The Age of “Intentional” Drinking

One evening not long ago, I met Amanda Crawford, a professional wine adviser, at Vandell, a new but nostalgic cocktail bar on the east side of Los Angeles. Crawford, who is in her early forties, caught the wine bug at Wellesley, where a favorite professor hosted tastings. Now she helps private collectors buy and sell bottles in the rare-and-fine market. What she described as the “classic archetype of the wine collector,” an investment banker in his thirties who is trying to impress his boss, “doesn’t exist anymore,” she told me. “The first crypto bubble, there was a lot of young blood, but then they lost all their money.” The Wall Street wine guys of the eighties, now elderly, seem to be pulling the ladder up behind them. “I go to dinners now, and everyone wants to talk about life extension,” she said. “All these multimillionaires and billionaires—they used to trade stocks, and now they trade longevity doctors.” After decades in the business, Crawford feels that she can weather the contraction—but she also doesn’t think it will be permanent. “Wine has been important for six thousand years,” she said. “I don’t think that a fashion for high-protein diets is going to interrupt that.”

At Vandell, which was packed at 5 P.M. on a Tuesday, we ordered Martinis: gin for Crawford, cut with both dry and bianco vermouth, plus a splash of tarragon vinegar, and vodka for me, mixed with an umami bomb of the Japanese condiments shio koji (made from fermented rice) and yuzu kosho (a spicy citrus preserve), as well as smoked olive brine. Both were available in a half size, an option that Crawford and I had each noticed creeping onto menus in L.A. and in New York. Many bars and restaurants now seem to be courting those who want to drink lightly—or more “intentionally,” in the self-help-tinted parlance of the moment. They offer tiny ’tinis and other mini cocktails, they list drinks in order of A.B.V., and the beverages once known as mocktails have been rechristened with more dignified labels, such as “N.A.” and “spirit-free.”

John deBary, the author of three books on cocktails (alcoholic and otherwise), who runs the beverage program at Strange Delight, a New Orleans-inspired seafood bar in Brooklyn, told me about a consumer behavior known in the business as “zebra-striping”—alternating between cocktails and N.A. drinks. At Strange Delight, he offers a teetotaller Martini, made with celery bitters, Tabasco, and non-alcoholic gin and vermouth, but he also develops recipes that are prodigiously boozy: a concoction called Having Fun Since 1933 (the year that Prohibition was repealed) combines passion-fruit juice and Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane Mix with a blend of rums. DeBary, for his part, stopped drinking in 2022. “I still do drugs!” he assured me. “I was, like, Wait—I actually don’t like the feeling of drinking alcohol.”

There will always be corners of the hospitality world where moderation is anathema. The New York super-restaurateur Keith McNally, of Balthazar and Pastis, told me that his alcohol sales this year are the best they’ve been since the pandemic. One wonders if this is because his clientele skews a bit older than, say, Jean’s, a restaurant and club in downtown Manhattan that always seems crowded with glamorous women in their early twenties. Ashwin Deshmukh, one of its operators, described a forthcoming tiny-’tini program that’s oriented less toward restraint than toward novelty: the adorable Bunny Martini, a mix of vodka and fresh-pressed carrot juice in a three-and-three-quarters-ounce glass, garnished with carrot-top “ears,” will come with a train ticket, to be punched whenever a roving server gives a refill. (No need to elbow one’s way to the bar.) When we spoke, Deshmukh had been having trouble sourcing glassware; one vender was sold out of the model he wanted, thanks to large orders from the Metropolitan Club and from Alaska Airlines.

Chloe Frechette, a former editor of the online drinks magazine Punch, and a co-owner of Echo Lake, a new rum bar in Williamsburg, theorizes that American drinking culture is having a “very honest” moment. “Pre-pandemic, wellness was really leeching in—people were ordering, like, activated-charcoal cocktails,” she recalled. “I feel like we’ve arrived at a moment where we’re not pretending that wellness needs to be part of this.” Drinking might confer its own kind of wellness, she suggested, one that comes from nurturing a pastime or convening with compatriots. (In 2025, Jacobin published an article titled “The Case for Social Drinking,” which argues that “it’s nearly impossible to have a semblance of socialism without the social.”) Like air travel, fast fashion, and so many indulgences of our era, drinking invites us to consider a gruelling litany of downsides and then decide whether the trade-offs are worth it.