Why Cocktail Hour Is Back

A French 75.

A piece in the New York Times looks at the revival of cocktail hour as many of us are working from home and/or seek a release from the subtle stress of living in a pandemic where you must treat everyone you meet as potentially contagious, wearing a mask and wiping down everything with sanitizer (routine real estate closings I do have a whole new underlying element of stress).   Meanwhile, as a piece in the Virginian Pilot notes, liquor sales in Virginia and other states have skyrocketed and there is a new focus on cocktails (beer sales have increased nowhere near as much as hard liquor). As the Times piece notes, cocktail hour meets a need: "we need the ritual; we have the time; and during lockdown, it’s 5 o’clock everywhere."  I think cocktail hour also meets another need for many, especially those of us of a certain age: nostalgia and a sense of a better time when things and life were more certain. In my youth I still recall cocktail hour at our summer home as my parents and relatives had cocktails on the front porch overlooking the lake discussing family things, reminiscing, and discussing politics (always a constant in my family).  Here are article highlights:

“Is it too early to drink?” A few weeks into our current disorientation, that line or some jokey variation of it began to appear with a certain frequency on Twitter, in texts I’d get, in Slack messages, in my head.

I would encounter it, too, during long calls with friends that now followed a distinct sequence . . . resolving, invariably, with a conversation about last night’s cocktail and the plan for this evening’s.

One friend recently posted a picture of David A. Embury’s classic primer, “The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks,’’ published in 1948, on his Facebook page with the caption: “Homework.’’ Another friend, Jimmy, was making Palomas with a grapefruit soda created by a Los Angeles bartender, which was now sold out on Amazon and at Target.

If you told me at Thanksgiving that in six months we would all be confined to our homes and facing shortages of toilet paper and a cactus-infused organic citrus beverage, I would have hugged you and smiled, and quietly called your psychopharmacologist to suggest adjustments.

[I]n New York and many other states, liquor stores were deemed essential retail businesses on the premise that our anxiety was going to require release. But there was a growing need as well for new rituals to replace the ones that had vanished from our lives — for a style of drinking that was neither rushed nor indiscriminate, presuming we were of sound health and blessed with the structural comforts. Gulping down a glass of wine from a screw-top bottle as you frantically heated leftovers because you got home late from work, again, was a habit it no longer seemed necessary to honor.

My friend Nelson and his wife have suddenly found themselves in a nightly cocktail routine. He recalled the sanctity of his parents’ cocktail hour, growing up in Palo Alto in the 1970s, and tracked its waning dignity in the years that followed. How could any of us have imagined that a pandemic would revive it? According to a 1958 New York Times article, the institutionalization of cocktail hour in American life can be dated precisely to Dec. 5, 1933, when the 21st Amendment made alcohol legal again. Cocktails “and the late-afternoon hour devoted to them,’’ the article explained, were a direct result of the Prohibition-era practice of disguising the flavor of bathtub gin and other spirits with fruit juices. It’s hard to say when it ended, but the tech boom was one assassin. In my own life, the need to punctuate the end of the day at a moment when time feels so static has left me looking for the exclamation points. On many days, I will make a drink that requires precise measurements, special equipment, effort, the boiling of water, the dissolving of sugar — order and the promise of a particular certainty. Perhaps some during this period will develop bad habits that require their own cures. I hope that is not the case. Five o’clock is now a lot closer to bed time than it used to be. And a single cocktail can feel like the best inoculation against dread.

Yes, the husband an I had cocktails last night - and will again this evening.