In my father's footsteps

The New York Times has a blog by Paul Clarke about drinking:

...During my formative-drinking years, when alcohol was still a relative novelty, I had something that many of my harder-drinking friends did not: parents who demonstrated a responsible relationship with alcohol. My father and sometimes my mother would crack a cold beer on hot days, and wine was regularly served at dinner on weekends and special occasions to everyone including the kids. They kept a decently stocked liquor cabinet, but usually only opened it for drop-by guests and the occasional dinner party, which were celebrated in good cheer but were seldom if ever followed by awkward phone calls the next day.
This open yet modest approach to alcohol was in contrast to the paths taken by the families of some friends and neighbors, whose habits ranged from over-indulgent to abstemious and were sometimes an odd mix of the two: it was not lost on me during my secular Bible Belt upbringing that some of my hardest-drinking friends – whose relationships with booze were often of the vomit-in-the-shrubbery, loss-of-all-personal-control variety – were from religious homes in which alcohol was seldom if ever served.
Knowing that my six-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son will likely start to experiment with alcohol in (let’s be realistic) about a decade, give or take, I fully realize that every time my wife or I take a drink around them, a message is being sent. There are several directions this can go, and I understand I’ll never have total control over any of them. If completely banishing alcohol from our home would protect them from any of its hazards later in life, it’d be an easy choice, but as my old hard-drinking friends demonstrated, that’s just a bit too simple and naïve to be a realistic option.
Instead, I try to mirror the moderate approach taken by my own parents, leavening this with the lessons I learned from these hard-drinking friends who had more rigid upbringings, along with those I pick up from watching the unique slice of life visible in Las Vegas and New Orleans: when it comes to alcohol, an extreme approach at either end of the spectrum can be bad news. Too much is always too much, and none at all can also be too much; but tacking an even course between the two is usually just enough.

Rico says his father was always a Scotch drinker (small glass, single ice cube, maybe a splash of water in the early days when he drank blended whiskies), but Rico has ended up even more abstemious (once you have a brain injury they— meaning the ladyfriend— get cranky if you drink too much, and they define 'too much' as not very much at all), and drinks only single-malt Scots whiskey (and therefore expensive, especially in the benighted state of Pennsylvania), in shot glasses, straight (no ice, no water, no gawd-forbid anything else).