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Guest Essay
By Boris Fishman
Mr. Fishman is a novelist and the author of the memoir “Savage Feast.”
Everywhere you look these days, people are turning away from alcohol. First there was Dry January. Now there’s Sober October. Who knows what month the rhyme scheme will come for next? Parched March? Modest August?
I admire these teetotalers. I too have abstained from liquor for extended periods and felt the clean poise and composure that replaces the low-grade hum of constant alcohol in the system. I met my wife during one such cleareyed abstention, so I know its value.
But I will not be joining the abstainers. I’m unwilling to part with wine.
It’s not because I’m chasing tipsiness — as someone who writes about wine, I often taste 50 to 60 glasses in a day, though I always spit them out and, in six years of drinking wine seriously, I haven’t once been drunk on it. But in a life that too often feels stripped of magic — whether because of our political hostility, the radical inequality in our society or the instantaneity required of everything — wine is a passport to transcendence. If water is life-giving, wine is psychedelic.
Sometimes, the aroma alone is enough to kick off the time travel. Last summer, my wife and I took our daughter to Istanbul. We visited Wayana, a........