On Getting Drunk in the Morning

One day last week we had an excursion to a couple of wineries for a wee bit of wine-tasting. It lead me to wonder how alcohol consumption affects us. i.e. why is it so easy to get drunk in the morning? Is it because breakfast, the most important meal of the day, is not the largest meal of the day, therefore we don’t have enough in our tummies to absorb our late-morning libations and they thus go straight to our heads?

And what about afternoon drinking?

I was feeling a bit sick that morning so I really held back on the 11:00 wine tasting. I had taken a couple of gravol around 10 and although I learned that gravol seems to have no affect on me whatsoever, I did determine it would be tempting fate to slosh down a couple of glasses of wine on top of the gravol, just to see if it would knock me out cold. So I just had a couple of sips. But I watched my travelling companions swig down the vino and everything got pretty silly pretty fast.

At the afternoon session, I had regained my sea legs and partook happily of the offerings. A glass of nice solid red table wine, followed by a couple of small glasses of a tasty chianti, followed by biscotti dipped in vin santo. In a nutshell, and to paraphrase Shane MacGowan, by 4 in the afternoon every bastard there was pissed.

I don’t believe everybody would’ve gotten as drunk as quickly if it had been night-time. But that’s just my theory. I have no empirical study to back it up.