Tomorrow will mark ONE year since the Drinking Diaries‘ first post on June 16, 2009. This blog has been a labor of love for both of us, and we are proud of the many talented contributors, poignant and funny essays, and interesting readers’ comments that have made their way onto the site.

In celebration of its first anniversary, we invite YOU, our readers, to please let us know in the comment box below what it is you like, dislike, or would like to see more of on the Drinking Diaries.

To show our gratitude, we will enter the first 20 names into a CONTEST and the winner will receive a signed copy of one of our contributor’s books (This will be a surprise!).

Thank you again for visiting us, and we hope you will return with great regularity!

Cheers,

Caren & Leah

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On a recent trip to Rome, my family of five fell upon a wonderful, homey trattoria called Matricianella. Checkered cloths covered each table, where families–large and small–gathered for a Friday night out on the town.

We were the sole Americans in the place, which only added to the authenticity of the experience. I was happy in my little trattoria element.

When the waiter approached with a basket of crusty peasant bread, my husband quickly ordered a bottle of red wine to get the meal’s festivities going. While we discussed how many carciofi giudea (fried artichoke Jewish style, a Roman specialty) to order, the waiter returned with the bottle of vino, four glasses in hand.

Peering over us with little patience, the waiter asked our daughters if they wanted glasses for wine. They are 16 and 14 years old, and they each peered across the table in slight wonderment. With our known approval, our eldest said, “Si,” and our younger one declined. I supposed it made sense that he didn’t offer a glass to our 9-year-old son.

We are completely comfortable with our daughter having a few sips of wine with us on vacation–though she really doesn’t like red wine. And the Italians clearly think nothing of it. But this is such a stark contrast to the ways of the land from where we come, that I am still always amazed that they offer. 

I honestly can’t say what the statistics are about problem drinking in Italy, or declare whether or not it is an issue among Italian teenagers. But I do know that my husband and I are okay with the laissez-faire attitude. And so, we will let our children drink il vino a Roma. Cin-Cin!

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As temporary home to the Olympics, Vancouver has been crowded with throngs of tourists for the past two weeks. With the excitement and thrills come lots of celebrations in the city’s bars, many of which have been spilling out into the streets.

So it’s only fitting that drinking should also make its way onto the art scene. In a recent article in the New York Times, Charles McGrath describes a new exhibit at Vancouver’s Playwrights Theater Center on Granville Island (the artsy area of town), which looks at the fine line between drinking and “drinking” and between the “bar as mere watering hole and as self-activating performance space.”

The installation, created by British neo-conceptualist Theo Sims, is set in a 12-by-20 foot plywood box, and recreates the Candahar, an Irish pub in Belfast, fully equipped with beer taps, a brass rail, and a TV tuned to Irish horseracing. The bar is tended by two Irish men wearing fedoras and thick Irish sweater—two real bar men (and brothers) who are also scripted performers for the exhibit.

“The purpose of the installation,” said the artist in the Times piece, “is to stimulate social interaction, encourage people to re-examine their preconceptions and start cross cultural conversations.”

It all sounds so civilized when you look at it this way. And it makes me think about the purpose of bars and the community gathering that must’ve been so integral for communicating and sharing events years ago. Now with Facebook and Twitter, people can “gather” virtually and video chat while sipping ale in their pajamas. Not quite the same.

*Photo source: Kim Stallknecht for the NY Times

Nope, it’s not the 1970s but it is about to be the start of a new decade, and why not bring feminism and wine together? The California National Organization for Women (NOW) and Bottlenotes, a website covering all things wine-related, have joined forces to launch the Feminist Wine Club.

“All wines in the Feminist Wine Club have been carefully selected by Bottlenotes to showcase some phenomenal wines made or imported by women, or produced at wineries owned by women,” says the Feminist Wine Club website. “All proceeds from the Feminist Wine Club go to the California National Organization for Women.”

The founders say the new wine club aims to provide subscribers with “an easy, enjoyable, non-intimidating way for women to learn about wine, build community, and support women winemakers and causes as well.”

