What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Drinking
WHY DO WE DRINK ALCOHOL? I heard it spelled out with clinical precision one night, years ago. I’d recently landed a job as a fact-checker at Gourmet and found myself out for drinks near the magazine’s Times Square offices with some editors I was a little in awe of. My shoes were all wrong. Where I’d gone to college was all wrong. I was pretty sure any drink I ordered would be judged wrong, too, as my companions sloshed singlemalts around on their palates and assessed the esters and phenolics. But I needed a Manhattan—my grandma’s cocktail and, for me, always, a big boozy hug of a drink—so I ordered one. The grizzled editor seated next to me did the same, which I’ll confess I found affirming. When our Manhattans arrived, he and I sipped in silence for a few minutes, letting the liquor do its work. Then he smiled down into his glass, palpably gratified, and said, “After a long day, having a Manhattan is a lot like having a mild stroke.” So true, I thought—and so far from anything we’d print in the magazine.
At the time, the writing on drinks in ran more to pairing advice like the following: “The wine’s verve is undiminished by the cream cheese in the canapés, and its flavor … unfurls, discreetly but irrepressibly, even across green olives, scallions, and Tabasco.” This was the early aughts. The craftcocktail boom was detonating all around us, but it took a few years to reverberate in the pages of . Drinks Editor James Rodewald first nodded to New York’s new-school speakeasies in a brief item in 2004; two years later, he noted “a return to
