Triangulator

I was writing last time about how it's been rather pleasant to think, fantasize, etc. about wine during this time of Lenten abstinence, as a surrogate for drinking it. (Practical note: two weeks to go!) I took this daydreaminess to a new level on Saturday by attending a wine auction.

I'd never been to one, and I'm not sure there really are or have been (m)any others around here. But Leland Little, a local auction house, decided recently to add wine to its portfolio; their new wine director, Mark Solomon, a really nice guy whom I last spotted at our restaurant drinking a '99 DRC, came by and invited me. I was on a pretty tight budget, but I looked at the catalog of bottles on offer anyway. (Like I wouldn't?) Most of them were hopelessly superannuated---it is not true that wine gets better with age. Or perhaps it's truer to say that some wine gets better, for a while, and then gets worse. There was a lot of Bordeaux from the not-very-good 1972 vintage, all way past its prime, and with scary looking ullage in some cases. There was a fair amount of California stuff that I wasn't interested in; there was a lot of status wine you can't really drink at this point---you'd be best off to stick it on your mantle and show it off, and thereby appear to be a wine snob of terminal rank. This stuff is meant to be consumed, people! It ain't trophies!

But there were a few lots that had promise and appeal, so there I was---brochure in hand, handwritten notes, dollar amounts---on Saturday. Not long before they got to the wine portion of the auction (this was an all-day affair, hundreds of things for sale from 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM), a guy in front of me spent about $20,000 on old vases in about 10 minutes. In other words, this was not a room for amateurs. Great bargains were generally not be had.

Good thing I had my notes. Each lot of wine was hustled through the process in about, oh, 45 seconds. The auctioneer did his rat-a-tat thing, the internet-bid guy kept going "hup!" and the phone proxies kept going "yep!" and a few of us in the actual room occasionally raised our hands and that is how a wine could start under $200 and sell for over $500 practically before you could even say the entire name of it. Good thing I had previously crunched my numbers. I bid on a few things but didn't quite win the Sociando-Mallet 1983 or the Abbona Barolo 1989; just barely refrained from upping my bid on the Smith Haut-Lafitte (also 1983); got blown away on the A. Grivault Meursault 1990 "Clos des Perrieres." It was Heather who noticed that the vast majority of the wine, thousands of dollars' worth---including all of those dead 1972's---was bought by the same phone bidder, the mysterious "No. 51." Hey, pal, leave some for the rest of us next time.

But it was a lot of fun, and in the rather giddy experience of looking and bidding, I actually felt I had had a little wine by the end of the day. I even managed to lay off buying a beautiful little Santenay that's been sitting patiently on the Hillsborough Weaver Street's shelf, getting better with age, for over a year now.

There was another reason I felt I had had a little wine, too.

The abstinence marches on...

A Brief History

What is Lent, anyway, and why abstain? A time of penance, sacrifice, discipline; like Ramadan in Islam. (Many, many cultures have such a rite.) "Lent" comes from a Teutonic word that just means "spring," and it's appropriate symbolically if not quite linguistically: The period actually leads up to spring rather than falling during that season. The idea seems to be a dark-before-dawn one, in which you volunteer some late-winter forbearance and renunciation in anticipation of the glorious blooms of April. (But to leave it tied only to natural cycles rather than heavenly obedience is rather pagan.) It's a kind of preemptive spiritual spring cleaning.

The 40 days of Lent coincide numerically with Jesus's time in the tomb and with Noah's flood, although the origins of Lent are not Biblical; the practice seems to have emerged in the first few hundred years A.D. (It's always a surprise to discover how many so-called "Biblical" things aren't actually in the Bible. Eve's apple? Not necessarily an apple. Just a "fruit.")

So you start on Ash Wednesday, which is easy to spot because it's the day after Mardi Gras (and you see people with the telltale sign on their foreheads), and you go for 40 days until Easter Sunday. But that looks like fuzzy math---40 days don't go as far as they used to, it seems---until you recall that you're supposed to skip Sundays, which are a celebration day; that makes it compute properly. Originally, Lent seems to have required total fasting, so you needed to eat on Sundays in order to survive. But the age of asceticism is long gone, so most people just swear off meat, or pick some other thing. (For the purposes of my experiment, I am including Sundays in my not-drinking. As a nonreligious person, it isn't important to me to break my abstinence once a week.)

For what it's worth, not every Lenten tradition goes 40 days. The Roman Catholics jump off the wagon on Maundy Thursday; the Eastern Orthodox tradition begins Lent on "Clean Monday" (the day before Mardi Gras). The Ethiopian Orthodox Lent lasts 56 days (it starts earlier). For the hoping-against-hope types, there is no apparent sign of traditions that end Lent on Palm Sunday, a week before Easter. Nor does Good Friday serve as a drop-off point. In any case, Easter itself seems to make the most sense. That holiday, like its seasonal cousin, the Jewish Passover, celebrates rebirth, life, feasting, redemption; and there, again, is that promise of spring. New shoots; mating season; Kabinett-level Riesling, with its sprightly verve and freshness. (The wine writer Oz Clarke once wrote that you should welcome the first signs of spring by popping and pouring a Kabinett-level Mosel Riesling. It's good for breaking Lenten teetotalling for another reason, too: only about 8% alcohol.)