Mona Lisa Wallace, a spokeswoman for the group, told the San Francisco Business Times that the effort is meant to celebrate “women succeeding in business and breaking into areas previously dominated by men.”

According to a study published in a recent issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, women who drink a glass or two of red wine may experience greater sexual desire, lubrication, and overall sexual function.

According to the study’s authors, members of the departments of Urology and Public Health at the University of Florence in Italy, the results help give a clearer picture on the female sexual response cycle.

The study, supposedly the first of its kind, examined red wine intake and the sexual function of 800 women between the ages of 18 and 50, none of whom had ever reported a sexual health problem. The women were divided into three groups–one group drank one or two glasses, another group drank less than one glass and a third group didn’t drink at all. Those drinking more than two glasses of wine were excluded from the study.

The participants answered a questionnaire called the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI), a questionnaire used by doctors to assess sexual health in women. The results revealed that the levels of sexual desire were higher in women who were moderate drinkers of red wine than in their counterparts who preferred other alcoholic drinks, or were teetotal.

Typically, medical studies on sexual health focus on men and dysfunction, so this was a welcome change. “Historically, the aspects of wine and sexuality have been well known since the time of Ancient Greece,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Nicola Mondaini, who was quoted in an article in the Wine Spectator and is publishing a book on the subject next month, titled Vino e Eros. “But the field of female sexual dysfunction is still highly unexplored.”

The researchers’ conclusion stated that “While this finding needs to be interpreted with some caution, because of the small sample size, self-reported data, and the lack of support from laboratory exams, it nevertheless suggests a potential relationship between red wine consumption and better sexuality.”

Any chance you’ll be testing this on your own?

Do you ever wonder what to do with your leftover wine? (Or is leftover wine an oxymoron in your house?)

According to the Waste & Resource Action Programme, British households are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars worth of wine down the drain every year. One can only imagine how much wine Americans are wasting.

Is this as common a scenario in your house as it is in mine?–You’d like a glass of wine with dinner, say, but your spouse (or partner, whoever) doesn’t, or perhaps you live alone and don’t really want to finish a bottle by yourself.

Halfway through one glass, or two, you feel sufficiently sated. So what do you do with the rest? Do you A) Pour it down the drain, B) Let it sit on the counter all night because you feel too guilty to waste good wine, then throw it down the drain the next day, or C) Pour the wine back in the bottle, where it sits until you feel like having another glass of wine a week later, at which time it has turned to vinegar.

It’s a perennial question–what to do with leftover wine…

Preserving your wine not only helps your budget, but it also helps reduce your carbon footprint. Though some wines last longer than others (a big cabernet will last longer than a young red, for example; and dessert wines such as port can last for a year), all wines will last at least a day if you recork them and put them back in the fridge. Most wines will go three days.

So what else can you do? Here are some answers:

* Freeze it in ice cube trays and use it in sauces and casseroles. But don’t drink the defrosted wine–yuck!

* If you know you can’t drink a full bottle when you open it, decant half into a smaller container as soon as you open the bottle, then seal with a screw cap to keep oxygen out. Keep a few half bottles around for this purpose. Wash, and reuse. The wine should be fine for at least a week, if not longer.

* If you want to keep the leftover wine in the original bottle, you can cork it up as soon as you’re finished and keep it in the refrigerator for two or three nights. (When you take a red out of the fridge, let it warm at room temperature for ten minutes before drinking).

* Make mulled wine syrup to drizzle over ice cream, or other desserts.

Some additional tips:

* Don’t worry about week-old wine being unsafe to drink. You’ll know if you’ve kept your wine too long because it won’t taste or smell as good, but it won’t hurt you.

* The more wine you leave in the bottle, the longer it lasts. A bottle with a few inches of wine has more air and oxidizes faster.

And one last tip:

* If you didn’t like the wine the first day, you probably won’t like it the second day, either, and it won’t taste good in your soup or stew. Pour it out!

What do you do with your leftover wine? And then there are the corks….

On the morning after that spectacular Yankees World Series win (sorry, Phillies fans), I was wondering: Do sports fans, in general, drink more than non sports fans?

