San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ESTHER MOBLEY DRY JANUARY SEES SOME PRECIPITATION THIS YEAR.
For many, quarantine a boost to sobriety; for others, rocky start to 2021 calls for booze
Given its increasing visibility in recent years, there was little doubt that many American drinkers would observe dry January this year. But the unresolved question was how our era’s strange new variable, COVID19, would affect the institution — whether the continued isolation of the health crisis would compel more people to go sober for the month, or fewer.
On one hand, some find going without alcohol to be smoother during quarantine since people aren’t going out to bars or parties. “Quarantine makes things a lot easier,” said Eric Kingsbury, a tech worker in San Francisco who has observed dry January for the past four years. He always dreads Jan. 7, the birthday of one of his best friends, when he inevitably finds himself at a bar for the celebration, relegated to disappointing mocktails. But this year, there’s no birthday party.
The shuttering of all inperson dining, too, has removed some of Kingsbury’s temptations. “I live in the Marina on Chestnut Street,” he said. In normal times, “when everyone’s out on the streets, eating outside, letting loose, opening bottles of wine — not being able to do that is a bit of a challenge.”
But others said that factors related to the coronavirus made it feel impossible to sign on for dry January in 2021. Lizz Grainger, a filmmaker in Los Angeles, is not observing the tradition right now even though she went dry for both January and May last year. “I’m now quarantined with my mom who is a wine connoisseur,” she said, “so I couldn’t pass up the chance to enjoy our rare time together.”
The stressful news events that January has brought so far — a mob storming the Capitol, a runoff election in Georgia, the president’s impeachment — may have been a test for some of the sobercurious. Mackenzie Lopez, who works for Caldwell Vineyard in Napa, started off the month with the intention of going alcoholfree; she’d observed “sober October” in 2020 and enjoyed the effects. Then on Jan. 6, the day of the attack on the Capitol, she couldn’t help but break her vow. She felt like she needed a drink after seeing “the insanity that was all over the news,” she said.
That sentiment was echoed widely on social media. “I'm calling a ‘mob storms the Capitol’ halt to my dry January,” tweeted New York Times tech writer Shira Ovide alongside many other announcements of people canceling dry January because of the day’s stress.
Others pointed out that such remarks, though often intended to be lighthearted, might strike people in recovery differently. There’s considerable scientific research that, if practiced frequently, drinking as a form of stress relief can lead to alcohol dependency — and may in fact exacerbate stress or depression. For people struggling with alcohol dependency, the concept of giving up booze for any period of time may feel more important than a simple New Year’s resolution.
While excessive drinking is clearly linked to negative health outcomes, many studies have shown that moderate consumption of certain types of alcohol may confer some benefits. Red wine in particular has been linked to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, some cancers and cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s. Federal dietary guidelines suggest that women limit their consumption to one drink per day and men stop at two; recently, an advisory committee recommended that those guidelines be reduced to one drink per day for men and women, but that recommendation was rejected.
That’s part of what drives the dry January campaign, which began in 2013 and was sponsored by a British nonprofit called Alcohol Change. The goal was to encourage people to moderate their drinking habits throughout the year, reducing the health risks that can come with excessive drinking. Alcohol Change’s research found that six months later, 7 of 10 people who had participated in dry January were drinking “less riskily than before,” according to its website.
In the years since, the campaign has grown in popularity, and Alcohol Change estimated that 20% of drinkers in the U.S. were planning to do dry January this year. The monthlong sobriety movement breached the mainstream in the U.S., too. About 15% of Americans planned to go sober for January, estimated a poll on the website YouGov, conducted in late December with 14,616 respondents. A December survey by Dry Soda Co. — which, as a maker of nonalcoholic drinks, has a strong business interest in people going dry — found that 33% of its 1,000 respondents were considering participating in dry January.
That said, respondents to these surveys may have a tendency to overpromise and underdeliver. Last year, YouGov found that about half of dry January participants failed to make it through the month.
For now, though, many in the Bay Area are sticking with it. Despite early preliminary data that U.S. wine sales overall did not grow significantly in 2021, many Californians said they felt like they’d overindulged throughout the year, and some were using January as a chance to reset.
“My drinking was really getting out of hand where I just felt like it started becoming a crutch for boredom,” said Justin Ang, a product manager who lives in the East Bay. “I just felt like I needed a break.”
Less than a week into the new year, Ang reported feeling “sharper in the mind” at work, but he said the biggest change was a vast improvement in his sleep quality. According to his FitBit, his sleep score was consistently 10 points higher than normal.
For Healdsburg resident Alexandria Sarovich, giving up alcohol has some special logistical challenges: As a sommelier at SingleThread restaurant, booze is part of her job. But that’s exactly why she cuts out alcohol for multiweek periods a couple times a year, including the first few weeks of January. “For me, it’s about boundaries,” she said, adding that it’s easy to unwittingly consume a couple glasses of wine during work on a typical night. She likes the discipline of these alcoholfree regimens.
COVID has made that discipline feel even more crucial to her. “The first few months of shelter in place, I was definitely drinking more,” Sarovich said. “It seemed like people were either like, ‘I’m gonna focus on my fitness’ or ‘I’m gonna drink a bottle of wine every night.’ ” In Wine Country, she watched many of her colleagues and friends fall into the latter camp.
In fact, Sarovich said that taking a few weeks away from alcohol can make her a better somm. Each time leading up to her two certification exams with the Court of Master Sommeliers, she went three weeks without drinking. “I could taste and smell more clearly. It really heightened my senses,” she said.
Such health concerns are undoubtedly on the minds of many people who are abstaining from alcohol this month. “The effects on my health like weight gain, rosacea (and) inadequate sleep are not worth the daily consumption pattern of 2020,” said Sharon Kelly, a wine buyer at K&L in Hollywood who is cutting back on alcohol this month, though not cutting it out entirely.
But more surprising, perhaps, were the number of responses from people — including Kelly — that part of the motivation for giving up alcohol was, actually, to rediscover its pleasures.
Instead of the compulsive reach for a beer at 5 p.m., some said, they wanted to hold out for the special drink with dinner. “This year I decided to continue drinking but only better wines that have a good reason for me to enjoy them, like a good meal, instead of just an exhausting day at work,” Kelly said.
Imagine after a break, returning to the lilting fragrance of a glass of Riesling. The crisp, clean mousse of a pilsner. Or the icecold, mouthpuckering tang of a margarita. Imagine tasting it as if for the first time. That alone might make it worth it.