A Cheaper Date

My SLF, Heather, is a real team player and is also not drinking in solidarity. She doesn't drink as much as I do and so this has been no big deal at all for her. When we go out to eat, the biggest deal is a good one: the bill is so much lower! I had forgotten, even though I sell people alcohol with their food on a regular basis and rely on it to make an adequate living, how expensive it is to drink in a restaurant. You can easily double your bill with a cocktail and a decent wine. (Sin tax in its full glory: the markups can be, in disreputable places, unconscionably excessive.) Our dinner the other night was only $44 plus tip in a restaurant where it's pretty easy to spend $100 if you find a wine you can't resist diving into.

But I haven't wanted to eat in restaurants much since Lent began, and not just because it's less fun to dine out when you aren't drinking. I've found that I crave less and less restaurant-type food. Meats, fats, salt---the hallmarks of most out-of-the-house food---lose appeal for me when there isn't alcohol to go with it. I've been craving vegetables, grains, and fish (all of which I generally prefer anyway) even more than usual. I am tempted to speculate that this has to do with the metabolic function of alcohol. Does it help break down the tougher fibers in animal proteins, or "cut" fat in some chemical way? Is my body losing interest in heavy-gauge food out of physical self-preservation?

Hard to know. In the mean time, I have found myself satisfying what deeper wine cravings I have by reading more about wine, thinking more about wine, even buying wine. Not long ago, I fell in love with Heidi Schrock's scrumptious, dare I say springlike Furmint from Rust, Austria, and ordered a case for the restaurant where I work. (Well, actually, half a case, as I'll be buying the other half.) I went into one of my favorite local liquid shops not long ago---for tea, I swear---and walked out not only with my indispensable long qing but also a bottle of Cinsault (all by itself? unblended? cool!) from Domaine Faillenc Ste. Marie, a wonderfully funky family winery in Corbieres down in the South of France. I'm excited to drink these. And I plan to check out an auction of old wines this Saturday. I really shouldn't go, but there's this 1989 Barolo...

I'm sorry there isn't more drama here: no night-sweats, no binges on rum raisin ice cream, no renting the movie Barfly and watching it 100 times in a row. But I think I have made a rather significant discovery. More on that next time.

I wrote at the end of my first post that, for the first Lenten week of not drinking, I was very, very hungry. No real surprise there: I was using alcohol less as an intoxicant than as fuel. It's got lots of calories in it, so a drink can substitute, to some degree, for food. It wasn't lost on me that I tended to get the hungriest after work, during which time I'd burned a lot of energy. I've been accustomed to sitting down to a drink after work because it marks the end of the labor period---I think a lot of people look forward to that end-of-the-workday tipple, as an indicator to the brain and body that one part of the day has ended and another is beginning---but what I didn't realize was that I was also replenishing my sugars. It was Gatorade for Grownups.

All that reminded me of something I once read about Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin guitarist. At one point, the story went, he was trying to drop down from 135 pounds to 125 (!), and consumed only vitamin-infused banana daiquiris for perhaps as long as two years. Well, banana daiquiris and heroin. But the point is that it wasn't just the bananas that Page was subsisting on; the rum had sugar in it, too. The human body will try to make nutrients out of whatever you put into it. A glass of wine has somewhere around 100 calories in it.

But back to that other reason for drinking after work: habit. When you pop the cork, order the beer or shake the martini at the end of the day---no matter whether your day ends at 5:00 or midnight---you're sending your body and mind a signal as strong as an alarm clock: that thing you were doing, working, is over; time to do the next thing. For many of us, that signal is sent as part of a larger social broadcast that may involve going out with colleagues, going home and cooking dinner with family members, or any number of other activities that contain, as part of their cluster of signs to the cortex, alcohol. That's why the thing we know as alcohol abuse may be much less a genetic or physiological problem than we think: substance use and abuse is deeply connected to the context in which we engage in it, and in healthy settings even excessive consumption isn't anything like abuse. Just before Lent began, Malcolm Gladwell published an article in the New Yorker about this phenomenon. A book I reviewed for the Indy a few years ago, The Cult of Pharmacology, makes a similar argument. Routine and ritual are the anchors of healthy drinking.

These days after work, I'm still hitting the bottle, but it's a liter bottle of water, which I don't even bother pouring into a glass. (One of my colleagues claims that this indicates a third thing I'm satisfying at the end of the workday: an oral fixation. But I don't much care for Freud.) While Brad swigs 7&7s and Graham a single-malt scotch and Petrie a glass (or four) of Vouvray, I'm staying inside the circle of the rite by glugging artesian water. It's one of the reasons why, so far, abstaining for Lent hasn't been a killer. I've got more than two weeks to go, or less than two weeks, or exactly two weeks---it depends on whose calendar you keep. Turns out that this particular ritual, like almost every other, has variations. More on that next time.

It's St. Patrick's Day. Enjoy your pint or your fingers of whisky. (By the way: Bushmills beats Jameson by a mile!) Needless to say, I won't be able to join you. Raise a glass for me. I'm green with envy.