Apparently, college sports fans do. A Harvard study from several years ago – the first national study of the drinking habits of college sports fans — says that more college student sports fans binge drink and have alcohol-related problems than non-fan students, and that targeted marketing and advertising by the alcohol industry is a huge influence. The study also concluded that schools with higher proportions of fans are more likely to have high rates of binge drinking.

The study, which appeared in the 2003 journal Addictive Behaviors, compared the responses of nearly 3,500 student sports fans (those who indicated in a survey that attending sports events was “important” or “very important” to them) to those of over 8,000 non-fan students. “We know that student athletes binge drink more than non-athletes…it turns out that fans are similar to athletes in their extreme drinking behavior,” said Toben Nelson, the study’s lead author.

So what about you? Does rooting for a team inspire you to drink, and drink more? Does watching a sporting event live make you drink more than you would if you watched it on TV?

P.S. A random twitter search of Yankees and drinking returned plenty of women drinking something (free beers, wine, etc.) while watching last night’s game, though some were just drinking lattes!

Having a drink at a bar ain’t what it used to be…Apparently, the use of date-rape drugs is on the rise. To combat the problem, a company called Drink Safe USA has developed a new coaster that tests cocktails for the presence of date-rape drugs. Fantastic invention–or a strange and sad reflection of our times?

The coasters, which test for two of the most popular date-rape drugs (GHB and ketamine) are distributed at bars. Unlike regular coasters, they feature colored dots at their corners. You place a drop of your drink on the dots, and they will change color if the drink has been contaminated with a foreign substance.

Bars using the coasters, which cost .40 a piece, will display signs in their front windows informing patrons of that fact, which they believe may deter would-be criminals from spiking drinks.

If you shell out a dollar, you can buy an AlcoTop, a bottle cap designed to keep your beer safe from predators.

Of course, there’s always the option of taking your drink with you wherever you go. So much for dancing.

Women who drink are in the news frequently these days.  Sadly, it is almost always a tragic story, which inevitably leads to women being pathologized as problem drinkers almost ALL of the time. Truth is, women have been drinking for a long time, but it seems to take a tragic accident to bring that to the media’s attention.

In the latest issue of People magazine (11/2/09), a piece called “Secret Drinking: A Mother’s Struggle,” by Alicia Dennis and Brian Braiker, recounts the stories of a couple of stay-at-home moms who formerly hid their drinking until they each had a wake-up call.

Last week on The Oprah Winfrey Show blog, Sarah Allen Benton—a licensed counselor and recovering alcoholic—gave readers insight into the high-functioning alcoholic and its risk factors.

So, where’s all the coverage about the men who’ve turned to drinking after losing a job, or those who’ve suddenly given it up after serving a 14-day DUI sentence—after being pulled over after a football game where they pounded beers all day? I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen that coverage…

By Laura Barcella

You don’t want to know the ludicrous number of possible love connections I’ve squashed by getting sloshed on a first or second date. The things that have come out of my mouth — both figuratively and literally – on nights out with essential strangers make me want to crawl into bed and stay there.

So it’s probably – no, definitely – a good thing that I decided to give up drinking in the summer of 2006. I’d had enough embarrassing nights out. I’d woken up beside more than my fair share of unattractive strangers, and was, in turn, more than ready to bid farewell to the drunken rants, crying jags, and ridiculous battles with  boyfriends, friends, cab drivers, cashiers and waiters. I thrilled at the notion of never having another hangover. (My hangovers were baaaaaad.)

But when I said goodbye to alcohol and its commensurate drama, I didn’t intend to bid farewell to dating. I saw my romantic future shimmering atop a cotton-candy cloud of contentment and stability. Without the crutch of alcohol, I told myself that my once-jumbled love life would fall easily into place. Now that I was sober and ready, Mr. Right would surely be waiting for me (albeit at the local coffee shop instead of the next bar stool).

