Like a punchline to a joke that isn’t funny, I fell in love with wine again when I was 15 years sober. There wasn’t a particular catalyst or epiphany. I just woke up one day and wanted to know more about the beautiful, seductive thing that had almost killed me. I was on the cusp of turning 40 and I wondered if it was one of those weird mid-life impulses, like getting a hand tattoo or heading to the Amazon to take ayahuasca.
After a quick sanity check, I gave myself the green light to order wine guides and encyclopedias. I chipped away at YouTube’s sommelier content and started taking an interest in wine lists when I went out to eat. I began visiting wine shops again. One of numerous friends who is also in recovery took me out for what she billed as a common-sense walk. “Are you sure you’ve got your wing mirrors where they need to be?” she asked. “This is a cunning disease. I don’t want to look back and realise I missed you creating a loophole to go back to drinking again.”
I reassured her that I was solid in my sobriety. I’d heard so many alcoholics in recovery say things like, “Nothing would make me drink again except my dad dying.” And then their dad dies and they drink. Nothing would make me drink alcohol again. The impulse to rediscover wine was always going to be from afar, like a retired tennis champion in the commentator’s box. In those first weeks, I got daily goosebumps, like when a song you loved as a teenager suddenly bursts out of the radio.
My wife, who I met when I had been sober for one year, held the moral compass: “If this turns unhealthy, I’ll be the first to tell you.” When I felt ready to take on the wine lists of London, she agreed to be my guinea pig. I’d order her a glass of, say, Australian Sémillon, and she’d rate it for me. And I got into the habit, with trepidation at first, of holding the glass up to my nose, inhaling what I could not taste, trying to meet its contents at a purely sensory level. It proved easier than expected to index the wines my wife liked. She told a friend that I was picking wines she’d never had before and liked better than any she’d ever tasted. And that was enough to send news of my amateur antics viral among friends. It’s now commonplace for them to message asking for wine advice. And while it will sound both boastful and surreal, I’ve never picked a dud yet.
Picking wines I’ve never tasted and will never taste makes me think of a great aunt I had growing up who went blind at the age of 32. Every time we went to visit her, she’d greet me by taking my face in her hands. “I’m figuring out how much you’ve grown and how happy you are,” she used to say.
I’ll walk you through how it works. Let’s take the annual Thanksgiving dinner we throw for about 35 guests (my wife’s American). I start with the champagne. Through studying guests’ faces relative to the different champagnes I’ve served over the years, I’ve learnt that everyone’s eyes smile the most when I serve Taittinger, and they also get a nice summery blush to their cheeks, so I stick to that. Next I need a red and a white. I’ve noticed that a harsh red makes people flex their dimples or lick their teeth. During my trial-and-error research, I observed that my wife did neither when I debuted a Malbec from Argentina. “It’s smooth”, she said, “like stroking a horse.” So I buy two cases of Malbec, my favourite being Santa Julia. It smells so good in the glass it can make me shiver. For the whites, I tend to go Austrian. A decent Grüner Veltliner apparently offends no one, it’s a crowd-pleaser that tap dances with confidence across both good old-fashioned cornbread and pumpkin pie. I discovered Grüner Veltliner — a wine I have never drunk — by making my wife go down the entire white-wine list at our favourite neighbourhood restaurant, meal by meal, week after week, until we came to an orange iteration of the grape. “It tastes like driving with your hand out the window feeling the breeze,” she said.
I have the advantage of some pre-existing knowledge. I spent my gap year working in off-licences and after graduation I worked for a publisher where I shared an office with two wine magazines. Along the way I acquired a basic understanding of wine by osmosis. When I returned to it all those years later, fragments of what I once knew came back to me, like the clean-up of a library after a fire.
Today, on the eve of 30 years sober, the staff at my local branch of Majestic Wine know me well, but not well enough to know why I always decline tastings. I’ve worn them down over the years with excuses. “I’m driving.” “I’m on antibiotics.” “I have a work meeting this evening.” But I think by now they know there is something going on when I ask questions that border on forensic. “When does the biscuity flavour come? Before or after the honey notes you mentioned?” “Can you tell me more about the smoke of the oakiness?” It would be easier to just tell them I’m an alcoholic. I don’t fully understand why I don’t want to. Perhaps it’s about power. I didn’t get to decide that alcohol would devastate my life, but I do get to decide who I tell about it.
It’s hard to say when I first knew I had a problem with alcohol. Therapists have suggested it was obvious from the first time I got drunk, aged 14, because almost immediately, within a single glass of champagne, my entire life felt tolerable. Or perhaps it was when I was in sixth form, at home revising for mock A-levels, and it struck me at 10.30am that I could absolutely not imagine even a minute more of that day passing without pouring myself a large glass of brandy. The unravelling gallop of addiction gathered momentum after that. At 19 I was prescribed Antabuse. At 20, I first called Alcoholics Anonymous. In 1994, at the age of 24, I had my last glass of wine, a bitter Chianti. When the next drink is more important to you than vomiting blood, you stick to red wine so you can tell yourself you’re only vomiting wine.
