A Five-Minute Love Affair With Natural Wine

I still love wine... I just don't drink it any longer.

By reader request, I’ve added audio voiceover for this piece in my own voice. Enjoy!

I made a huge change to my relationship with alcohol close to five years ago now, and for the most part these days, it doesn't even enter into my consciousness. Once in a while though, I get a reminder of how compelling this powerful substance can feel—and also of just how fleeting that compulsion is—how quickly it appears and then disappears again.

Making the short drive north on highway 101 the other night to my beautiful friend’s house for dinner, the last of the fall twilight fading behind the hills to the west, I was sore from running and heavy from not running enough, melancholy from allowing myself to be distracted by the evil little left-handed sprite of Resistance, and unpleasantly tense and vigilant of my finances as I head towards a (truly!) major purchase. You could say I was urging the traffic along, but to be honest I was swearing under my breath at whoever had me boxed in at ten under the limit—not my usual pleased-to-be-alive postmodern state of post-road-rage, laughing a welcoming wave towards whoever lollygags into my lane.

Let’s just say I wasn’t quite feeling the Dakini Bliss that

Holly Whitaker

describes there in my road cage, and so when I rolled to a stop and slid out of the can, I was hungry. I was hungry for dinner, and I was hungry, in that instant, for something to dull the slightly-too-bright edge of being alive. I stepped into the house and lurched around the kitchen looking for something to eat until my eyes landed on a chunk of cheese—a triangle of brie placed on a board with a little bowl of those bright-green Castelvetrano olives that seem to have appeared out of nowhere at Whole Foods about 2005 and some very now crackers. You know the ones—midnight black and somehow both thick and light enough for space travel, sort of puffy and very crunchy-looking. Sort of a dark-side-of-the moon cracker. Very snazzy.

I grabbed a knife and carved off a chunk of the cheese, slapped it onto one of those super-modern crackers and shoved the whole thing into my mouth, already readying the second round as I remembered something of my manners. I paused and looked up, asking “Would you like one of these?” around a mouthful of tasty, soft, rich cheese. “Yes,” she said, “with an olive on top, please,” and my next thought was… wouldn’t this be nice with half a bottle of wine!

Now, I don’t mean a half-bottle sized bottle, one of those silly little 375ml demi’s that are empty before they’re even open and seem to yield about two-thirds of a glass each for two thin and desperate diners. I mean a half bottle for me, and the other half for you, if you hurry, because I would have necked the first glass of Clos de Sarcone, Hauts de Madon, or Domaine Giachino Mondeuse in the blink of an eye—or a flick of the tongue—and I would be thirsty for more. More to go with the delicious cheese, more because I love all of those incredibly fresh and alive natural wines and more! because I would have been rushing towards the feeling that comes with the draining the second glass. The wine buzz. The comforting warmth. The relief.

My troubles might be real or imagined, but the forgetting was real, and as I chewed my cheese I remembered how it felt to wash it down with wine. There’s a tingle and a glow, a lovely slow fire that builds in the belly and rises to the heart, the hands and the head. There’s the taste of stone and earth and sweet crushed fruit set off by the balanced pang of ethanol and the magical esters of fermentation, long-chain molecules transported thousands of miles, each carrying the story of some small winemaker lovingly working away at their craft to capture an elixir of terroir. The pure geographic essence of place—you can taste it! And you can drink it! You can feel it—and I could still feel it, having drunk down so many wine-country voyages by way of various bottles in the past.

I was momentarily allured. I wanted to taste wine with my cheese and crackers, and I wanted the feeling of wine in my body. I felt right then what I had felt so many times in the past—that if and once I had that second glass, or maybe a third, that I would no longer feel the angst that I’d carried in the door with me (and, sad to say, otherwise empty-handed).

Here’s the thing—I know that feeling. I know the whole sequence of feelings. I’ve been down that road a thousand-and-one times, and as much as it seems like the magic will work, the truth is that, for me, it just doesn’t. The anxiety might be dulled by the wine, but then…everything else is too. Conversation over dinner is animated, but then drags to a halt—unless we open another bottle. Instead of a refuge, sleep becomes a pit to fall into and climb out of later, with no memory of the precious hours intervening. Even the stiffness in my back, which could damn well use some numbing, yes please—to the extent that it might be relieved, is replaced the following day by a lethargy that causes its own subtle ache. The wine, even in such modest consumption, wants me to itself and will do its best to keep me from feeling like doing much else with my body.

“Would you like some wine?” she asked, as she reached out for the cracker that I’d prepared, topped with cheese and, as requested, one of those lurid, creamy-sweet olives. “I have some right here.” “No, no, thanks,” I replied, with no regret at passing up the offer. I know too much—and it serves me well. It’s not a battle, and it hasn’t ever been. The fact is that once I did become clear that I was no longer enamored of alcohol’s actual effects, I pretty much stopped entirely, and without any struggle—and although it is fair to say that it took me a very long time to get to that point, I didn’t struggle with any sort of back and forth about drinking or not drinking before that very specific juncture. I discovered drinking, I enjoyed drinking, I drank too much, and for too long, but I didn’t ever try to stop until I did stop, and then I just stopped*.

The asterisk is there because, as I explain in Change Of Heart, at first I didn’t stop like never again, ”sober,” not a drop. I stopped with some occasional exceptions, few and far between, but, and, without any battle along the way. I was maintaining the freedom to choose, and sometimes I did choose to have a drink. As it happens, since writing that piece just a few months ago, I wandered into an online community of like-minded people in the process of finding a more conscious relationship with alcohol, and we all made a simultaneous commitment to choose the freedom of not having to choose for at least a year, all together, and so I suppose at least for now I can remove that asterisk from “stopped.” Or maybe the distinction doesn’t matter all that much, because what’s more important is that I did heal my relationship with alcohol, and that changed the way that relate to it—and that has held true throughout the past few years whether I don’t drink at all, or if I choose to drink a little bit of alcohol once in a while.

