel Wine People was published by Zibby Books August 1. Her previous novels include Bread and Butter, But Not for Long, and You’re Not You, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and was adapted into a film starring Hilary Swank and Emmy Rossum. Wildgen’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Modern Love column, Best Food Writing, O Magazine, Real Simple online, Tin House, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is a freelance editor and cofounder of the Madison Writer’s Studio with Susanna Daniel.