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Example sentence:

She got so close I could smell the French wine she'd emptied/drained alone.

Is this verb choice correct? If not, what are more suitable verbs?

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  • Emptied seems incorrect. Drained seems okay. I'd favour sank, maybe devoured (depending on the circumstance). I'd perhaps use ", whilst alone" too. (Actually, I'd probably describe that aspect in more detail, but that really depends on the context.)
    – user2768
    Commented Nov 8, 2017 at 12:28
  • Do you need to remain formal? "Quaffed" might work. If we open the gate to informality, "guzzled" seems to fit.
    – Rob_Ster
    Commented Nov 8, 2017 at 19:25

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I, too, have difficulty with using emptied or drank as you didn't use bottle. You can empty or drain a bottle but empty wine is-ugh! Devoured or even gulped down (provided you don't mind ending a sentence with a preposition) might be better.

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  • Thanks. Isn't it weird to say "devoured" since ... you don't "eat" water?
    – alex
    Commented Nov 8, 2017 at 14:34
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Neither are correct. Empty implies she emptied a bottle (not drank) and drain doesn't quite fit. You could say she "drained an entire bottle of wine" but not just "drained the wine."

"Alone" is also best changed to "by herself" as the idea here isn't that she was physically alone but that she drank the entire thing by herself and did not share it.

More suitable sentences would be: "She got so close that I could smell the French wine she'd had/drank."

"She got so close that I could smell the French wine on her breath from the bottle she'd apparently downed all by herself."

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