The lost art of drinking wine at breakfast
It might be better for your health to imbibe early. Doing so may also hurt your productivity – which is maybe a good thing
A VIDEO POPPED into my feed last week showing Kevin O’Leary, one of the Shark Tank hosts, extolling the virtues of drinking wine for breakfast. “This is my biggest weakness—I love wine,” he says on Logan Paul’s vodcast, Impaulsive. “But if you drink wine three hours before you go to bed, you really screw up your sleep. You get no REM. The best thing to do is get up in the morning and drink.”
Paul and his cohosts roar with approval, then O’Leary adds, “I haven’t gotten to that place yet.”
The clip is three years old, but by some trick of the algorithm it’s resurfaced and gone viral, inspiring social-media users and media outlets to declare: “Shark Tank Star Kevin O’Leary Reveals He Drinks Wine at Breakfast.” He didn’t reveal that, actually, but why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
I was thinking about the clip as I rolled through Newark Airport recently. Americans are drinking less than any time on record, but you wouldn’t know it at the nation’s airports, where travelers are bellied up to the bar at 7:00 a.m., slugging wine, beer, and cocktails. Ahead of my 7:30 a.m. flight, I saw a middle-aged woman sitting by herself sipping a martini. I was impressed.
Of course, any self-imposed rules about drinking—not before 5:00 p.m., never alone, whatever—cease to exist once you pass through TSA. The plane is boarding in 30 minutes? Do whatever the hell makes you happy. But what about O’Leary’s idea that you should drink at breakfast when, you know, you don’t have a flight to catch? On, say, a regular Tuesday? Is that an idea worth pursuing? Should we be pairing our Greek yogurt with a crisp glass of Assyrtiko or sipping pink Taittinger Champagne with our scrambled eggs in the manner of James Bond?
“From a health point of view it actually doesn’t make any difference [when you drink],” Dr. Martin Feuer, who practices internal medicine in New York, told The Wall Street Journal’s former columnist, Lettie Teague, in her 2019 story about drinking wine for breakfast. The good doctor isn’t writing you a blank check to imbibe whenever you like; instead, he’s saying alcohol will do what it does to your body—inebriate you, give your liver a jolt—whether you drink it at 9:00 a.m. or 9:00 p.m. Therefore, when you consume is really up to you.
Naturally, the French have embraced breakfast wine. Visit the Marché de Capucins, an open-air market in the Bordeaux region of France, and you’ll see people sipping white wine and sucking down oysters at a time when most Americans would be tearing open their egg McMuffins. The French scientist Louis Pasteur—a man who would know such things—once said, “Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages,” which is important when you’re eating oysters at an open-air market.
In the ’70s, magazines seemed enamored by the idea that wine could be a health drink. There’s the famous white-wine diet that Vogue published in 1977. It calls for drinking one bottle of white wine a day—served with breakfast, lunch, and dinner—with the promise of losing five pounds in three days. Esquire even embraced the fad. Our founding editor, Arnold Gingrich, who was the magazine’s publisher in the ’70s, expressed his excitement for The Wine Diet Cookbook in his monthly dispatch from the September 1974 issue.
“Several times … I have ventured the opinion that wine in the diet is helpful rather than hurtful for those who must count their calories and watch their scales,” Gingrich wrote. “Since I’m neither dietician nor physician, I’ve never tried to push this pet notion as being anything more, or other, than it was: the result of a one-man survey.
“Now I learn that at last somebody else has been able to provide the scientific basis for this very idea that I could only say had worked for me, without being able to explain why,” he continued before breaking down the “science” of healthful wine consumption in The Wine Diet Cookbook.
Thirty years later, Dr. Philip Norrie, an Australian M.D. who calls himself “the wine doctor,” wrote a dissertation for a doctorate in philosophy called “Wine and Health Through the Ages.” He tackles the question of when it’s best to uncork a bottle. “Is there one meal more than another which is especially appropriate for the employment of wine?” he writes. “That meal should be the best where the greatest tax is made upon the digestion. As a rule this is dinner but where people are in the habit of making heavy meat breakfasts, suitable wine would be quite as proper.”
There you go: If you’re eating a heavy meat breakfast—and Americans love a heavy meat breakfast—then wine will help you digest it. Not long after Dr. Norrie wrote his dissertation, Esquire published an endorsement of red wine with breakfast. (I assume the timing was a coincidence.) We focused more on the psychological effects. “Afterward, you somehow feel more prepared,” Ryan D’Agostino wrote. “Like any doubts about the day ahead, any potential hindrances, can be handled. Calm. Confident. One glass gives you the perfect amount of buzz, and it doesn’t make you groggy.”
Nowadays, this all feels like wishful thinking. Despite past studies that suggest a glass of red wine is good for the heart or the notion that it aids in digestion, we live in an era when alcohol in any amount is considered bad for your health. Perhaps it explains the sharp decline in consumption among Americans, especially those in the Gen Z cohort. Weirdly, it also reveals why O’Leary’s statement on drinking wine for breakfast continues to go viral years after he said it. We seek to optimize all parts of our life with the goal of productivity. If you’re going to drink wine, do it over breakfast. That way you’ll sleep better and, presumably, perform at a higher level—even though you’re wine drunk at 9:00 in the morning. Yes, it’s a bit of a paradox.
In stories and social-media comments about drinking wine when the sun is high in the sky, you will see the word productivity frequently, mostly to point out that imbibing early may dampen your ambition. For instance, Lettie Teague wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “A number of wine drinkers I surveyed named noon or lunch as a time when one might consider drinking a glass, yet almost all of them added that they, personally, would not, lest it impair their productivity during the rest of the day.” In the ’70s, we focused on whether wine was healthy. Now we’re wary of wine—or any alcohol—because it’s both bad for our health and a productivity killer. In the 2020s, the latter might be worse than an early death.
And that’s precisely why you should consider throwing back a glass or two over breakfast—to aggressively pursue being unproductive. I don’t know about you, but on my days off, when I promise myself to relax, I end up feeling guilty that I’m not accomplishing anything. I start looking for tasks around the house or open my work email. A glass of wine with my eggs might be just the thing I need in order to avoid this fate. And if I decide to have two glasses, I can look forward to a nap.
This story originally appeared in Esquire US.
