Opinion | This Is Not the Time to Give Up Wine

Everywhere you look these days, people are turning away from alcohol.First there was Dry January.

Now there’s Sober October.Who knows what month the rhyme scheme will come for next? Parched March? Modest August?I admire these teetotalers.

I too have abstained from liquor for extended periods and felt the clean poise and composure that replaces the low-grade hum of constant alcohol in the system.I met my wife during one such cleareyed abstention, so I know its value.But I will not be joining the abstainers.

I’m unwilling to part with wine.It’s not because I’m chasing tipsiness — as someone who writes about wine, I often taste 50 to 60 glasses in a day, though I always spit them out and, in six years of drinking wine seriously, I haven’t once been drunk on it.But in a life that too often feels stripped of magic — whether because of our political hostility, the radical inequality in our society or the instantaneity required of everything — wine is a passport to transcendence.

If water is life-giving, wine is psychedelic.Sometimes, the aroma alone is enough to kick off the time travel.Last summer, my wife and I took our daughter to Istanbul.

We visited Wayana, a wine bar that focuses on indigenous Turkish grapes, and I asked for a glass of Kalecik Karasi, the country’s flagship red varietal, which makes light-bodied, red-fruited reds sometimes compared with pinot noir.When I stuck my nose in the glass, however, I wasn’t in Burgundy.

I wasn’t even in Istanbul.I was 6 years old, in my grandmother’s kitchen in Soviet Minsk, smelling the tart sweetness of her raspberry jam, made from berries we’d picked in the countryside, as it bubbled away on the stove, the sunlight streaming through the window.

Then, necessarily, the transport was over — miraculous for being so fleeting.For me, wine will always be a connection to a Europe I lost as a child and to a time when things moved as slowly as an aging bottle of wine.Jorge Rosas, the head of the...