Let’s get one thing out of the way: I love a good drink. I’ve spent over two decades studying wine and spirits, working in the industry, and tasting my way across the globe. Drinks are woven into culture, history, and ritual – and I am completely here for all of it.

Over the past decade or so, I’ve watched the alcohol pendulum swing from the insufferable mommy needs wine bandwagon (portraying women as helpless booze hounds who couldn’t survive the rigors of Tuesday without climbing into a bottle of Chardonnay) to the current sober wellness movement. I wasn’t a fan of the first one, and I’m not a fan of the second.

These days, alcohol has quietly joined the ever-growing list of things we’re supposed to feel guilty for enjoying – somewhere between gluten and cheese.

The Actual Case for the Drink

A shared bottle has always been more than just a drink. It’s a gesture of hospitality. It’s how strangers become friends, how negotiations get unstuck, how grief gets processed, how celebrations get marked. Every culture on earth has a version of the toast – cheers, prost, kampai, slainte – because raising a glass together is one of the oldest human rituals we have. It predates most religions and writing.

Humans have been fermenting things for at least 13,000 years. In a cave near Haifa, Israel, Natufian hunter-gatherers brewed wheat-and-barley beer in stone mortars – for ritual feasts, researchers believe, to honor their dead. Neolithic potters in Jiahu, China stored fermented rice, honey, and hawthorn fruit in clay vessels around 7,000 BC. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia worshipped a goddess of beer named Ninkasi, which tells you everything you need to know about how seriously they took it.

The pattern holds across every civilization that left records. Ancient Greeks used wine as medicine, ceremony, and philosophy. Medieval European monks brewed beer in monastery cellars not as indulgence but as survival – it was often safer to drink than the water. The Incas built an empire partly on chicha, a fermented corn beer the state produced on a massive scale and distributed to workers as both payment and sustenance. Japan wove sake into Shinto ceremony for over two thousand years – priests poured it as an offering to the gods before anyone poured it for a guest. And here’s a detail worth sitting with: the word “alcohol” itself comes from Arabic. Arab alchemists of the Islamic Golden Age developed the distillation techniques that eventually gave the world whiskey, brandy, and gin. The civilization most associated with abstinence handed us the science of making stronger drinks.

Every human culture that has ever existed, on every continent, independently arrived at fermentation. That’s not a bad habit. That’s an instinct.

A Wellness Reckoning

And here’s what the wellness movement doesn’t reckon with: this tradition is not a Western quirk that someone can tidily rebrand as a health problem. A Georgian winemaker whose family has fermented grapes for 8,000 years is not engaging in a risky lifestyle choice. A Japanese sake brewer who operates within centuries of cultural and ceremonial tradition does not need a sobriety journey. A French village that built its entire identity around terroir is not a wellness problem waiting for someone to solve. When you apply a 21st-century Instagram sobriety aesthetic to 8,000 years of human culture, you aren’t being enlightened. You’re just being arrogant.

To reduce a drink to empty calories is to miss the point entirely. Life is full of empty calories – the slice of birthday cake, the late-night Taco Bell run, or the Starbucks venti half-iced, half-blended, caramel mocha cold brew Frappuccino situation. These aren’t purely nutritional decisions. They’re human ones. Alcohol belongs in that same category: not necessary, not perfect, not without risk, but deeply woven into what it means to live a full and imperfect life.

Sidebar: I have tried a significant number of alcohol-free beers, wines, and spirits. Non-alcoholic beer is the most tolerable of the group. Everything else tastes like disappointment.

A Brief History of People Trying to Ruin a Good Drink

Every few generations, a segment of society decides that all of this is a problem that requires an organized response.

In the 19th century, religion fueled the temperance crusaders, who warned that alcohol would ruin your soul. Drinking wasn’t a habit – it was a sin, a one-way ticket to poverty, violence, and eternal damnation. In the US, that fervor eventually gave us Prohibition: thirteen years of bootlegging, bathtub gin, and organized crime that basically funded itself. The lesson isn’t simply that it failed. It actively made things worse – organized crime metastasized, corrupt officials hollowed out law enforcement on a national scale, poisoned bootleg liquor killed thousands, and ordinary citizens abandoned whatever respect they had for laws they found absurd. You cannot legislate morality, and every attempt to do so tends to create the exact conditions you were trying to prevent.

Today’s temperance movement doesn’t drape itself in prayer shawls. It wraps itself in athleisure, clutches an oversized Stanley cup, and preaches from an Instagram pulpit. The modern wellness crusader hoists a mocktail in a crystal coupe and hashtags the whole thing: #soberissexy, #soberjourney, #soberismysuperpower. The message is clear: you’re not just sober, you’re evolved. Optimized. Elevated. Someone rebranded what was once a private and personal decision as a lifestyle – carefully curated, content-ready, and, critically – expensive. Eighteen-dollar mocktails. Boutique wellness retreats. Cold-pressed adaptogen drinks with names that sound like skincare brands. Entrepreneurs monetized the sober lifestyle for people who can afford it, while the same movement implicitly shames a $12 bottle of wine shared between friends at a kitchen table.

