Living: Water, Water Everywhere

On a bright Saturday afternoon, customers at the small bar are sipping, socializing and avidly comparing their drinks. New vodka concoctions? Rare Napa Valley vintages? Bavarian lagers? No. This is High Sobriety, a “beverage boutique” in a North Dallas shopping center, which stocks and serves a storeful of nonalcoholic liquid refreshers. Here are such unspiked delights as Calistoga sparkling water from California, Chateau Yaldara (a sparkling spumante) from Australia, Texas Select “beer,” and Carl Jung “Champagne” from West Germany with no kick at all. Cheers! And welcome to the water generation.

W.C. Fields, who once complained that someone had put pineapple juice in his “pineapple juice” (an oversize shaker of martinis), would be horrified. America is tapering off, and doing so at a faster pace than at any time since Prohibition took effect in 1920. In restaurants, at country clubs and wedding receptions, and even on the screen, it is increasingly difficult to find anyone with a stiff drink in his hand. Sighs Restaurateur Duke Zeibert, who recently began carrying Moussy nonalcoholic beer from Switzerland at his famed Washington watering hole: “I’m from the old school of Scotch and soda and bourbon and water, but you just don’t hear that much anymore. There’s been a big turnaround.”

Indeed there has. The martini, once a symbol of American imbibing, memorialized in thousands of neon outlines of cocktail glasses, is becoming an amusing antique, like a downtown Art Deco apartment building. The new sign of the times? It should be the outline of the ubiquitous green Perrier bottle. Whether it is imported from exotic locales or comes from a local spring, cool, clear water is the quaff of the moment. “Everyone is drinking Perrier and iced tea,” observes Sondra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. “White wine is almost daring now.” The temperate mood is transforming the ways in which the nation works, plays and socializes. New attitudes toward careers, fitness and the very image of what we are and wish to become are being altered. Americans are tackling the entrenched social problems of abusive drinking with a new rigor. The neotemperance has already inspired tough drunk-driving laws to combat highway bloodshed (see following story). Basic to it all: people are drinking lighter and drinking less, and seem to be proud of it. A new poll conducted for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, Inc., showed that only 67% of the nation’s 170 million adults over 18 said that they drank at all. More than a third of them acknowledged that they have cut back their consumption over the past few years; only 6% said they drank more.

The trend is a sobering reversal of America’s long-standing love affair with a social sip or two. By 1830, when citizens were feeling their oats on the frontier, absolute alcohol consumption was 7 gal. per capita, nearly three times the present level. After the 14-year hiccup of Prohibition ended in 1933, Americans began to drink less in bars, more often in their living rooms. Cocktails became synonymous with socializing. In fact, sharing a convivial cup to promote friendship and hospitality is a tradition older than the republic. Potent stout and rum flowed at the first Thanksgiving because the Puritans feared contaminated water.

Today their descendants worry about not getting enough of it. The business lunch, for example, was once a two-plus martini milieu in which to cut a deal or woo a client. Now trust is more often won by a show of efficiency and orders for monkfish and mineral water. Water snobbery has replaced wine snobbery as the latest noon-hour recreation. People order their eau by brand name, as they once did Scotch. The fastidious will not take it on the rocks, because ice bruises the bubbles. Only aspiring starlets drink Perrier (“designer water,” sniff detractors). Evian is Hollywood’s chic refresher, and the hottest innovation of all is Cit-Jet, a pressurized can of lemon juice from France that will flavor the waters of summer ’85. Says Novelist-Screenwriter Josh Greenfeld (Harry and Tonto): “Pretty soon we’ll be ordering water by the year.”

Bosses increasingly frown on employees who smell of liquor after lunch, and aggressive yuppies, some of whom have turned to the coke spoon instead of the bottle, fear that booze will slow them down. “You can’t run on the fast track with demon rum eating at your stamina,” says Sam Wolfe, a recent University of North Carolina law school graduate. “I can’t remember a single business meeting in a long time where anybody’s had a drink,” says Warner LeRoy, owner of New York City’s Maxwell’s Plum. When someone orders a stiff one, “a mental trigger goes off with other executives at the table,” says Jay Chiat, chairman of the Los Angeles-based Chiat/Day advertising firm. “It’s not being judgmental; it’s just that it’s so much rarer.”