It sucked to discover that alcohol-free dating was still, well, dating: an ouchy dance of anticipation, expectations and artifice. And for those of us who don’t drink, dating can be even more of a mixed bag. Why? Because, in case you missed the memo, most Americans are all about alcohol. We meet for happy hour at five, dine with wine at seven, meet lovers at a bar later on, and make every excuse to have another round. When love and sex get mixed in, the whole shebang gets even stickier.

To be honest, dry dating hasn’t been as smooth as I’d hoped. Most of the men I dated in early sobriety were drinkers. Not alcoholics, but average Joes: the kind of guys who had no trouble stopping after a couple of glasses of wine; the kind of guys who couldn’t remember the last time they puked up all 12 of the Stella Artois drunk the night before.

Guys like these sound good to most women. “Those men are stable,” you might be thinking. “They’re normal!” And yes, indeed – they are. But, see, Normal and I clash like hot cider and summertime. Normal gives me uncomfortable side glances and keeps me at a perpetual distance. Normal makes me feel crazier than I actually am.

I learned this lesson the hard way after dating a man named Craig. Tall and dark with long eyelashes (my weakness), he was sexy in a skater-boy way (I never got over my sixth-grade propensity for Vans and bowl-cuts). He was a friend of a friend, who I’d casually admired for months, and his warm, easygoing manner won me over right away. He was a considerate guy who held doors open, carried my bike up the stairs and offered to feed my cats when I went away. Sweet, right?

Right – and things progressed nicely until, cuddled on my couch one night, Craig said, “It makes me sad that we can never have a glass of wine together.” Which, to my hypersensitive brain, sounded like, “the fact that you don’t drink is a deal-breaker.” He claimed he was just being honest, and we tried to talk it out. But it bothered me deeply that my sobriety – something I was proud of, something I’d worked hard for – could be an issue for him. His uber-casual comment made me feel like there was something wrong with me for being unable to drink like a Normal Person. (Damn those normies!) My therapist urged me to break it off, worried that Craig’s cluelessness might drive me back to the bottle. But I liked him, so I waited it out; and we ended things a month or so later.

Craig wasn’t the first guy who seemed unsure how to handle the fact that I don’t drink. More than a few internet dates have magically disappeared after learning that I was sober. They didn’t try to sugarcoat their disdain with any “met someone else”-type excuses, either. Nope; we’d exchange a series of perfectly pleasant, getting-to-know-you emails, and then the dude would suddenly evaporate when I mentioned that I’d prefer meeting for coffee instead of beer. Odd.

Then there are the men I wouldn’t dream of dating – the party boys (ahem, cough, alcoholics) who don’t drink remotely like Normal People, who see nothing wrong with pounding six shots of Cuervo at the taqueria. I had a close encounter with a member of this species on a brunch date last year. A carefully constructed hipster with tattoos lining each arm, Steve was cute, unkempt, and unshaven. He ordered a mimosa as soon as we sat down, and mentioned that because he works from home, he goes to a bar every night “just to be around people.” (Apparently he’s never heard of restaurants or book stores or coffee shops or libraries or…) Steve also noted that, a few years back, he was “a dog” who slept around and tried to collect as many women’s phone numbers as possible. He said he had “grown up since then.” (Um…okay.)

Guys like Steve make “Normal”  men — a la Craig — look like dreamboats. But, like I said, I’m not looking to date someone too average, too boring, too well-adjusted. I like flaws, I like edge, I like quirks — heaven knows I’ve got plenty of them. Guys who are Normal don’t usually get me. Though I admit: Thanks to sobriety, I’m much saner than I used to be, and that’s definitely not a bad thing.

I decided to stop drinking when it started doing me more harm than good – when it started contributing to the deterioration of both two-hour dates and two-year relationships. Like lots of people, I ride a rickety daily roller coaster of moods and emotions, but my overall frame of mind has improved a lot since the summer of 2006.  I’m 32, single, and sober, and I’m ready for a little companionship with a funny, sensitive but not-too-Normal man. I know he’s out there — inquire within.

