The Opinions - There’s More to Wine Than Just a Cancer Warning

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, recently recommended that cancer warnings be included on all alcohol products. The author and wine enthusiast Boris Fishman argues that doing so would place all forms of liquor in the same bucket — one that ignores the history, the generations of labor and the joy that accompany sipping a glass of wine. He’d like people “to think about this as just one example out of many in a life that risks becoming stripped of a certain kind of magic because we’re trying to protect ourselves out of existence.”Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. Warning for drinkers from America's top doctor. There is a causal link between alcohol and seven types of cancer. Alcohol consumption contributes to roughly 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 deaths each year. A reminder he wants added to warning labels already on booze, beer, and wine. So I heard this news last week, and I thought, taught to myself, here is another very unnuanced binary solution to what feels like a very nuanced

problem. My name is Boris Fishman, and I am primarily a novelist, but over the last couple of years, I have also found myself writing more and more about wine. So late last week, the surgeon general issued a recommendation that cancer warnings be applied to all alcohol sales in this country, which is something that I believe Congress must act on first, but the recommendation itself is weighty and consequential. So the news wasn't a total surprise because anecdotally, this has been happening for a while. Reports have been coming out for some time saying that alcohol is bad in any amount, and these findings have real consequences. You know, we had, dry January. Now there's also sober October. I'm sure parched March, maybe next, then modest August,

and as long as you can find a rhyme for the month, I'm sure it'll fall in line. But more seriously, little by little, the tide against alcohol has grown. Foot traffic falls dramatically during January, and producers of wine are ripping out acres upon acres of vines. I have a dear friend, and an exceptionally talented winemaker who is taking two years off the work without income because he no longer sees the demand. I have a neighbor

in the next town over from where I live who had a 6,500 bottle cellar, which was, you know, the envy of everyone in a 50-mile radius, and he has made the decision to stop drinking and sell off most of it. So to me, these feel like very consequential

outcomes, having to do not only with the way people live, and enjoy themselves, but with business, with the kind of culture we have, the kind of products we have in our marketplace, and what we consume for both meaning and joy. So I really want to emphasize this. If somebody has an alcohol dependency, then I couldn't be more of a supporter of their not participating. And so I'm no one to tell anybody else that they should imbibe or should imbibe this much or this little. It just feels like something really important is getting lost in the conversation,

which is that the difference in what's wrong between a glass of wine and a bottle of bourbon is enormous. And if the Surgeon General of the medical establishment is going to communicate with consumers, it must find more nuanced ways of doing so because the cultural values of consuming some beverages are very different from others,

as are the purposes of most of the people who do it. Of course, the government has a responsibility to help consumers avoid harm. No one here is arguing that there should be no warning, that there should be no help, there should be no education. I'm just saying that this doesn't feel like the solution, just to speak of myself personally. I write about wine professionally.

I am obsessed with wine. It contributes a tremendous amount of meaning to my life. But I almost never have more than a glass, maybe two, with a meal. because the purpose it serves for me has nothing to do with tipsiness or becoming drunk or becoming looser or anything like that. It has to do with participating in an incredibly rich tradition instead of sensory, olfactory, psychological even experiences that transport me to other places and times and make me feel things that so few other things do. I'm here to say that there is so much beauty and meaning in consuming a small amount of wine, that to have that big-footed by threats

and warnings like the ones we're seeing now that lack so much nuance is really disappointing and frustrating because it's going to drive so many people away from a truly magical experience. Last year, my wife and I took our older child, our daughter, to Istanbul, and while we were there, we wandered into a wine bar called Wayana, which focuses on indigenous Turkish grapes. And there was one glass in particular from a Turkish varietal called Kalachik Khorasi, if I'm saying it correctly, which makes light-bodied red-fruited wine sometimes compared to Pinot Noir. I put my nose into that glass of wine. And I smelled something that I have not smelled since I was six years old in my grandmother's kitchen,

in Soviet Minsk, which is where I was born, with me sitting at the kitchen table in that kitchen that I had, thought of in close to 40 years at this point, the sunlight streaming through the window in such and such a way, and there was my grandmother, now 20 years dead, at the stove in the apron that she always wore when she cooked. More than anything, it was the same exact smell, and it was putting my nose into that glass that brought me back into that kitchen, and for a nanosecond brought my grandmother back to life. With all respect to science, I don't care what warnings go on what bottles. This is an experience that I never want to do without. I was on an airplane yesterday and passing the business class cabin and there was a gentleman there wearing a t-shirt that said,

but does it scale? There's nothing about wine that scales. And I think that is such an important experience to embrace and to have particularly in our lives right now when everything is supposed to be repeatable and predictable and programmable. We are not programmable creatures, and every time I have a glass of wine, I'm reminded of that. What I would love for people to keep in mind is that it's really not about wine.

It's about what you value in life and what creates meaning and how perfectable we are versus how fallible we are and whether we sometimes can draw meaning and import as human beings from something that is otherwise perhaps technically fallible. I just want people to pause

and to think about this as just one example out of many in a life that risks becoming stripped of a certain kind of magic because we're trying to protect ourselves out of existence. I want you to think about what your glass of wine is and advocate for that and keep that alive in your lives because that flame is precious and there are certain things in our modern existence that really threaten it.

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