Calls for spirits are the lowest ever at the superdeluxe Ma Maison restaurant in Los Angeles; wine accounts for 80% of sales. Patrons of New York City’s most famous saloon, the “21” Club, are rattling the aged bar with their orders for such low-proof and nostalgic concoctions as kir royale–champagne sweetened with a spoonful of French black-currant liqueur. At Elaine’s restaurant, an uptown Manhattan hangout favored by the likes of Woody Allen and Michael Caine, the wee-hours drinkers have evaporated; the bar empties “early,” around 1 a.m. Commuters on the Long Island Rail Road are buying a lot less liquor. Trendies at Sage’s restaurant in Chicago interface over watermelon coolers. Everyone is still drinking white wine, according to Michael Roberts, chef and partner of Trumps, the hip West Hollywood bistro. “It’s not nearly as interesting as red,” says he. “It has a lot less personality. I guess most people have less personality.”

The new temperance is going beyond real-life social situations. On prime-time television, a drink is no longer an acceptable hand prop for heroes and heroines. “We don’t want to close down the bar on Love Boat,” says Larry Stewart, chairman of the Hollywood-based Caucus of Writers, Producers and Directors Alcohol and Drug Abuse Committee. “But we were unwittingly making drinking macho, cute and acceptable.” Thanks to pressure by the 175-member committee, concerned over sending subliminal messages into the nation’s living rooms each night, most drinking scenes have been cut from Dallas scripts.

Unlike the Prohibitionists of an earlier age, the new moderates are not on a single-minded moral crusade; they are simply getting older and busier. People tend to drink differently as they age, and the 76 million baby boomers, whose sheer numbers can turn a whim into a trend, are maturing. There is not much time for drinking in two-income households and little sympathy for hangovers. “I’m pushing 35, and I’m certainly drinking less,” says Angie Levin, an Atlanta office worker. “In college, binges were pretty common, but as people get older, they have children and other responsibilities.”

The $66.4 billion alcohol industry is having trouble coping with the new fashion, which neither it nor any other group predicted. While bottled water soared (see chart), distilled-spirits consumption fell from 2.88 gal. per adult in 1974 to 2.46 gal. in 1984. Brewers registered their first (though slight) slump since 1957–from 36.9 gal. per person in 1980 to 35.1 gal. in 1984–despite the introduction of low-alcohol brews like Anheuser-Busch’s year-old LA. Wine growth, which experienced significant leaps in the 1970s, has slowed. One reason: the industry was late in developing softer lines. The Seagram Co. Ltd., the Montreal-based distillery giant, has become the second- largest American wine producer; it owns both Paul Masson and Taylor wines, along with some 100 other spirits. To woo the yuppie sweet tooth, many distillers are marketing unusual-flavor drinks much lower than liquor in alcohol content. Bailey’s Original Irish Cream Liqueur (whiskey, chocolate and cream) and Hublein’s Long Island Iced Tea (vodka, gin, tequila, rum and triple sec) are successful examples.

Drinkers are cutting down on quantity and going for quality, a shift that is nowhere clearer than in the wine industry. While consumption grew only slightly, sales jumped from $6.2 billion in 1980 to $8.2 billion last year. “Wine has history, romance and a lot of glandular stuff,” says Terrance Clancy, president of Napa Valley’s Calloway Vineyards. “Eighty-three means something different than ’82. I haven’t heard of many people going to gin- tasting courses.”

Other marketing strategies are aimed at more temperate consumers. Introduced only last year, St. Regis, the first mass-market nonalcoholic vintage, which some tasters rate as similar to a fruity Chenin Blanc, already has a following and is selling briskly. In the three years since they hit the market, some 40 brands of wine coolers–carbonated mixtures of fruit juice and wine only half as potent as vin ordinaire–have captured 5% to 8% of the wine business.

Since 1972, the vineyards have been attracting baby boomers with the so- called blush wines. Made from such red grapes as Zinfandel or Pinot Noir, this wine is kept a pale salmon-pink by removing the skins, pulp and seeds from the juice before they darken the liquid. The result: a wine that tastes like a white and lacks the flowery bouquet of a rose. The Wine Growers of California are negotiating with Julia Child to tout their vintages on TV ads come September. Says William Young, western division president of D’Arcy MacManus Masius, the Wine Growers’ advertising firm for the commercials: “We’re trying to make Americans understand that wine enhances food, and that’s where to use it.”

Some sterner souls want to deprive their bodies of wine, good food and other sensuous pleasures altogether. “The sixties generation is no longer engaged in political activity . . . People feel profoundly guilty and are directing that guilt against themselves,” said Historian William Leach in a New York magazine article last year. “Running, fasting, enables them to feel whole and pure and clean again.” Most people are not going that far, according to Cornell University Psychology Professor Michael Sacks, but he adds, “It has become a sign of status, as a whole, sensuous human being, to have the ability to control your impulses.”