Laura Barcella is a San Francisco-based writer whose work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Salon, the Village Voice, Time Out New York, and the UK Guardian’s Comment Is Free. You can find her on the web at www.laurabarcella.com

In a recent study done in the U.K., 3,000 women were surveyed about drinking before sex. The results showed that 75 percent of women preferred to drink one or two glasses of wine before getting into bed with their husband or boyfriend. 6 percent never had sex sober.

Seems that these recent findings are tied to women’s self-esteem. Sure, drinking can definitely loosen us up before getting into bed. And it certainly can boost our self-confidence, reducing our inhibitions about our body.

What’s your feeling about drinking before sex? Does it make you feel less inhibited?

Here’s a bit more about the study:   Why Do Women Drink Alcohol Before Sex?

They’re everywhere: Ads for alcohol. Many of them featuring scantily clad fembots with big bazooms, shiny legs and icy stares, like the one that stared me and my three children in the face on the side of a truck as I drove them to school recently. They seem to be targeted to men, or are they? With some of the ads, it’s hard to tell…

The Media Awareness Network divided female stereotypes in alcohol advertising into six categories: The Sexpot/Bimbo, The Man Eater, The Rebel, The Prize, The Party Girl, and my personal favorite–The Objectified/Dismembered Woman.

Here are the pictures that go along with the ads: media-wareness

Now, according to Brandfreak.com, we have two new categories, which I’ll call–The Lipstick Lesbians, for a brand called Passionne–and–The Vampires–for Remy Martin…Who do you think these ads are aimed at–men? Women? Twilight-obsessed teens? If you had to design an alcohol ad campaign for women, what would it be? 

“So, who is this ad aimed at? Horny men? Or is it a drink designed for lesbian get-togethers? If so, we may have the long-awaited female version of Schmidt’s Gay.”

—Posted by Todd Wasserman on Brandfreak.com

As much as I like to do drink, I had no problem changing my habits while expecting each of my three beautiful, healthy children. That being said, I was lucky to have an obstetrician who did not have a problem allowing me the occasional glass of wine (once I was past my first trimester).

Though fairly infrequent, each sip that permeated my palate was that much tastier, and I had no concern, or guilt, that a small quantity of wine would affect my baby. After all, I knew that women in European countries drank–in moderation–during pregnancies, and they too, gave birth to healthy children.

In the U.S., there is (of course) an abstinence-only position on drinking while pregnant, but interestingly, there are a number of studies that have come out with some varying evidence. Read below on ModernMom.com about some recent research and let us know, did you drink while you were pregnant?

About Drinking and Pregnancy

Remember Kitten from “Father Knows Best,” one of those oppressive shows that made you feel really bad about your own dysfunctional family? Turns out she, too, came from a dysfunctional family, and the TV show of her actual life might have been more aptly titled, “Thank God Father Knows Best Because Mother Is a Freakin’ Nightmare.” See below–Excerpted from TCPalm.com

VERO BEACH — When Lauren Chapin played the character of the youngest daughter on the hit TV series “Father Knows Best” half a century ago, the small-screen version of her life projected the warmth and stability of the archetypal 1950’s nuclear family.

But Chapin, now an ordained minister at Immanuel Church of Vero Beach, wants women to know that her real life wasn’t always like that. Her real-life mother was an alcoholic and Chapin was abused as a child.

But she also wants women to know that if she can overcome such obstacles in life, they can, too.

Chapin, 64, recently moved to Vero Beach and will share her life story in a new series entitled Women of Purpose, which is offered Friday evenings at 7 p.m. at the Immanuel Church. The 16-week program, starting this Friday, is free and open to the public.

“This is going to be an interactive program,” Chapin explained. “I’m not going to stand up in front and lecture people. Instead we’re going to share our stories with each other, pray for each other and apply the word of God to our lives with joy. It’s going to be very casual and comfortable.”

The series is open to women from diverse backgrounds, be they of different faiths or non-believers, she said. It is designed to benefit women dealing with such problems as drug or alcohol addictions, prison records, loneliness — or those without such problems, she said.

AND HERE SHE IS TODAY, HAVING SURVIVED IT ALL: 

            

Lauren Chapin