Do wine and I need to consciously uncouple?

Methinks that I have stayed at the red wine party for too long.

I turned 45 this September. With the exception of debilitating insomnia (which is a pretty big exception, one that causes me hallucinations and canker sores and IBS and other ailments I write about in my memoir) I’ve been pretty lucky on the aging front until this point. My body (when it’s rested) doesn’t present me with any problems, each limb works just fine. My face looks like the face of a multitasking writer/mother who doesn’t Botox, but it hasn’t sagged into a separate gravitational plane or anything. My hair hasn’t gone gray. My ankles function, I wear glasses only to work on the computer, I do fun things on the weekend—and sometimes even weekday nights.

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

But maybe I should put all of these fortunates in the past. Because since turning 45, a lot of this is changing. My eyesight is getting so bad that I can’t read exit numbers on the highway until they’re practically upon me. Getting out of bed in the morning is the muscular equivalent of exiting an airplane after a long-distant flight: if I don’t roll my ankles to get some of the blood flowing, I might fall on my face. I have streaks of gray in my bangs now and I’m not sure what to do with them. And either everyone I love is mumbling, or my hearing is shot.

But the most pronounced thing I’m noticing since hitting my mid forties is that I can not drink red wine without repercussions anymore. I was never a white wine drinker, but red wine, yeah: big fan. On top of being raised in a household where my father’s favorite activity was getting me to “smell the bouquet” of whatever red he’d opened for dinner, I lived in Paris for most of my twenties, coming of age and learning to “adult” over bottles (and bottles) of Bordeaux and Chinon. During the worst and loneliest parts of Paris when I would set a mini-bottle of Cab on a dinner tray to watch re-runs of “Who’s the Boss” in French during a period where I was hiding from my psychotic ex in a tiny room rented to me by a widower, to the blissful period when I finally got a proper work Visa and could legally secure my own apartment and live with independence, red wine was the culinary bass in the soundtrack of my life. It was a big thing with my friends, red wine. We’d go through bottles of the stuff, even at restaurants, because in the good old early aughts before France swapped francs for euros, you could—I’m not exaggerating—have a three course dinner with wine for the equivalent of twenty American dollars at the places we liked to go.

When I eventually met my (French) husband and we returned to the United States in 2005, we purchased a wine called “Fat Bastard” by the case from Costco, and would usually go through a bottle and a half of it while eating too much pasta in front of a home renovation show. Brooklyn, where we had moved to, was much more expensive than we’d been led to believe and because it was expensive, we stayed at home a lot and we were lonely. But with our HGTV and our Fat Bastard, at least on our weekend nights together, we weren’t lonely at all.

That my relationship to wine needs reevaluating has been obvious to me for several years now. My sleep cycle, which has always been the most problematic element in my life, is totally disturbed by it. If there is any amount of red wine involved in my evening, I’ll be up at 2am, at 4am, and again at 5 o’clock at which point I’ll wake up for good, except that I won’t feel good, I’ll look drained and feel exhausted. I find myself dreading work-week dinner invitations because there will be wine at dinner, and I can’t say no to wine, or rather, I’ll say ‘no’ to it, and then someone will say you only live once, or they’ll compliment the taste of whatever wine that we are having, and I’ll cave, hold out my glass.

For my sober subscribers (and there are many of you), you might be thinking: this chick has a problem, a problem with alcohol. And yes, I definitely do. Because when I say “no” but then eventually back track, it’s not because I want to taste the wine or want the inhibition or inebriation that comes with it, no. I usually enjoy myself more when I don’t drink wine: it makes my head feel stuffed with chestnuts, it makes me dull and dumb. What happens to me in those dinner table moments when someone pulls a cork out is that I see something in the middle of the table that’s deeply connected to my young adulthood, and I think: I’m still young! I’m still fun, I’m frisky! Connect me back to that!