The new temperance is transforming a number of social situations and institutions. Bars and restaurant lounges used to be primarily for drinking. As customers taper off and new laws discourage happy-hour promotions, however, managers are pushing food to make up for lost liquor revenues. The China Rose in Arlington, Texas, replaced its traditional happy-hour offer with a 24-foot- long buffet stacked with Kung Pao chicken, Szechwan fish and egg rolls to keep customers on their stools. In front of the Long Beach Hyatt Regency hotel flies a flag emblazoned with a giant banana: the “fruit of the month” served at the hotel’s jam-packed juice bar. “We’re discouraging all- you-can-drink offers and free shooters,” says Jack Burk, vice president of public relations for the hotel chain. “The emphasis is on social occasions and lower-proof drinks.”

Does the loss of revenues in the lounge mean higher prices in the dining room? For a lot of places, the answer is yes, says Ed Moose, owner of the Washington Square Bar & Grill in San Francisco. While his touted fettuccine still goes for only $8, this may not be typical. “If wine drinkers spend 25 minutes over a glass, whereas the hard drinker orders more expensive spirits every 20 minutes, it changes the economics,” he says. “You have to raise food prices.”

Young crowds respond to limpid, sweet liquid mixtures. Singles now meet in health spas, but many still play the dating game in bars and clubs. A list of their favorite drinks reads like a dessert menu from the 1950s. At 104 TGI Friday’s around the country, for instance, it is the pineapple fling (lime Calistoga water and fruit juices); at the Hyatt hotel in San Francisco it is “Remember the Oreo” (creme de cacao, ice cream and Oreo cookies). For guys, it is no longer considered wimpy to order a light beer. Says a Friday’s vice president, Gregory Dollarhyde: “There’s reverse psychology at work. You’re going to be fat and unattractive if you don’t (order it). Looking good is very key.”

Image is an obsession. “There’s no such thing as a fat yuppie,” says Gene Street, principal owner of SRO, a fashionable Dallas restaurant and bar that features full-length mirrors in the men’s lounge. “It’s all part of a wave of self-love,” says Author-Humorist Fran Lebowitz. “They’ve overweighted the sanctity of the human body. These bodies aren’t temples. They’re barely bodegas.” Says Screenwriter Greenfeld: “It’s fear of embarrassment. In Hollywood you can stuff coke up your nose until it falls off. But God forbid you should appear drunk in public!”

Some new drinking and socializing trends involve no alcohol at all. The “power tea” is starting to catch on with businessmen in big cities. Rather than gathering for whiskey at the cocktail hour, executives are collecting in hotel lobbies from The Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla., to the Mansion in Dallas for decaffeinated Darjeeling and little sandwiches. Businessmen and -women talk deals at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton, which offers a variety of teas, steeped in floral china pots. New York City’s WaldorfAstoria reinstated tea service just over one year ago. Says Food and Beverage Director Thomas Monetti: “People like the relaxing harp music and the elegance of the brass tea trolleys. You often see papers and memos out on the tables.” “It’s a very graceful way to do business,” says John Strauss, manager of San Francisco’s elegant Four Seasons Clift Hotel. “Some of them add a glass of wine to the service. It’s a kind of ‘California’ tea.”

The way the nation entertains at home is also changing. The time when a host or hostess stocked up on whiskey for the winter, gin and tonic in summer, some bottles of white wine and a six-pack of beer year-round is gone. “I’ve had three cocktail parties recently,” says Doris Yaffe, fashion and publicity < director for Saks Fifth Avenue in Boston. “I can’t tell you how much liquor I was left with.” The nation’s caterers have seen hardliquor sales drop from more than half to less than one-quarter of their business. New York City Caterer Donald Bruce White estimates that “three-quarters of any crowd now will drink white wine.” Joe Toboni, owner of five catering outlets in the San Francisco Bay Area, says that hard liquor is only 10% of his business, down from 70% five years ago.

Wine and beer make up an additional 65%, and the rest is bottled water. Some older people, however, still like the stronger stuff. “Out of 300 wedding guests, 250 will drink wine, the other 50 hard drinks,” says Toboni. “But the father of the bride still wants the full bar because he doesn’t want to offend his cronies.” As alcohol’s role as a social lubricant diminishes, both the appointments and the guests’ behavior moderate too. “I remember one office party in particular where they filled the water coolers with vodka and orange juice,” says White. “Now people say, ‘I know it sounds silly, but could I have another Tab?’ ” Casey Jones, dining-room manager for Emily’s caterers of Atlanta, notes that parties at which people drink less or not at all last longer. “Instead of walking around and talking for a few minutes here and there, they are sitting down and actually having conversations.”