On that point though, I will say that the freedom of not having to choose, the freedom of having moved on, the freedom of having closed that chapter—that is the greater freedom. That is the freedom of going for days, weeks, and months without alcohol even entering my consciousness, and that creates space for other, much more generative things.

Even so, with that bite of cheese in my mouth, I went off to Sicily. My trip began several years ago, at a neighborhood wine tasting in San Francisco, one of those things that I used to often enjoy on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday evening. In those days I was a regular at all the hip little wine shops around town, stopping in on the regular to pick up three or a half-dozen bottles to add to my stash in the garage. Natural wines were just coming to the fore, with the spicy, volcanic and yet also light and airy natural-methods reds from the slopes of Mount Etna leading the way. On this particular evening I went down to Hayes Valley with my old friend John and we quickly fell in with a guy from Ukiah who had snuck some cuttings home in his suitcase back in the 90’s. We went through everything that was being poured and were enjoying it all so much that we bought a couple of bottles off the shelf and opened them right then and there. One wine in particular struck me like a bell ringing in my ears—a bottle of nerello mascalese from C. & S. Biondi Proprietari in Trecastagni—it was like sixty bucks, well over my usual price range, but we had tasted some earlier in the evening, and the bottle proved to be just as vibrant. I mean, we were in our cups, but this wine was really singing. I hadn’t ever had anything like it—fresh, bright, and also full and deep, flowers and earth, sunshine and clay, the Greeks, Etruscans, even the Phoenicians, all of their history speaking to me through the glass! Or so it seemed at the time, although I will add that by the end of the evening I was already feeling a preview of the dull throb that I’d awaken to the next morning, and what was left of the room was a late-night array of purple-stained teeth, hair gone straggly and eyes a bit wild as the last of the patrons wobbled their way out onto the street.

A few weeks later, doing the sort of research that I tend to do, I looked Biondi up on the web and sent off an email to Ciro Biondi—the “C” from the label himself. There was no “Visit Us” section up there at the time—I wrote a little note in Italian saying that I’d tasted some of his wine and that I’d been inspired to pay him a visit, would that be possible? Wine ”tasting” as it’s done here in California is, or at least was not a thing in Italy (although now so many things have back-migrated from California to Italy that you can get a “latte” as well as craft beer and kale salad in many places there now), and so I was a little surprised but mostly delighted to receive his reply and invitation just a couple of days later, and a month or so from then, I was driving up the road with my traveling companion to their modest property in Trecastagni.

Ciro and his wife Stephanie very generously hosted us for a private tour of their property and winemaking enterprise, which included the visual explanation of what cisterna fuori means—the wine is left outside (“fuori“) in ancient ‘cisterns,’ or vats to absorb wild yeasts and ferment in the unique air of this unique place lying between the steaming fumarole of the volcano above and the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean below. Again, this is not like going off to Napa for the afternoon—there is no tasting room, no greeter with a well-practiced ”hello-this-what-we’re-pouring-today,” no parking lot for that matter. This was just the two of us driving up to their vineyard home and the two of them showing us around on a quiet sunny afternoon, looking out over the bay of Catania and the straights of Messina, where ten thousand years of ships have shipped their cargoes of world-class wine made from the same indigenous varietals that we were drinking there that day.

As it happened, we all got on so well that as we were leaving, they invited us to meet them for dinner that evening down the road in Pedara. Although I pride myself on my ability to find such places, we never would have come across La Tana del Lupo (”The Wolf's Lair”)  on our own, and it wasn’t until the four of us sat to table there that Ciro and his wife revealed that they’d invited us along on what happened to be their anniversary night! Not the first time I’ve somehow been invited along on someone else’s wedding anniversary, come to think of it, and a rather special occasion on all counts, thanks to nothing more than a love of well-made wine, my own willingness to reach out, the generosity of strangers, and the geometry that connects us all by just one step—all we have to do is take it.

As I hope you can gather, wine hasn’t done me all bad, not by any means, and I enjoyed quite a lot being whisked off to Sicily there for a moment while standing in the kitchen holding a cracker. I looked around the room as we carried on preparing a dinner of improvised ramen. A pile of chopped ginger and shiitake mushrooms sat on the cutting board, illuminated by the light from the vent hood. A pot of water bubbled away on the stove, a very faint chemical tang in the air still perceptible after a visit from the cleaners earlier in the day.

I turned back to my friend and finished my reply. “I love wine, I just don’t drink it any longer,” I said, and added a tablespoon of miso paste to the soup. As I stirred the pot, the memory that had visited me lifted and dissipated in the steam, and carried away with it my thirst to pour the wine.

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Love reading?

You might be interested in some of my other writing on alcohol or intuition, especially my prior piece Change of Heart and the more recent Five Years Sober*

as well as these books:

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain

Stanton Peele, Love and Addiction

Adi Jaffe, The Abstinence Myth

David Poses, The Weight of Air

Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

Johann Hari, Lost Connections

Caroline Knapp, Alcohol, A Love Story

Mary Carr, Lit

Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

Annie Grace, This Naked Mind

…Stick around, I’ve got some questions for you:

1. Do you have a favorite memory or story inspired by a love of wine?

2. What is your own relationship with alcohol, and how has the relationship changed over time?

3. Have you ever felt the compulsion to drink, or the need for relief, come and go?

4. Any good recipes for soup to share? Winter is coming!

And finally, please let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that little red heart ❤️down below ↓