Sublime

When I’m feeling festive or exuberant, I want to chat and burble, marking my journey into tipsiness with my verbal outpourings, measuring my drunkenness in confessions and, eventually, incoherence.

It seems clear by now that an occasional nip from the bottle also promotes longevity. A 97-year-old woman in Fengyuan, Taiwan, claims that her sound health and long life are due primarily to her daily consumption of one bottle of rice wine, taken in three portions with each meal. Western doctors also agree that moderate daily doses of liquor

Ernest ordered calves liver (fegato alla Veneziana), which he said was a restorative, and he ordered a bottle of Valpolicella Superiore, which he told the floor waiter to pour for us without waiting for the bottle to breathe. “Italian reds don’t need oxygen,” he said. “I got that bit of Bacchanalian wisdom from Fitzgerald.”