Drinking Alcohol

I'd rather have the booze!

good point, stillwater.

Now, now, the polygamy is gone in Utah (officially), and the drinking clubs are very easy to join. Their laws aren't all that different than Washington, sadly. (Washington also has a large LDS population -- may not be a coincidence.)

I guess I won't tell you secret news that growing up in Germany primarily consists of getting drunk on a regular basis - that is after having been taught that beer is basically like a good dish, it's just tastier and better.

I hold with the "Forbidden Fruit" theory.

I tell my kids if they want a drink, they can have one with me. My idea was
to demystify it. Drinking can't be all that cool and rebellious if you can do
it with your father. Also, I want to be there if they don't handle it well.

They've each tried beer, wine, and mixed drinks from about age twelve on.
They all disliked it at first, and only had a sip or two. As they grow older,
I expect they'll acquire taste for it. After my daughter started college she
would have a glass of wine with dinner when she came home for holidays. (I
imagine she had a drink or two with friends at school before reaching 21 also.)

So far, so good. My boys are fifteen and eighteen. As far as I know, neither
drinks except for a sip or two of something I'm having. As far as I know...

Oh boy George, I can promise you that your boys don't just have a sip or two with some friends.
But I think you handled the whole thing quite properly and shouldn't be concerned in any way that your kids couldn't handle alcohol sensibly.

Could those abstainers at one time have been whole loters

Texas has many, many dry counties - but ...........

........ but they've also got drive-through liquor stores.

For real?

A-yup.

whoa.

Yeah, Texas is quite a place.

Aren't there drive-through bars somewhere?

I believe in parts of Louisiana you can go through a drive-thru and get a mildly acoholic frozen beverage of some sort. I'd have to ask the person I know from Louisiana, and she's, um, in Louisiana for a few months.

I've been in the Crescent City for mardi Gras and the bars on Bourbon St. had tables across the doors selling drinks to patrons walking by on the sidewalk.
Laissez les bonnes temps roulez, cher!

I think they got drive by (or walk by) bordellos also

Get your pee-pee whacked, 5 minutes or less......

pa has the most convoluted laws.

You can only buy whiskey and wine in a State Store

You can only buy a case , or 3 of beer in a distibutors store

malt Liquors and wine coolers are similarly sold in distributors, but wine coolers are also sold in state stores

If you just want 2 sixpcks, you can buy that at a bar, where you buy drinks by the glass.

certain 2nd class townships can be dry but boroughs and cities cannot.

all this is governed by a Soviet style Liquor control board . however, they no longer enforce the illegalities of underage drinking or, horrors, the heinous crime of importing booze from anotherstate which sells the brands that pa does not.

the PA LCB buys booze like texas and californiabuys school books. The booze brands must conform to some Mideival standard of branding , and, of course, paying a huge tribute to finance the LCB workers pension fund.

the funniest thing is that The lCB claims that all this is to help restrain alcoholism and underage drinking. the stats prove otherwise.
maryland, next door to pa, has a totally market driven ABC policy wherein the privately owned booze stores buy through a state controlled warehousing system.
when I used to drink, I would order cases of calif wines (the better ones like stone Creek) and they were cheaper in MD than in Calif. The availability and reasonableness of the Md sytem did not promote any more alcoholism or underage drinking.

Idaho is like Utah in that there are state stores, and, I must say, not all that many. I found this out on a trip to Sandpoint, Idaho for a memorial for my aunt who died at age 100. I felt a little bit like an addict getting her officially sanctioned fix when I went to buy some Glenlivet to make the week a bit mellow.

I have posted here on a2k many times about my noticing the way that italians in general, if not specifically every single person, handle alcohol, that they treat it as a meal accompanyment, to some fair extent. That is, it is considered beneficial to have an aperitivo or digestivo to add the digestive process. Aperitivi are light alcohols, rather like Dubonet. Digestivi are often a little or a lot bitter, like Frenet Branca. You don't drink a lot of them, just a small glass.

Then wine with a meal is considered fine, although mineral water has almost as much a role on the table as the wine, and not everyone drinks wine.

There doesn't seem to be a culture of "tieing one on" or getting "snockered", "blotto", etc., not least because it is considered "brutta figura", which is to present a bad figure to the world.

I wasn't raised in this culture, am american of irish descent, but I think it makes good sense. There is pleasure taken in the riches of the wines and spirits without the extremes of teetotaling or drunken benders. I think they introduce children to all this as nothing terrible, and often serve younger family members a bit of wine with water.

There is a book I read back in the early '90's that gives a really good history of wine in the Chianti area, starting out with very early history of vines, while it also covers the comings and goings of various sets of soldiers. I highly recommend it to anyone interested. It's by Raymond Flower, is titled "Chianti"; Flower was probably the first person I read about who had fixed up an old place in Tuscany.. he pretty much started the most recent (1950's? maybe it was the '60's) advent of british expatriate-dom in Tuscany, which has since gotten the appellation, Chiantishire. The book has been reprinted recently in paperback.