On a bright Saturday afternoon, customers at the small bar are sipping, socializing and avidly comparing their drinks. New vodka concoctions? Rare Napa Valley vintages? Bavarian lagers? No. This is High Sobriety, a "beverage boutique" in a North Dallas shopping center, which stocks and serves a storeful of nonalcoholic liquid refreshers. Here are such unspiked delights as Calistoga sparkling water from California, Chateau Yaldara (a sparkling spumante) from Australia, Texas Select "beer," and Carl Jung "Champagne" from West Germany with no kick at all. Cheers! And welcome to the water generation.
W.C. Fields, who once complained that someone had put pineapple juice in his "pineapple juice" (an oversize shaker of martinis), would be horrified. America is tapering off, and doing so at a faster pace than at any time since Prohibition took effect in 1920. In restaurants, at country clubs and wedding receptions, and even on the screen, it is increasingly difficult to find anyone with a stiff drink in his hand. Sighs Restaurateur Duke Zeibert, who recently began carrying Moussy nonalcoholic beer from Switzerland at his famed Washington watering hole: "I'm from the old school of Scotch and soda and bourbon and water, but you just don't hear that much anymore. There's been a big turnaround."
Indeed there has. The martini, once a symbol of American imbibing, memorialized in thousands of neon outlines of cocktail glasses, is becoming an amusing antique, like a downtown Art Deco apartment building. The new sign of the times? It should be the outline of the ubiquitous green Perrier bottle. Whether it is imported from exotic locales or comes from a local spring, cool, clear water is the quaff of the moment. "Everyone is drinking Perrier and iced tea," observes Sondra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. "White wine is almost daring now." The temperate mood is transforming the ways in which the nation works, plays and socializes. New attitudes toward careers, fitness and the very image of what we are and wish to become are being altered. Americans are tackling the entrenched social problems of abusive drinking with a new rigor. The neotemperance has already inspired tough drunk-driving laws to combat highway bloodshed (see following story). Basic to it all: people are drinking lighter and drinking less, and seem to be proud of it. A new poll conducted for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, Inc., showed that only 67% of the nation's 170 million adults over 18 said that they drank at all. More than a third of them acknowledged that they have cut back their consumption over the past few years; only 6% said they drank more.
The trend is a sobering reversal of America's long-standing love affair with a social sip or two. By 1830, when citizens were feeling their oats on the frontier, absolute alcohol consumption was 7 gal. per capita, nearly three times the present level. After the 14-year hiccup of Prohibition ended in 1933, Americans began to drink less in bars, more often in their living rooms. Cocktails became synonymous with socializing. In fact, sharing a convivial cup to promote friendship and hospitality is a tradition older than the republic. Potent stout and rum flowed at the first Thanksgiving because the Puritans feared contaminated water.