It will be no secret to anyone here that alcohol is falling out of favor in America and beyond. You can’t swing a cat¹ without hitting people who have recently turned sober, and my friend Holly Whitaker of

Recovering

fame convinced a lot of us that sobriety can be an act of self love and radical feminism, as she writes about so game-changingly in her bestseller “Quit Like a Woman.”² Wine is not attached to youth, I know this. I see it in the mirror. On the nights I drink, my morning eyes are sunken, my lips are lined, I look parched of any moisture like a harried crocodile. And yet, I still equate wine drinking with a devil-may-care attitude that goes along with “fun.”

To be clear, I don’t think this way about hard alcohol: I’ve never been a shot taker or a big drinker of spirits. While I like a proper gin and tonic and a well made margarita puts real joy into my life, it isn’t a problem for me to regard these beverages as something that is special and celebratory, appropriate in moderation at specific times. Also, cocktails come in single-sized portions making it easy to say “that’ll do it” after finishing one, whereas when a bottle of wine is opened, there’s all that wine waiting if you only have one glass.

In my twenties, I finished off wine bottles that wouldn’t otherwise get finished—in my forties, I don’t do that any longer: I put the cork back in. To be frank, I can’t remember the last time my husband and I opened a bottle of wine and made it through more than half of it. In terms of the quantity of wine I drink when I drink wine, I don’t think (bird’s eye view) that it’s problematic, but what is problematic is that I am drinking any quantity of something that makes me feel like crap. Why am I doing that? Why do I continue to do that? Why can’t I just say, “none for me, thanks. I’ve given up red wine” and drink water or sparkling water with a little lime in it, which is a beverage that I actually enjoy that doesn’t put me at death’s door in the middle of the night?

Saying no to red wine feels like I’m admitting to the existence of a divide between the young and somewhat festive person that I used to be and whatever I am now: a mother, a full time job haver, an insomniac who needs to be vigilant about their relationship to sleep, a person who is aging. Not drinking red wine makes me feel a bit despondent. I know that reads dramatically, but I’m bemoaning this: am I really at a place in life where only two glasses of the red stuff throws my next day off? Is there something other than my youth that I’m attached to? Is it, I don’t know…France? Does drinking red wine make me feel somehow less American, less responsible for all of the violence and waste and skewed values that Americans have unleashed on the rest of this dark world?

Obviously, all these questions are ones I should be addressing to a therapist, but my beloved therapist (if you’ve read my memoir, you’ll have met him) moved out of state and now I have no therapist. I wrote to two potential therapists about needing therapy, and they never wrote me back, and now my ego’s hurt. So I’m sharing all this here. I bet some of you have been going through these same changes in your relationship to alcohol, in your relationship to youth. I would like very much for the second half of my forties to be my 2023 bare-faced Pamela Anderson era where I’m flitting about without a dependency on vino, but I fear I lack the courage. It really does feel like courage to me, the resiliency and steadfastness needed to say no to all that wine.

I wish my friends would invite me to more hikes instead of dinners. I wish that my relentless work ethic carried over into my relationship with/against red wine. I wish I had the fortitude of character to finally make the call: red wine has been making me feel like shit for years, and it’s time I give it up. But somehow, I’m not there yet. Maybe it’s a question of a gradually cooling turkey, instead of going cold turkey overnight. I know the decision I have to make, but I just haven’t carried out the making of it, yet. Love is so short, forgetting is so long, wrote Pablo Neruda. Maybe he was talking about wine?

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This weekend, I’m headed to New Mexico to run the inaugural launch of my new line of writing retreats, Turning Points. I’m so excited! I probably won’t post again until my return because I’ll be devoting all my attention to the nine writers coming with me.

In the meantime, Substackers who are also revisiting their relationship to alcohol would be well advised to check out the writing and books of the aforementioned Holly Whitaker’s

Recovering

and

Laura McKowen

and

Nora McInerny

. If you’d like to comment about your own experience with wine/alcohol, or on what I’ve shared here, please do. Be kind, as always. It’s an act of resistance, isn’t it, kindness? Comments are for paid subscribers. Please consider upgrading if you’d like to join the discussion.

Thanks for being here, and for those listening eyes and ears (and hearts).

Courtney

1. Please don’t swing cats.

2. This is an affiliate link. If you purchase the book using this link I get a tiny commission I use to buy books at Bookshop.