"Dry January is hard for me." When Caroline Conner, a wine expert and educator living in Lyon, France, admitted that on her Instagram feed earlier this month, it wasn't because of any concerns that her nearly 70 thousand followers were going to temporarily lose interest in her business. It was because, as she said, "I can see more clearly how overindulging wastes my time and poisons my body." What do you do when you're a wine expert trying to renegotiate your own relationship with alcohol?
Sobriety is not just an annual New Year's challenge — we are in a shifting moment in alcohol consumption. A 2023 Gallup poll found Gen Z drinks substantially less than their elders, and drinks less regularly and less excessively. And a 2021 Gallup poll from 2021 found that "The average number of drinks Americans consume in a week has been falling over the last several years." For most of us, though, cutting down or cutting out alcohol is a relatively straightforward affair. It's not so simple when it's your job.
"I've been in the wine industry since I was very young," Conner tells me during a recent phone conversation. "I got into wine because I did competitive blind wine tasting during my undergrad when I was at Oxford, which obviously for Americans is impossibly young, but in England, I could drink." Now, after building a career in a field she loves — yet one that she says incentivizes excess — she's figuring out a new normal.
"I have never desired to stop drinking," she admits. "I want to drink moderately. I've been to [AA] meetings; I have friends who've been in program. I acknowledge that it can really help some people, but I also absolutely reject any one size fits all model. I know I drink too much. I know I like drinking too much. I know that it's easy for me to drink too much. I am surrounded by free alcohol. And," she adds, " I don't want to lose my connection to wine, because wine is sacred and beautiful. And my career and my journey in this life, I think in a large part is to find a way to be moderate."
For Conner, coming to terms with a new dimension of her life also means looking back at the ways the industry — and drinking culture in general — uniquely affect women. In 2020, the New York Times published a feature on the sexual harassment and assault problems within the Court of Master Sommeliers, Americas. One female sommelier told the paper at the time that "Sexual aggression is a constant for women somms. We can’t escape it, so we learn to live with it,” Devon Broglie, the organization's chairman, resigned soon after. "It was a really triggering article," says Conner, "and to the surprise of no woman ever."
"Basically, this is an old boys club," she says. "It's super toxic. They're all drunk all the time. They're encouraging us to drink a lot. The whole industry is a super dangerous place for women, particularly young women. We are plied with alcohol and, and it's free, and it's intoxicating. Certainly when I was young in this industry, nobody was talking about how to stay safe, how to not drink too much, about moderation. It was very much, 'Eating is cheating.'"
She says that now, "It's gotten easier for me because I work for myself, I have relationships with winemakers. But nobody wants to admit that there's a problem. Nobody wants to admit that alcohol isn't good for you. Everyone wants to look at this one study from a million years ago. 'The French paradox, oh, I guess wine is healthy.' It's not healthy. It's poison. It's sacred poison. There are beautiful things about it, but it is dangerous. And I see how little people want to have that conversation."
For Conner, recalibrating her relationship with wine means still drinking it, though doing so differently. For example, "We don't drink at home," she says. "Unless we have friends over, there's no open wine at our house."
But for Abe Zarate, a New York sommelier who goes by @sober_somm on his TikTok and Instagram, evolution has meant something else. "I just spit," is the simple explanation he offers on his bio, though in practice the experience is more nuanced.
"I always had the idea that I was a heavy drinker," he says, "but I never thought of it as abuse. There was this phrase thrown around me all the time — 'professional alcoholic' — and as a 25, 26 year-old, you kind of carry as a badge of honor. Being able to get my certification and get the promotion, get the job, etc., it becomes even more of almost a power play."
Zarate says, "It wasn't until I started noticing all the areas of my life — financial relationships, work, etc. suffering, that I started thinking, 'Maybe I should lay off.'" But when his sisters confronted him about his drinking, he knew he needed to make a dramatic change — and like Caroline Conner, discovered he didn't have a lot of company. "I started looking at other people who might be active in alcohol industry or beverage industry and sober and I couldn't find many," he says. "So that's where Instagram page came about, to give me some sort of accountability."
Over time, he says, "It just became a mission to turn it into a sort of superpower. Why wouldn't you want to hire someone who won't potentially be you know, drunk or embarrassing or a bad representation of your business?" But after quitting drinking in the summer of 2020, Zarate had to figure out how to stay in a business where he'd be surrounded by wine. "I didn't want to be scared of alcohol and I didn't want to want it to control me," he says. "I think it controls you as you're abusing it. But it can also control you once you quit it, if you let it. And if you view it as a sacrifice, it's not sustainable."
Instead, now he says that "Wine to me is reframed as people's stories and places. That's how I go about it. I'm getting ready for the advanced sommelier exam certification, not because I care about certifications, but because I want to show one more way in which this can be a sustainable career without overconsumption, or without abusing alcohol. And to show that to myself and others who might be in need of one example of hopefully many." He also does that by, as he says, spitting.
"It's going to a portfolio tasting that a distributor might have hundreds of wines available to taste," he explains, "and people are spitting. They're still able to make educated decisions about whether it works for their program, whether they like it, just through that taste that was not swallowed." He says. "just a recalibration of the palate. It's just like a muscle, just doing it to figure out how to make the right call."
As Conner and Zarate continue to explore what it means to reassess one's alcohol consumption while building a career in the wine world, they both want to further a dialogue that's largely been left out of their industry. It's been nearly six years since a feature in Meininger's Wine Business International asked, "How do we teach up-and-coming professionals to know that … you can have a successful career in wine and spirits without excess, when some of those in the industry who are considered 'successful' also demonstrate existing or developing issues, or unhealthy habits that may cause problems in the future?"
But it'll take more professionals coming forward with their lived experiences of how they're making it work to demonstrate how it can be done — and, by extension, help lead the rest of us in learning how to balance pleasure and moderation.
"I have not met many people in the booze industry who don't drink too much," says Caroline Conner, "I will say that; I will scream that from the rooftops. I really think that all of us drink too much." But in her own life, she says, "I am in a good place right now, and there will be times when I'll probably stop drinking altogether, but I don't think I'm ever going to be like, 'I'm never going to drink again.'" As she puts it, "It's complicated."
