Drinking and blathering on about it at the New York Times

Have you seen the New York Times' "Proof" blog? It's a collection of writers posting about drinking -- not the drinks, but the experience of drunkenness.

This fills a niche. There are scores of wine writers and at least a few dozen people aspiring to be spirits or cocktail writers. But all of us concentrate on the flavors we experience, not the feeling we get after imbibing.

I've always found this dichotomy strange, and have been annoyed more than once by an editor prudishly snipping out a reference to being schnockered at the end of a long tasting of Zinfandels, for example. It's the polite secret of the wine industry: Yes, Virginia, professional wine tasters do get tipsy. We just don't admit it.

In fact, it's important in the industry to be able to drink bottle after bottle of wine and not show really obvious signs of drunkenness. If you jump in a fountain or give a technicolor yawn in public, people will still talk about it years later with disdain, perhaps while opening the 6th bottle of the night.

Thus I think there's a good spot in American wine writing for what the Times is doing. The actual results are, so far, hit and miss.

What the blog seems to spotlight mostly are regretful essays from binge drinkers. This is definitely a way many Americans relate to alcohol, and it's a shame that it is.

But I for one would like to see more essays about why people like drinking in the first place. There's a great line very early in the movie "Trainspotting" about heroin: "People think it's all about misery and desperation and death and all that shite, which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not fucking stupid."

I really liked David Kramer's essay "Buybacks" about his feeling of being special at his neighborhood bar in Manhattan: it managed to convey both the reasons people like to while away their lives in bars, and the reasons they probably shouldn't.

He writes: "McManus is one of those rare New York bars that still understands and holds dear the concept of the buyback — a drink on the house for every few you buy. And depending on the bartender and the length of my drinking session, the buybacks could be plentiful. Every now and then, the cadence of the buybacks would increase and I would find myself going one-for-one with the bartender, which made it difficult to slip out in a moment of polite one-upmanship.

I thought this was just great. I knew that buybacks didn’t go to just anybody. They were a perk of the inner circle, the handful of patrons who were genuinely liked and trusted by the staff. So a buyback didn’t just mean free beer — a great concept on its own. It meant acceptance. It meant I was on one of the rings of the inner circle."

... but later ...

"I told her about that split-second, how I was frozen on my bar stool and didn’t know what to do. But then every free drink that I had ever had, and the potential of that ending — forever — flashed before my eyes. No more special treatment. No more buybacks … The thought was staggering. I just had to do something."

Good stuff. Read the whole post.

That said, after Kramer, there's work to do: too much grimacing, not enough winking. Hopefully the Times will find more writers to highlight interesting things about drinking, because otherwise "Proof" will deteriorate into an unending elegy of eloquent regret, alleviated by occasional glitters of bright celebration. Sound like any activities you know?