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The Daily Ritual I Will Never Give Up
Here’s to us older women who savor those wind-down sips.
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“The way someone holds a glass and drinks can be very chic. Someone could guzzle or they could sip.” — Emily Blunt, discussing what makes a person chic, in a New Yorker interview with Stanley Tucci.
Here’s to the sippers, to the women who like their humor dry and their martinis drier.
Here’s to the ritual of the wind-down, the moment of exhale, when work is done and a cocktail glistens before you. The first brush of my lips to a chilled martini glass always excites me — that’s a kiss that never disappoints.
It’s a rush, like the spark of a bright idea or the promise of a deep conversation with a friend.
A cocktail hour marks the day’s transition, a “civilizing pause,” as critic Bernard DeVoto wrote in his 1951 book, The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto: “When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.”
My cocktail hour has changed over the years. When my children were young, I’d come home from work around 7 p.m., after a 10-hour day in a newsroom filled with delightfully intense people, pour some vodka over ice and stir in some V8 juice. My daughters knew to leave me alone for a half-hour while I sipped and stared into space. One jigger of vodka could rejigger my mind.
When my daughter Tess was in kindergarten, the teacher asked the class what their moms liked to do. Tess said: “My mom likes to drink Bloody Marys and read magazines.”
Now that I’m 70, I like martinis. In a cold glass. In moderation. Around 5 p.m.
I no longer go to an office, but my mind is as busy as ever — and always in pursuit of fascination and focus.
Sipping a martini allows me to stop the world — for at least as long as the chill in my glass lasts. Sipping requires a delicate hand and an attention that’s steady, neither shaken nor stirred.
Perhaps that’s the most civilizing thing about my cocktail ritual: it is the opposite of multitasking. It is what I call “conscious cocktailing” — an intentional act to slow down and sharpen my thoughts, to separate the flowers from the weeds.
There’s social sipping and solo sipping, sipping to forget and sipping to fire up the mind.
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Here’s how some great dames throughout history have done it…
Sipping to Remember
Anthropologist Jane Goodall took her civilizing pause at 7 p.m. every evening. She was a whisky woman — Johnnie Walker Black, Chivas Regal or Famous Grouse.
No matter where Jane was in the world, she would raise a glass to her mother at 7 p.m., and her mother would do the same.
“It was a way to feel connected,” Goodall told The Guardian in 2023. “Now I toast her up in the clouds every evening.”
Goodall, the great conservationist, said whisky soothed her throat. The trick seems to have worked. She was 91 when she died last year. Her mother, author Vanne Morris-Goodall, lived to 94.
Sipping to Stay Riveting
Vivacious Vogue editor Diana Vreeland ate the same lunch every day — a peanut butter and marmalade sandwich finished with a shot of Scotch.
That jolt of liquor helped her come up with pronouncements like “ravishing personalities are the most riveting things in the world” and “never fear being vulgar, just boring.”
Sipping with the Swells
My favorite place to sip a martini is Bemelmans Bar in Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel, where the walls are decorated with Ludwig Bemelmans’ drawings from Madeline and the atmosphere is as buzzy as the booze.
New York magazine once wrote that Bemelmans Bar “emanates a kind of impossible distilled luster and charm; it shines with a polish we mostly experience only through movies and TV. But Bemelmans is the real thing, one of a dwindling number of spots in our increasingly globalized, franchised, suburbanized city that can exist here and only here.”
It’s a sipper’s paradise.
The last time I was there, actress Lesley Manville swooped in. She was starring in Oedipus on Broadway.
You may know Manville from The Crown, where she played Princess Margaret in her later years. While Margaret famously liked gin and whisky, Manville told The Guardian she prefers champagne. “It helps make the mundanity of laundry, washing up and weeding rather lovely. Perhaps I’m embracing my inner Princess Margaret.”
Sipping Like a Queen
And speaking of the royals, Queen Elizabeth II enjoyed four cocktails a day for most of her adult life, according to her royal chef, Darren McGrady, who was quoted in Vanity Fair.
Her first drink, sipped shortly before lunch, was a gin and Dubonnet with a slice of lemon and a lot of ice. The queen, who died in 2022 at 96, shared this ritual with her mother, the Queen Mother, who lived to 101, in spite of the fact that she drank one or two dry martinis every night, topped off with champagne.
Sipping with Your Favorite People
The Martini Socialist website TheMartiniSocialist.com is dedicated to all things martini. As the site notes, a civilizing pause is most wonderful when spent with a cherished friend.
“Select your company with great care. Ultimately, this is one of the most fundamentally important aspects of a martini. Anyone who joins you for the ceremony must respect it, understand the dangers of the drink and realize the importance of the atmosphere (switch off your phones).”
No guzzling allowed. Just sipping, delicious conversation … and a very chic and civilizing pause.
Who else enjoys an occasional cocktail? Let us know in the comments below.
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