About the book
The short version
I grew up on a council estate in Hitchin and I left at eighteen on the morning after my mother died. Her last clear words to me were get out of this town, go somewhere they have to ask you your name.
She left a name and an address in Monmouthshire. The man at that address had eleven acres of wet hillside, and I asked him for a job, and he said no. He said my mother had wanted me educated, and then he told me about a scholarship that nobody in my family had ever heard of, because nobody who knew about it had ever been in the same room as us.
I arrived in Los Angeles at nineteen with four GCSEs and a full ride to read computer science. I have written software ever since. And every summer and every weekend I could steal, I was three hours north on a crush pad, purple to the knee, because the wine was the real thing and always had been.
By twenty-five I was drinking two bottles a day on my own in a flat in Koreatown. I stopped on the fifth of May, 2020, and I did not give up wine, which is the harder half of the problem and the part nobody writes about. The practice that made it possible is in the appendix, and for free below.
The practical part
How I taste without drinking
This is the part people write to me about, so it lives here for free and always will.
You get the entire wine in the first four seconds. The nose, the attack, the acid, the tannin, the balance, the length, the whole of the finish. Everything after the swallow is alcohol going into a person, and that is a separate activity with nothing to do with the trade.
- Keep a full glass in front of you
- A hand with nothing in it is the loudest object in any room. Nobody in nine years has asked a man with a full glass why he is not drinking.
- Taste first, talk second
- Nose it, taste it, spit it, then say something intelligent about it. Nobody questions a man who has just described the wine accurately.
- Six words, then move on
- Mine are: I'm a spitter. Occupational hazard. Cheerful, shrugged, next subject.
- One true sentence for the rest
- Mine is: I got very good at the swallowing part, so I retired from it. Half of them laugh. The others find you later, by the coats.
- Carry a cup you are not embarrassed by
- Mine is dented pewter with a handle, because a handle lets you hold it at chest height without looking like a man apologising. Never hide it under the table.
- Eat, and leave at the top
- Every dinner in the world has a natural summit at about the ninety-minute mark. I spent twelve years believing the good part was at the end. It never was.
“People think the job is grapes. The job is the fella holding the secateurs. The grapes are only the report card.”
Lance O'Leary, 1948–2020
Getting sober from sustained heavy drinking is not a thing to do alone or suddenly. I nearly put myself in hospital on day two by stopping cold. See a doctor first.
