Very interesting read. My initial thought was I started reading was how much the father would have enjoyed CellarTracker and the Coravin. For me, tinkering in the cellar and acquiring bottles is equally, if not more, enjoyable than consuming.
That’s about the point of the article where I stopped being able to relate. My parents were very very light drinkers. Usually only on special occasions, and holidays. My dad would have the random jug of chianti sitting on the cement floor of our garage. Pretty sure it sat there year round. Or they would enjoy a Corona with homemade tacos. But that was about it. Never saw them drunk or even buzzed. One or two drinks and done. I’d wondered if it was just because they were getting older and lost interest in alcohol because they used to tell me stories from their 30’s and they sure knew how to party.
My father passed away when I was 23, so well before I got into wine. My mother passed away when I was 32 and she seemed to enjoy looking at my growing collection because she liked the pretty labels and thought my Le Cache was a nice looking piece of furniture. But she hated the taste of red wine. Try as I might, it didn’t take.
Now at 37, I often wished my parents were into wine and I could have enjoyed/freeloaded off of a nice cellar of aged gems that in today’s world would be less financially prudent. But reading this makes me wonder had that been the case growing up, would I have developed the same dependence as the author? I suppose we become products of our environment and then either stay the course or deviate onto our own path. I’m at the point where if I so chose, I could probably enjoy a glass or two of wine daily with dinner and not think twice about. Conversely, if I was told no more alcohol, I’d just sell all my wine, have a little collecting withdrawal, and then be just fine.
I applaud the writer for being able to go cold turkey after all those years and it makes me ponder how many of us on the board would be to do the same thing? I’d say it’s safe to say there are functioning and non-functioning alcoholics here based on probability (not observation.) Do their experiences resemble that of the article or did it start elsewhere? This is just me thinking out loud.
Alcoholism is one of the most significant pitfalls of being in the trade. One of the most painful moral quandaries over the years has been ringing up customers who are clearly in the process of dying of it.
Of course, there’s also watching the behavior or co-workers and trade friends, and wondering about your own. As I do retail AND own a wine bar, it would be very easy to drink pretty much whenever I wanted. I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine last October about alcoholism and the business (on a side note, I’m happy to say that health and well-being seems to be something the next generation in the trade takes more seriously, generally speaking) and the topic came up that, if you had to give up one or the other forever, would you give up the flavors of wine or the effects of alcohol?
I decided I would be just fine without a buzz/drunkenness, but I would miss the taste. So, as mentioned in Peter Hirsch’s Dry January thread, I began spitting wine for the holiday season to keep from packing on holiday weight, lost a bunch instead, and now I’m about 3 months into it - and still going for vanity’s sake as much as anything.
The writer acknowledges that he realizes the father was trying to pass on something that he loved.
However, ultimately, the writer still seems to blame the father for the alcoholism instead of owning it himself. Seems like the alcoholism and denial still talking.
The author was born with all the privilege and wealth one can only dream of. Now he wants to blame his father for that life of wealth and privilege. I reserve my harshest criticism for the author, not the father.
Kudos to him for finally recognizing it and taking the first step.
Someone with a genetic tendency towards alcoholism (which it sounds like the author has) will find it hard to stop drinking once they start. It’s easy to come up with post-facto explanations for the behavior but from what I’ve read the cause is for the most part physical.
I’m reminded of a study that was done of identical twins who had been adopted by different households. One pair that were tracked down were both meticulously neat people. When they were interviewed one of them said “My adoptive parents were neat and organized so I learned it from them.” The other said “My adoptive parents were incredibly sloppy and so I became very neat and organized as a reaction against them.” Humans have a tendency to see patterns and seek explanations but sometimes it just comes down to biology.
My personal take is that the father was probably not an alcoholic, especially given how easily he gave it up when he lost his sense of taste. And given that it’s easy to see that he would not have understood that his son was.
Yes, I don’t disagree. The fact remains that the author presents his father in quite an ambiguous way in the piece. Details like the fact that his father always sits at the head of the table under a massive portrait of himself. But I agree that the author may be trying to deflect some responsibility for his disease (though he seems to see it more as a “failing” than a disease) through the characterization of his father.
The other interesting thing to me about the piece was how both father and son associate fine (foreign) wine with “breeding” and culture. The author is a failure compared to his father not just because he can’t control his drinking but because he doesn’t own a massive cellar stocked with great wines. Instead he spends years drinking bottles bought one by one at the corner grocery (when he wins the foundation for a great cellar, he drinks it up). And he says ruefully at the end, a $20 Oregon Pinot is no 59 Bordeaux.
It’s a pity the author doesn’t debunk this notion, which I think many wine aficionados hold at some level, rather than reinforce it.
Very true. Personally I found the portrait of the father a little amusing and somewhat endearing (he obviously cared about his son but didn’t know how to help him - or might not even have realized that help was needed) but of course I didn’t have to live with him.
Well said…I completely agree that fine wine or appreciation of fine wine has nothing to do with culture & breeding. It has more to do with generosity, kindness, and passion to me. I’ve been blessed to taste with and share wine with some amazingly generous folks in the last decade+. I hope that others have similar experiences.
But I don’t know why people said the ending was a surprise. The subtitle of the article is “Learning how to drink, and how to stop.” It seemed pretty obvious from the subtitle, and how the article was crafted that the author ultimately was going to give up drinking.
I really enjoyed that piece. Thank you for sharing.
Imo I must agree with others who state that the father was not an alcoholic. I believe he was a wine lover as evidenced by his meticulous nature in tracking his purchases and abrupt discontinuation. The author however was an alcoholic and would’ve been an alcoholic regardless of his fathers hobby. He’d been introduced to etoh thru someone else.
It’s only been 9 months since the author quit drinking. In all liklihood his struggle with living up to his father’s measure of success and his own substance-addiction is not over.
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