On Drinking Alone

There is a particular pleasure in sitting down to a meal alone with a glass of something good. Not the melancholy of eating alone — that is a different thing entirely — but the deliberate choice to be unaccompanied, present, and unhurried. I have drunk alone in many cities. A Barolo in a trattoria in Turin where the owner refilled my glass without asking. A cold Txakoli at a counter in San Sebastián, watching the pintxos disappear. A glass of orange wine at a bar in Paris that I only found because I was lost. The point is not the wine. The point is the quality of attention that comes when there is no one to perform for. You taste differently. You notice the room differently. You are, briefly, nobody. I recommend it.