A funny thing happened on the way to the liquor store

Well, inside the liquor store. And after the liquor store.

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Quick note: I had a great time chatting with Josh Woll about recovery. Check out the recording of our conversation here.

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Last week, I was standing in a liquor store for the first time I can remember in my 17 years of sobriety. I walked in already agitated because the store was in an unfamiliar area and the GPS in my car sucks. Driving there, I assumed that as I got off the highway, I would need to yield to oncoming traffic, so I slowed to a stop until some lady leaned on her horn. Flustered and sweaty, I slammed my foot on the gas and drove, turning down the first side street and then driving aimlessly around a tangle of residential neighborhoods until I figured out where I was.

So, it was probably a less-than-ideal time for a recovering alcoholic to walk into a warehouse-sized store filled with nothing but liquor, wine, and beer (well, that’s not entirely true. They also had solo cups and ping pong balls). Backlit bottles of every color glittered on the shelves, and for a second, I felt like I’d come across a lion in the wild: mesmerized by its overpowering beauty but acutely aware of the inherent risk in our face-off.

But let me back up and explain why I was there: I’ve never liked the taste of beer. When I was in high school and college, I thoroughly enjoyed drinking beer, but taste had very little to do with what made it pleasurable.

These days, on the rare occasions I drink a non alcoholic beer, it’s usually because other people are having real beers and a non alcoholic beer feels more exciting than my standard bubbly water. Roughly 99 percent of the time, I drink about half of it before I abandon it and get the seltzer I wanted from the beginning.

Wine is a slightly different story. Somewhere along the years of guzzling anything I could get my hands on, I developed a taste for certain white wines. But I’d never seen any non alcoholic wine in the grocery store—I’m not sure it even existed for much of my sobriety. A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned she’d been surprisingly impressed by a bottle of “dealcoholized” wine she got at this store. Intrigued, and knowing I was heading into a summer of outdoor events with drinkers, I decided to investigate whether there was anything to this dealcoholized wine business.

It didn’t take me long to wonder if I’d made a mistake. I’m very comfortable in my sobriety, but I’m sure part of that comfort comes from the fact that I don’t make a habit of hanging out in liquor stores. My plan going in was this: ask the first employee you see where the non alcoholic wine is, grab a bottle or two to try, and get out.

My concern wasn’t that I was going to buy a bottle of liquor and go to town on it; I was worried about indulging in all the in-between steps: I wanted to avoid romanticizing booze because I know that it can be the start of missing booze and then craving booze, and that’s all nonsense I’m better off without. Sure, I could tell myself I’m just curious about all these new liquors that didn’t exist when I was drinking, but I don’t particularly trust where that curiosity comes from.

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I couldn’t find an employee right away, so I browsed the shelves while looking for someone with a name tag. After a few minutes of searching, I started to wonder if the whole endeavor was a mistake. I didn’t need to be in this liquor store. I could just go home and snuggle with my dog, and let the serotonin from that interaction calm me while I sipped a tried and true flavored seltzer.

But then a woman with a name tag appeared, and I asked if the nonalcoholic wines were in their own area or if they were mixed in with the regular bottles. She looked at me and beamed. “They’re all right here,” she said, walking me quickly past aisle after aisle of booze.

We turned down aisle nine, and she said proudly, “This is our fastest-growing section!” Instantly, I felt my anxiety disappear. I told her that I was looking for white wine, and she asked me questions about what flavors (and other fancy wine terms I pretended to know) I wanted, and she recommended a few.

“This is so great,” I told her. “That you have all this.” She seemed equally excited. “I know! It used to be that the non alcoholic wines were essentially grape juice, but over the past few years, they’ve nailed how to remove the alcohol after making the wine.”

I liked that I didn’t feel the need to explain why I was looking for alcohol free wine. I liked that she asked me all the same questions as any other customer. I loved that she was so excited about their ever-expanding non-alcoholic section.

I picked a few bottles, headed to the register, and finally drove home. When I was heating up dinner that evening, I poured a glass and was pleasantly surprised. It tasted...like wine. (Keep in mind, I haven’t consumed real wine in almost two decades, so if you’re a wine connoisseur, you may have a different experience.) It tasted so much like wine that I suddenly realized I was expecting an alcohol-induced warmth to spread through my chest.

Strange, I thought, feeling an odd mix of relief and disappointment. How odd to still have that visceral memory and expectation all these years later. How bizarre to feel even the slightest pang of disappointment that I’d managed to avoid the thing I was deliberately trying to avoid. But such is the nature of addiction (at least, my addiction).

I’m writing about this for two reasons:

1) People tend to assume that being 17 years sober means I never crave alcohol or feel uncertain or awkward in situations involving alcohol. As though once you hit a certain number of years sober, you’re immune to the kind of struggles you had in early sobriety. And I am infinitely more comfortable with sobriety now; I rarely find myself in situations that make me feel like a “newbie.” But they happen, and this was one of them.

2) I have a better understanding of the potentially triggering nature of NA beverages. Since the taste of beer has never appealed to me, I’ve never craved the taste, only the effect. When I sip an NA beer, my first thought is typically “ah, I remember high school.” I like that this dealcoholized wine tastes like the real deal, but I want to be careful with it. It’s not triggering in an upsetting way, but it is associated with memories of being pleasantly tipsy. That association has become less distinct over the last week, and I’m hopeful it will eventually disappear entirely. But I’m keeping an eye on it.

There may come a time when I decide it’s better to cut any vestiges of those associations off and stick with seltzer. Or, dealcoholized wine could be something that helps me feel more comfortable (and fancy) in drinky situations. Only time will tell. But it’s a useful reminder that these dilemmas or uncomfortable situations can arise many, many years into sobriety, and that’s okay. In my experience, it’s not actually the feelings that are dangerous. The risk is keeping them to yourself—that’s when they pile up and fester inside, becoming a burning, toxic stew. But if you share them with the right people (that’s you, readers!), the feelings are manageable. Like everything, they pass.

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