The wettest Dry January on record — a remedy

How did your Dry January go? Every time I picked up a wine or a health-related article in the first month of 2023, “Dry January” seemed to pop up and sounded to me like a sure-fire recipe for dreary meals on dreary, cold, rainy, windy and scary days.

For me, “a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.” And aren’t we having enough of those days this winter without also making January “dry”?

(Were I going to have a dry month, I’d vote for July.)

In the ‘50s the French government, concerned about the rise in alcohol consumption, launched a (successful) campaign to lower it, but their recommendation was not to go dry. No, it was to drink no more than a liter of wine day. Per person. Can you imagine?

I’ve been scolded for my daily bottle (750 ml) wine habit — and that bottle is shared equally with another person. An entire liter all on my own would give me a world-class hangover, no matter how beautifully-made the content of the bottle. (And no, as passionate as I am about “natural wine,” I don’t believe the occasional claim that it prevents hangovers. If you drink enough of it you’ll suffer in the morning. But a half bottle, no.)

Do you ever get the impression that we Americans (of the U.S. variety) can be just a tad hysterical about drinking wine? I think of the delightful piece Adam Gopnick wrote about his wife’s pregnancy. They were living in France at the time and when the obstetrician announced the positive test result, he broke out a bottle of celebratory Champagne for the three of them. Again, can you imagine?

A friend sent me an article in which a wine writer argues that instead of going dry, we consider spending more of our wine budgets at small businesses, especially at independent wine shops, wineries and restaurants; another suggests that we resolve to drink only wine made with organic grapes and without any of the 100-plus additives permitted in this country and ubiquitous in Big Wine of every sort.

Most of these additions are prohibited in other countries but, well, we do like our pesticides, herbicides and added flavors and colors in just about everything we consume, so why not wine?

Oh, resist. Resist. Buy local. Buy better.

I’ve been reading “To Fall in Love, Drink This,” the latest book by Alice Feiring (anointed “the queen of natural wine” by The Financial Times). I envy her acute sense of smell and taste, her vast knowledge of wine and wine regions worldwide, and her ability to write so eloquently of a bottle she loves. To write beyond the standard “dark berries and tobacco with a wisp of salt.” To write about wine’s connection to life itself.

Of one “thought-provoking,” and “shocking” bottle from the Czech Republic, she says it’s “a wine that got you out of a rut, moved foundations, showed life’s absurdity, and made us laugh at our fragility but also reminded us of our resilience.”

And isn’t that exactly what we need to counter our days of plague and storm, political unrest and economic meltdown, war, fear, and climate chaos? Don’t you want a bottle? I do.

Of course the “counter” is only temporary, but, yes, it reminds us of possibilities when we’re sometimes nearly devoid of hope and is, therefore, like art, music, literature, and good food essential to survival.

That said, “natural wines” can be an acquired taste — a taste, I