And it’s all really, really exhausting.

To Be Clear

This is not an anti-sobriety essay. Let me say that plainly, before anyone misreads the room.

Plenty of people have entirely valid – and entirely personal – reasons for not drinking. Addiction is real. Health risks are real. Sometimes the best thing a person can do for themselves is put down the glass permanently and never look back. I have seen that reality up close, and I respect it completely.

A little over two years ago, my mom died of breast cancer. She loved her wine. Did alcohol play any role in accelerating her illness? We’ll never know for sure, and that uncertainty is not something I take lightly. It made me look hard at my own habits. I made some personal adjustments, and I’ll keep those adjustments to myself – because they’re private. Not content.

What I’m pushing back against is the idea the rebranding of sobriety as a badge of moral superiority. And the reason that matters isn’t just that it’s annoying, which it is. It’s that when you attach virtue to a personal health choice, you inevitably attach shame to the alternative. Shame is not a useful or honest framework for how adults make decisions about their own bodies. Not drinking isn’t a virtue. It’s a choice. A valid one, an admirable one in many cases, but not inherently better than the alternative.

It’s also worth noting what the wellness movement has quietly done to the language of drinking. It has collapsed the distance between “drinking” and “problem drinking” until they mean the same thing. They don’t. Most people who drink are not alcoholics, not binge drinkers, not dependent. They are adults having a glass of wine on a Tuesday. Treating those two categories as equivalent isn’t health advocacy. That’s not science, it’s spin.

What About the Science?

TL;DR: The science says no amount of alcohol is safe – but the studies behind that conclusion have a known flaw, the researchers know it, and the actual picture is a lot murkier than the headlines suggest.

The wellness movement’s strongest weapon is the science. Specifically the claim that no amount of alcohol is safe – full stop, no exceptions, the research is settled. That claim is what gives the moral argument its teeth. If the science is unambiguous, then drinking isn’t just a personal choice, it’s an objectively bad one, and anyone who defends it is either ignorant or in denial.

Here’s the problem: the science isn’t unambiguous.

The most-cited study behind the “no safe amount” conclusion is a 2018 meta-analysis published in The Lancet, covering 195 countries and 28 million people. It made enormous headlines and has been invoked ever since as the final word on the matter. What got considerably less coverage was the methodological flaw at its center.

The studies in the analysis compared moderate drinkers to non-drinkers. Straightforward enough – except the non-drinker category wasn’t just people who never drank. It included former drinkers who had quit. Many of whom quit because they were already sick. Cancer patients. Heart disease patients. People whose doctors told them to stop. When you load your “healthy abstainer” comparison group with sick people, that group looks sicker than it actually is – which makes moderate drinkers look worse by comparison. Researchers call this the “sick quitter” effect, and it skews the health comparisons significantly.

A 2022 analysis published in JAMA Network Open examined 107 studies on alcohol and mortality and corrected for exactly this bias. What happened? The dramatic harm associated with light drinking largely disappeared. So did the apparent protective effect of moderate drinking. What remains is a dose-dependent relationship: risk increases with consumption, but not in a way that translates cleanly into simple, universal rules for individuals.

None of this means drink for your health. What it means is this: the science that the wellness movement presents as settled and absolute is not settled and not absolute. The wellness movement isn’t wrong that alcohol carries risk. It’s wrong that the science gives it permission to be certain.

Where I Land

Is alcohol good for you? No. But neither is red meat, Diet Coke, donuts, botox, sitting too much, the sun, or about forty other things that sensible adults have decided to enjoy in moderation while accepting the trade-offs. The list of things that might eventually harm us is so long that chasing perfect health has become its own kind of full-time job.

Alcohol is not a character flaw in a glass. It’s not a test of virtue, a marker of weakness, or a measure of self-worth. You’re not a better person for swapping Syrah for seltzer, and you’re not a worse one for enjoying a Negroni at five o’clock on a Friday. A drink doesn’t define your morality. It defines your mood in that moment.

So to the wellness brigade, genuinely: I’m delighted your chakras are aligned, your liver is pristine, and your mocktail photographs beautifully. But I’ll keep toasting life’s imperfections with an actual drink – because life is short, unpredictable, and far too interesting to spend in a permanent state of self-optimization.

The Natufians brewed beer 13,000 years ago to honor their dead.

I think that’s a tradition worth continuing.

Cheers. 🥃