For the fitness-conscious, alcohol has joined sodium and cholesterol as a substance devoutly to be avoided. The active ingredient in alcohol is ethanol, a depressant closely akin to ether. It dulls perceptions, slows reactions and contains “empty” carbohydrate calories, that is, with no nutritional value. It also relieves stress by releasing endorphins, chemicals that calm the nervous system. Many people drink to relieve stress, says John Bagshaw, a University of California associate professor of medicine, but they often cut down consumption or quit entirely when they begin an exercise program. Reason: the endorphins released by a workout preclude the need for alcohol. Tapering off for health reasons may be an enduring trend for an aging and sedentary population. “We’re becoming a nation of clerks,” says Megatrends Author John Naisbitt. “Over 70% of us process information; if we don’t take care of our bodies, we’ll go to pot.”

Many firms now penalize or fire those who drink on the job, and a few even ban drinking at company picnics. A provision in the new contract between Anheuser-Busch and the Teamsters and other unions is gradually eliminating beer breaks and free lunchtime brew over a one-year “transition” period. Instead, 9,000 employees will be given free six-packs to take home or may choose additional benefits, like more health insurance. Says Company Spokesman James Morice: “Basically, it was a matter of reflecting contemporary concerns.”

Not everyone is tapering off, of course. According to the Yankelovich poll, 26% of the population continues to drink as it always has. Marshall Lyons, 31, a Berkeley, Calif., tree surgeon, even gives nostalgic martini (stir, don’t shake) parties, complete with Peggy Lee music, because, he says, “martinis have the aesthetic of cold steel. They’re like contemporary graphics.” Dudley’s, a workingman’s tavern in Atlanta, has not slacked off selling ten kegs of beer a week as it has for years. “We’re a neighborhood place,” says Manager Tas Cofer. “We get workers from GM, construction men, manual laborers. They know everybody, and they say, ‘I’m going to party with those guys before I go home.’ “

Even before Americans began cutting back, the U.S. was temperate about alcohol, at least by comparison with many other nations where drinking is deeply woven into the fabric of social life. Changes now are also visible abroad. Thanks to a government sobriety pitch and a burgeoning fitness trend, in 1984 French consumption of table wine was down 4% from the year before. Diabolo Menthe (mint-flavored fizzy lemonade) and Brut de Pomme (a cider) are the latest nonalcoholic quaffs at cafes. “People used to drink wine with their meals as a matter of course,” Claude Vilain, of France’s Committee for Health Education, says. “Now it’s something for weekends and guests.” Perhaps, but whiskey drinking is on the rise, as are sales in higher-priced vintages. Alain Maurel of Alexis Lichine & Cie, a Bordeaux wine firm, says, “The French are more aware of quality. There has been so much specialist wine coverage in the press. Wine is a star now.” When asked if Moet-Hennessy, famed for its champagnes and cognacs, would produce soft drinks, a spokesman cried, “Absolutely not!”

The Irish, counter to the stereotype, are the European community’s most abstemious tipplers, consuming less than 2 gal. of alcohol per capita annually. In Britain, where the corner pub is a second home and a pint is considered a birthright, 95% of all adults in England, Scotland and Wales are drinkers. Beer consumption is down slightly, however, due to high unemployment and increased taxes on alcohol. In West Germany, beer intake has tripled over three decades, to 9 billion liters annually. “We have a saying,” says an official of the National Health Ministry in Bonn, “that ‘a man isn’t a man until he’s been drunk.’ “

Some experts think that the neo-temperance mood in America could lead to a new prohibition era, even though there is a national trend away from local option laws that ban sales of liquor by the drink. Says Yale Professor David Musto: “Historically, temperance moods have led to prohibition. There’s a human tendency to get carried away.” Even if Musto is right, chances are that the pendulum of excess will swing back again. What put an end to Prohibition in 1933 was not so much that it was unworkable and unenforceable. According to some historians, it lowered U.S. drinking as much as 50%. A main reason for repeal, write Authors Mark Lender and James Martin in Drinking in America, was “popular disgust with the rigidity of temperance advocates . . . their all or nothing posture.”

Robin Room, director of the Alcohol Research Center in Berkeley, suggests that the advances made as a result of the current temperance mood could soon be reversed. Legislating against alcohol, he says, “can make it a potential symbol of rebellion, as it was for middle-class youth in the 1920s rebelling against Victorian morals. We’re already seeing the signals on college campuses.” Ironically, a return to heavier social drinking could come about because of the change in attitudes and laws. “If the temperance people succeed in curbing alcoholism and alcohol abuse,” says Room, “the problem will pretty much disappear, and people won’t remember what all the fuss was about.” Such a swing, he says, could come in as little as 20 years.

Rapid reversals in public temperament may be a social reality, but they are not to everyone’s taste. Julia Child speaks for many when she says, “A glass of wine is part of civilized life. But we’re inclined in this country to go overboard on everything. I believe in moderation in all things.” Whether with a small glass of water, wine or something harder, the proposition deserves a hearty toast.

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