Addiction is drip-fed by denial. And alcoholism is such a mind-altering, powerful disease it kids the sufferer he is fine. Alarm bells should have started ringing in my head about 10 years ago when I had to have a medical. When my doctor asked me how much I drank, I replied, 'As a wine writer, naturally I drink more than the recommended 21 units a day.' She raised her eyebrows, "More than 21 units a day?" A week, I meant a week,' I stuttered.

My Freudian slip was much closer to the truth. Over the 25 years I had been writing about wine, my consumption had been surreptitiously creeping up. My whole life was steeped in alcohol. I was the daughter of a wine shipper and at 22, I married a wine merchant whom I met while working on a wine magazine. Life was one long party, revolving round tastings, lunch, dinners and boozy press trips around the world. Going freelance meant I had even greater freedom. I would often taste 200 to 300 wines a week, and while spitting was an automatic response, I had cases of leftovers. Drunken lunches and dinner parties were commonplace in my house and I surrounded myself with other free-loading heavy drinkers.

I began drinking constantly, because I felt happy or sad, was over or under-worked, because it was raining or too sunny – on and on the excuses went. I never considered I might be an alcoholic – I wasn't sitting on a park bench drinking meths was I? And I could and did stop regularly. But every time I started again, I found myself drinking more as my tolerance increased.

And then I got divorced. Unhappy, I began drinking even more when the children weren't around and the structure disappeared from my life. I self-prescribed alcohol to anaesthetise my feelings – but miscalculated the dose – big time. Work tailed off and my 25-year career began to turn sour. I was pressing the self-destruct button. My life became seriously unmanageable. I tottered, bewildered on the brink of a self-created wine lake – and then literally fell in. When my dad died, my lunchtime drinks became 11 o'clock until one day after a bout of toothache I found myself drinking vodka at 8am. My denial told me I drank because I had problems rather than the other way round.

Self loathing, guilt, bad behaviour, blackouts, hangovers, drunken phone calls and retching every morning were commonplace. Until one day, house sold and capital spent, driving licence gone and without any work, I fainted, broke my nose and came round covered in blood on a pub floor.

This was my rock bottom, just over a year ago and the day I stopped drinking and started, thank God, my journey of recovery. Unlike many killer diseases, I can manage my illness by not drinking, one day at a time and with the massive support network of a 12-step recovery programme. But alcoholism is cunning, baffling, powerful and patient – so I am constantly on my guard as it is waiting in the wings, ready to pounce.
Alice King