The Cocktail Nation

American Demographics, July 1, 1998 by Marc Spiegler

Cigars. Steaks. Cocktails. This jazzy trio of former American favorites came roaring back in the 1990s, transformed from social vices into hallmarks of sophistication-especially for men. Driven by media coverage that has promoted as much as reported these trends, the renewed fads have been packaged together into a supposed redefinition of American's attitude toward health-damaging behavior.

Across the country, writers have described the rise of "The Cocktail Nation," a supposedly massive subculture of bon vivants living a devil-may-care existence. Their background music: aged crooners Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra, who several years back became suddenly popular among young people. Supposedly, this signaled a desire to return to the carefree American epoch of the singers' original heydays. Spread by the 1996 movie Swingers, this vision of besuited guys who are "so money" chasing "beautiful babies" has hatched cigar bars and cocktail lounges on every mall-style hipster strip in America.

Drawing on this anecdotal evidence, trend writers proclaim that Americans have tired of cholesterol counts and sober living. We are ready to enjoy life again, damn it, and pay the consequences later. It's a wonderful, seductive story line, one that has yielded some of the most overblown journalistic prose in decades. And the numbers seem to back it up. Cigar sales have skyrocketed. Hip bars compete to invent new cocktails. Steakhouses are doing great business.

But if you take a harder, closer look at what's going on, the trend spotters have got it wrong. In fact, studies reveal that, whatever their occasional indulgences, Americans are more obsessed with their mortality than ever. Rather than going gung-ho into the good night, we're terrified. Cocktail Nation? More like Nation of Wimps.

The New Martini is all glamour, its sleek image distilled from old movie clips and Algonquin Roundtable witticisms. It intoxicates with memories of tycoons and tough guys, starlets and vamps on ocean liners and in speakeasies. -St. Petersburg Times, April 1997

For those of us whose adulthood has been marked by downsizing and round-the-clock productivity, the three-martini lunch seems like a mass delusion, something possible only in an economy so strong it could roll along every afternoon on auto-pilot. Today, people who have anything stronger than a single glass of wine at a business lunch get odd looks from their tablemates.

Having spent years as the Chicago Tribune's "Dr. Nightlife," Rick Kogan remembers the days of the serious drinkers. He mocks today's new breed of cocktail connoisseurs, who make a show of ordering complicated, recently invented drinks like the Cosmopolitan and Chocolate Martini. "In the old days, no one talked about, 'sipping martinis'," Kogan says. "They just said, 'Let's get a drink.'"

When you look at the actual trends in America-the kind supported by numbers, not buckets of printer's ink-they punch a hole in the "cocktail nation" concept large enough to drive through several truckloads of goat-cheese-stuffed olives. Studies by the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley, California, show the number of people who say they did not drink in the past 12 months rose from 30.6 percent in 1984 to 35.4 percent in 1995. Over the same period, the number of people who report having five or more drinks a day at least once a week has also dropped, from 6.1 percent to 4.5 percent.

Furthermore, heavy drinkers are far more likely to be chugging than sipping. "Evidence has repeatedly shown that the heaviest consumption is in beer," says the center's Thomas Greenfield. "So many people may actually be drinking less by converting to cocktails. Beer accounts for 67 percent of all alcohol consumed in America, (as measured by the actual ethanol content of beverages consumed), according to a new study by the center. Hard liquor, which serves as the basis for any cocktail, accounts for only one-fifth of the alcohol we drink. Ten percent of American drinkers consume 57 percent of all our alcohol intake, and beer accounts for 75 percent of their imbibing.

"The alcohol industry likes to promote the idea of people saying, 'To hell with all this neo-temperance,'" Greenfield says. "But actually, we've found there are two brands of abstainers: those who always abstain and those who occasionally let loose, reconnect to their glory days and regret it afterward."

Grad student Carrie Yury, a 27-year-old who has bartended in New York City and Chicago, echoes Greenfield's take. Among her customers, she distinguishes between the older cocktail set-who drink the same martini repeatedly, several times a week-and the new generation of cocktail types, who experiment more, order only off preset martini lists, and drink less.

Yury says her own evolution as a drinker reflects what she observes in young customers. "In the old days, when I drank all the time, I drank a lot more beer," she says. "Now, my relationship to liquor is a lot more Epicurean than alcoholic. When I drink at all, I want something special."