![]() ![]() “You get the sizzle and pop but no high,” one told me. Others I spoke with say that drinking alcohol substitutes are the worst thing recovering alcoholics can do to themselves. A bartender who’s trying to get sober said that substitutes like nonalcoholic beers were essential those first transitional months into sobriety, but now, he’ll only occasionally reach for one for the taste. “I never want a buzz again, but it’s still fun to mix a drink and not have it ruin your life,” a recovering alcoholic told me. Some I spoke with found them helpful in their recovery process. But it’s unclear how much these drinks might help people who are trying to get sober. The boom in the nonalcoholic market has also dovetailed with skyrocketing rates of alcohol dependency in the U.S., especially among women. “If Gucci had a wine,” Coulter added, “you’d find Starla.” The branding is aspirational: Abstaining from alcohol means creating a life so good you don’t want to escape it. “We just wanted to make Starla stigma-free and cool,” founders Dawn Maire and Jamie Coulter told me of their dealcoholized wine company. There’s a sense of fantasy to drinking - it allows you to step outside of yourself for a while - but there’s an even more heightened fantasy to nonalcoholic marketing it invites you in by making you aspire to its glamor and exclusivity. Many of the companies rely on visual identities of high-end luxury: web pages that glimmer and drip with warm pinks and reds, Instagram squares of pregnant women with glittering bellies and dealcoholized wines, vintage fashion, and videos that evoke Mediterranean travel. The branding is aspirational: Abstaining from alcohol means creating a life so good you don’t want to escape it. These drinks sometimes feel marketed like a way to assert power, as a kind of girlbossery. Having a line of nonalcoholic spirits has become almost de rigueur for celebs of a certain stripe. Real Housewife of New York City Luann de Lesseps even has her own dealcoholized rosé brand, Fosé Rosé. ![]() Sales of nonalcoholic beverages rose 300 percent between 20, and just since last September, Katy Perry has launched her own line, as did Blake Lively, whose sparkling low-calorie mixers can be sipped on their own or mixed with alcohol. Brands like Kin Euphorics, which launched in 2018 and later made Bella Hadid a co-founder, promise to revamp the “modern ritual” of drinking. Glossier alum Melanie Masarin founded her spirit-free aperitif company Ghia in the thick of the pandemic, drawing inspiration from her family’s aperitivo traditions (Ghia’s since been included in Gwyneth Paltrow’s holiday Goop guide and called “seriously chic” by Vogue). There are chichi and functional varieties, from mood-enhancing adaptogenic drinks to bubbly floral spritzes and spirits meant to taste like liquor. A whole new genre of self-help literature was born, including Ruby Warrington’s Sober Curious, which gave the movement its name, and Holly Whitaker’s Quit Like a Woman, inspired by Whitaker’s online alcohol-treatment program. The trend has spawned Facebook groups, online sobriety schools, meetups, and communities designed to foster social interactions among women that weren’t contingent upon having a glass of happy-hour wine in hand. And more and more young people, particularly young women, have trickled into a growing “sober curious” movement in which those who don’t necessarily identify as alcoholics or want to commit to lifelong sobriety can experiment with consuming less alcohol. A 2018 study indicated that millennials and Gen Z drank less than their boomer and Gen-X counterparts did at similar ages, citing negative social perceptions as reasons to cut back. I didn’t know it then, but younger generations had already started to shift their relationship to alcohol. I felt admonished - it had taken me so long to get into the glamor of drinking culture. ![]() Then, as I ordered my third glass of wine, he diligently chewed the straw of his seltzer with lime, committed to cutting back. He used to tease me for being a lightweight. I was on my second glass of Pinot Noir opposite a friend with whom I used to drink excessively. The first time I noticed people not drinking was at an Irish pub at a normal happy hour before the pandemic. Photo: lovelypeace/Getty Images/iStockphoto ![]()
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