"Dry January is hard for me." When Caroline Conner, a wine expert and educator living in Lyon, France, admitted that on her Instagram feed earlier this month, it wasn't because of any concerns that her nearly 70 thousand followers were going to temporarily lose interest in her business. It was because, as she said, "I can see more clearly how overindulging wastes my time and poisons my body." What do you do when you're a wine expert trying to renegotiate your own relationship with alcohol?

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Sobriety is not just an annual New Year's challenge — we are in a shifting moment in alcohol consumption. A 2023 Gallup poll found Gen Z drinks substantially less than their elders, and drinks less regularly and less excessively. And a 2021 Gallup poll from 2021 found that "The average number of drinks Americans consume in a week has been falling over the last several years." For most of us, though, cutting down or cutting out alcohol is a relatively straightforward affair. It's not so simple when it's your job.

"I've been in the wine industry since I was very young," Conner tells me during a recent phone conversation. "I got into wine because I did competitive blind wine tasting during my undergrad when I was at Oxford, which obviously for Americans is impossibly young, but in England, I could drink." Now, after building a career in a field she loves — yet one that she says incentivizes excess — she's figuring out a new normal.

"I have never desired to stop drinking," she admits. "I want to drink moderately. I've been to [AA] meetings; I have friends who've been in program. I acknowledge that it can really help some people, but I also absolutely reject any one size fits all model. I know I drink too much. I know I like drinking too much. I know that it's easy for me to drink too much. I am surrounded by free alcohol. And," she adds, " I don't want to lose my connection to wine, because wine is sacred and beautiful. And my career and my journey in this life, I think in a large part is to........

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