I

n wine is truth, whatever your '€œwine'€ is.

The unbecoming insensibility I once saw at night on St. Mary Street in Cardiff, Wales, and the death of a young motorcycle driver I know in Cengkareng, West Jakarta, after spending a night of drinking cheap booze with his buddies are essentially telling the same truth.

The firing of a boss of a foreign car manufacturer in Jakarta after pampering guests attending its safety first campaign with Veuve Cliquot champagne spoke another truth.

It pays to be true to yourself before the truth in wine exposes your true colors.

People drink for different reasons and health is one of them.

A government official once told me he drank red wine because of media reports saying it was good for health. About a year later, he died of a heart attack.

He might have been misled into thinking that red wine was a cure for heart disease, although nothing was definite about it as World Wine Symposium founder François Mauss once told me in 2010 in Singapore.

Yet, belief in the health benefits of alcohol is common. Alcohol causes blood vessels to widen and expand. Thus, it is believed to improve blood circulation.

The former Peruvian ambassador told me a shot of pisco a day kept his 80-year-old father healthy. Italian winemaker Pio Boffa also linked the health of his elderly countrymen to their wine drinking habit.

But alcohol is not for everybody; even a wine expert I know now has to severly limit his wine-drinking activities after his allergy to wine became increasingly unresponsive to medication.

At celebratory dinners, alcoholic beverages are used to properly propose a toast because they can make glad the heart of man and are thus considered special '€” a status that non-alcoholic drinks can never achieve.

Yet, on several occasions I have noticed teetotalers toasting with soft drinks or fruit juice and shouting kanpai and ganbei (bottoms up) as boisterously as their Japanese and Chinese counterparts, although some reserved and distance-keeping attitude sometimes still hung in there.

Alcoholic drinks are also seen as a status symbol. Those showing up at prestigious wine dinners, which are priced over Rp 1 million (US$105) are normally different from those content with cheaper offerings.

The purchase of wine priced at Rp100 million a bottle in Jakarta is not uncommon among certain circles. So is the use of expensive wine to flaunt wealth and impress.

But wine has now become more common, readily accessible and affordable. A wine and cheese expo has now become an annual event in the city.

At numerous wine bars and lounges dotting the city, wine drinking among young professionals has become part of a cool, trendy, '€œhappening'€ lifestyle.

This once provided a context for an F&B professional I used to know to devise an all-you-can-drink scheme from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. after making an anecdotal survey on how much wine expatriates and locals were able to gulp down at one sitting.

She calculated that they would be late due to traffic, come at seven with a growling stomach, eat at her restaurant and have only one hour left to drink all the wine. This '€œbrilliant'€ idea, however, was short-lived.

While drinking among women is now becomming more common, alcoholic drinks are normally associated with the male ego. As a high school student decades ago, I found myself in an environment where manliness had to be proven by strong drinks including the ability to, among other things, outdrink other males.

As I grew older and got exposed to the richer facets of life, I found that drinking is actually a skill and an art of balancing pleasure, discipline and self-control.

The La Fête de la Fleur grand tasting of more than 50 wines from the official 1855 Classification of Medoc and Sauternes at one sitting provides a rare but good occasion to hone the skill because you have to spit out the wines after tasting them.

Drinking is also the art of negotiating opposites, of knowing how to maximize the pleasure from the drink in your hand, perhaps up to the point of manageable tipsiness, and knowing when and how to stop if you sense that your body won'€™t let in any more alcohol.

A good drinker should never get drunk nor drive under the influence. It pays to be true to yourself before the truth in wine exposes your true colors.

'€” Arif Suryobuwono