That last time, the bleeding didn’t stop. As I got in my car to go to the hospital, I was still hoping that the 30-minute drive might just be long enough for a miracle to take place, one that spontaneously fixed my body and allowed me to turn around and drive to the nearest wine shop. I wound the window down and let the freezing air slap my cheeks.
In A&E, they rushed me to an endoscopy, where a bolt of glorious general anaesthetic shut everything down: the flock of beautiful blue birds I’d been hallucinating during delirium tremens, the bleeding stomach ulcers, the bonfire of gastritis and oesophagitis, and the endless screaming for alcohol that had lit the path of my every waking hour.
For my first six months sober, I went swimming most evenings, physically removing myself from the world. Underwater, in solitude, sobriety is unconditional. In the three decades of sobriety since, there have been so many therapists and therapies, antidepressants, beta blockers, acupuncture, ayurveda, jogging, reiki, kick-boxing, Pilates, screaming in my car to release anger, and negative things too, like punching straight through a plasterboard wall. The one thing that has consistently helped is practising Jivamukti yoga, a method people in recovery flock to; I believe it does something wonderful to an addict’s brain.
I also attended AA meetings and worked my way through the 12 steps. But somewhere along the way, I discovered that not being anonymous helped me at a more profound level with the sustained, intimate conflict of staying sober. I had outed myself by publishing a memoir in 2002 along with a related longstanding newspaper column that formed part of my varied career as a journalist. Out to lunches and dinners with my family, people who had read some of these things would regularly interrupt us to share urgent stories of their alcoholism with me.
Drawing wine close felt logical: getting face to face with this thing that had caused a traumatic experience in my life would be both healing and give my sobriety the edge I was looking for. For all addicts in recovery, complacency is the one true danger. Bringing wine into an intimate, tense embrace that I initiated made my sobriety stronger, the way exposure therapy has people revisit the scene of a traumatic event over and over, until they can face their emotions head-on. It works for me, but I urge caution before exploring whether it works for you.
That said, being around alcohol is sometimes still a problem. At a 50th-birthday dinner last summer, the hostess was struggling to open the champagne. “Get Nick to do it, he’s brilliant at it,” someone said. Normally I’m happy to take on uncorking duties, but this was the one night of 2023 where I was struggling to be around alcohol. I wanted to say “Don’t point that thing anywhere near me,” but it was a birthday dinner and that would be unfair. I took the bottle like it was the very thing it is for me — a deadly toxin that nearly took my life and could still — and twisted the cork off like I was handling the jaws of a feral dog. Even today, I won’t take a sip from any drink I haven’t prepared myself or seen prepared with my own eyes. If somebody brings me a drink and I didn’t see them make it, I’ll hold on to it for as long as it takes until it’s not rude to abandon it untouched on the nearest table.
It’s been moving and a little bit strange to have the gift of a second act where I get to re-experience wine as one of life’s pleasures. Today I like to think serving wine to those I love is just that: an act of love. But my wife thinks I do it because I still believe bone-deep that drinking is the only way to shake life off and have fun. Over the years, our parties have become legendary and it’s true, since getting sober, I’ve got so many of our friends stinking drunk, it’s ridiculous. “That was a night to remember,” they say. “It was,” I say. In truth, I don’t like people who don’t drink and I don’t like active alcoholics; I only like people who drink and people who had to stop drinking because they are alcoholics. In that tongue twister of a preference, I acknowledge there is a darkness inside me.
Tonight we are throwing a party. I’ve spent weeks worrying about the perfect wines to serve. The bottles are lined up in the fridge and on the kitchen counter, all enviously comfortable in their different shapes and sizes. I have overbought as usual because, even at 30 years sober, I am frightened of running out of alcohol. I can feel it’s one of the good days, where I will serve the wine generously and confidently — “a glass half full signals poor hosting”, as my grandfather taught me.
I have days where I wonder if my sober love for wine is idiotic and reckless, a cartoon character skiing down an avalanche-prone mountain, but then I remember something the late Lou Reed said to me at the end of a long, moving interview during which we compared notes on our respective alcoholism, “Nick, in sobriety, it’s hard enough to deal with the what-ares, don’t ever get caught up in the what-ifs.” This evening, the first familiar knuckles will rap on the door to our home, and I’ll open the first bottle of champagne and let the tiger out. I will give my friends a good time. And in the roar of the merrymaking, there’ll be a moment when I’ll cling too tight to a bottle and stop breathing, just for a heartbeat or two. The moment will pass, and I’ll step back into the party, back to myself, sad on the inside, glitter all the way on the outside.
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