‘I RUTHLESSLY EDITED MY DRINKING SCHEDULE’

Wine writer Victoria Moore on how she cut down (without missing out)

Awine correspondent watching what they drink? That sounds about as appealing as a coeliac baker, or a high-board diver with vertigo. But you have to understand that I am offered alcohol – in unlimited quantities – virtually every minute of every day (at least, that’s how it can feel) both at home (I open a lot of bottles to taste at home – why not have a glass as well?) and out

(lunches, dinners, catch-ups, you name it). Sometimes, I have to say no, and that means I have to decide how often to say no. Or, more importantly, how often to say yes. A relativist approach is no good. I operate at the intersection of two of the hardest-drinking professions on the planet. In the wine trade, you’re considered teetotal if you don’t drink at lunchtime, while journalists have a tendency to approach every aspect of life as if it’s an extreme sport.

Five years ago, in order to reset my drinking habits, I decided to drink on no more than two days a week – I taste on many more days than that – for at least a year. I had to find a way to sell it to myself as a life improvement; I had no intention of spending 12 months feeling I was missing out. The first thing I did was a ruthless edit of my drinking schedule, eliminating the drinks I enjoyed the least. Surprisingly, this resulted in dropping a lot of social drinking; glasses that barely registered, because I was too busy talking to pay attention to the wine. Conversely, I held on to the glasses I sipped on my own in the kitchen on a Saturday evening while tidying up and making dinner.

At the time, I was studying for a postgraduate diploma in psychology, and this provided a handy toolbox of tricks to make the changes easier. For instance, it reminded me not to rely on applying the brute force of willpower. Not-doing things is tiresome – a state of mind I didn’t want to live in. Also, according to some theories, willpower is a limited resource, so on a testing day, after not-snapping at your boss, not-indulging in an episode of pavement rage, and not-eating all the biscuits, you might have run out of it by the time it comes to not-drinking a lovely, fizzy, clinky G&T.

One way to lose a habit is to overwrite it with a new one, and turn those trigger points into a trigger for something else. If 6pm is your moment to open a bottle, make that your time to do something else instead: go out for a stroll, make an elaborate pot of tea, whatever. Before long, you begin to swing into the new action without consciously considering it, and remove the drain on your willpower.

It also helps to ask yourself what precisely are you getting from that glass of wine or whisky and soda? Social confidence? A treat? Whatever it is, map out another way to achieve that. And, by the way, if the answer to that question is “drunk” then I’d rephrase that as “escapism”. For me, the endorphin-rush of a half-hour run was a happy replacement for the dizzy release of alcohol.

When I began making more effort to pick a zero-proof option, the trickiest part was resistance from other people. Not-drinking was viewed as an aloof, bordering on hostile, stance. The social landscape has now changed: it’s perfectly acceptable to say, “I don’t feel like wine today, I’ll have…” Plus, there are often lots of zero-proof choices. Mine’s a Monte Rosso with a slice of orange. Cheers.