I Was Paid to Spit It Out, and I Stopped Spitting

The Bucket on the Table

For eleven years my working life revolved around a small silver bucket. If you have ever been to a proper tasting you will know the one. It sits in the middle of the table, slightly dented, lined with a bit of sawdust if the cellar is old fashioned, and everybody leans over it with a kind of practised elegance and spits.

I was very good at spitting. I could taste forty wines in a morning in a cellar outside Stellenbosch and drive home along the R44 with my head perfectly clear. You put the wine in your mouth, you find the cherry or the pencil shavings or the fault, and then you give it back to the bucket. The whole profession rests on that small act of letting go.

I do not know exactly when I stopped letting go. I have tried to find the day, the way you look for the first crack in a wall after it has already fallen down, and I cannot. What I can tell you is that by my thirty eighth birthday I was swallowing more than I spat, and I had become very clever at making sure nobody noticed.

How It Hides in a Wine Town

Here is the thing nobody warns you about when you work in wine. Everyone around you is drinking, all the time, and it is called work. A Tuesday lunch with a distributor is two bottles. A launch at a wine estate is a glass in your hand from four until nine.

So when I started finishing the tasting samples instead of returning them, it did not look like anything. When I opened a bottle at home "to check it had not corked" and then checked it all the way to the bottom, that was diligence. When I kept a half bottle of something interesting in the car door, that was research. A sommelier with a drinking problem is very hard to spot, mostly because the sommelier is the one doing the spotting.

My partner, Lerato, spotted it anyway. She did not make a scene. She simply started counting. I found the little pencil marks on the recycling bin lid one Sunday, tallies like a prisoner scratches on a wall, and I was so ashamed that I took the bin out to the road three days early so she could not add the week up.

The Morning at the Blending Table

The moment that finally cracked me open was not dramatic. Nobody crashed a car. Nobody got hurt. I was helping a young winemaker with a blend, a lovely Cabernet Franc that she was nervous about, and she asked me what I thought of sample three.

I had tasted sample three. I had swallowed sample three. I had also, it turned out, swallowed samples one, two and four, and I could not tell her a single useful thing about any of them. I looked at the beaker and my palate was gone. My nose, the thing I had trained for over a decade, the thing people paid me for, simply was not there. Everything tasted of the same warm, dull red.

She was kind about it. She thought I was tired. I drove home very slowly and sat in the driveway for an hour with the engine off, and when Lerato came out to see why I was not coming in, I told her the truth for the first time. I said, I cannot taste anymore, and I think it is because I cannot stop.

Saying the Word Out Loud

It took me another fortnight to type the words into my phone. I remember sitting on the edge of the bath with the door locked, searching for help, scrolling past pages that felt like they were written for somebody else, somebody worse off, somebody who drank from a brown paper bag. I was a man who could tell you the soil type of a vineyard from a single sip. Surely I was not that.

Eventually I stopped arguing with the screen. I read about Alcohol rehab and what a day there actually looks like, and what struck me was how ordinary it sounded. Meals at set times. Groups. Sleep. Talking. It did not sound like punishment. It sounded like the kind of structure I had dissolved in wine years before.

Lerato and I made the decision together at the kitchen table, the same table where I used to line up bottles to "compare" them. She held my hand and did not say much, which was the right thing to say.

The People I Met There

I had expected to feel like a fraud in treatment, the posh wine man among the real addicts. That lasted about a day and a half.

There was a woman in my group, a nurse from the East Rand, who had started on painkillers after a back injury and ended up somewhere she never imagined. There was a twenty two year old who had been in Drug rehab twice before and spoke about it with a sort of weary humour that made the rest of us laugh when we badly needed to. There was a retired headmaster who drank brandy and Coke because, as he put it, nobody suspects a man who coaches the under thirteens.

What I learned, sitting in a circle of chairs with these people, is that the substance is almost a detail. Mine came in beautiful bottles with gold foil and a story about the terroir. Theirs came in blister packs or plastic sachets or cheap bottles from the corner shop. We were all doing the same thing. We were all swallowing what we should have let go of.

The nurse said something in our second week that I wrote on the inside of my notebook. She said, I spent years looking after everybody's pain except my own. I felt it land in my chest like a stone into a well.

Learning to Taste Again

When I came out, I did not know if I could ever go back to work. Every friend I had was in wine. Every invitation was a tasting. My whole identity was built around a glass.

I took four months off and worked in a nursery in Somerset West, potting fynbos, letting my senses come back slowly. The first morning I smelled the buchu properly, sharp and minty, I cried in the shade house.

Then I did something I am still a little proud of. I went back to tasting, but only as a teacher, and only under rules I wrote myself. I do not taste alone. I do not taste after four in the afternoon. The bucket is always closer to me than the glass. And I tell the people I work with, plainly, that I am in recovery, so there is no room left for secrets.

What I Tell People Now

I get messages sometimes, mostly from people in hospitality, chefs and barmen and other wine people, asking me quietly how I knew. They usually phrase it carefully. Did you ever think you had a problem, or was it obvious.

I tell them it was never obvious, because I had built my whole life so that it would not be. I tell them about the pencil marks on the bin lid. And when someone asks me where to begin, whether there is a best rehab in South Africa or a right answer, I tell them honestly that the best place is the one you will actually walk into, and that the hardest part is not the treatment, it is the fortnight on the edge of the bath before you say the word.

I am three years sober now. I still keep a silver bucket on the shelf at home, the dented one from that old cellar, which the owner gave me when I told him what had happened. I do not use it. It just sits there, empty, reminding me that the most important skill I ever learned in this business was how to give something back instead of keeping it.