Adele has unveiled the music video for “I Drink Wine”, the third single off her 2021 album, 30. The indulgent Joe Talbot-directed video shows the 34-year-old Grammy winner floating down a stream surrounded by a dreamy forest in a red innertube sipping wine in a sparkling golden dress. As she sings and sips on her wine, she encounters various characters, such as a woman and man seemingly on a date, a little girl trying to get a woman’s attention who is preoccupied reading along the bank of the calm river, and fishermen. Some of the fishermen are played by notable actors such as Insecure‘s Kendrick Sampson and Jimmie Fails, from 2020’s Pieces of a Woman. Adele is also joined by several synchronized dancers who routinely fill up her wine glass throughout the video.
The plum-colored skies turn dark once the sun sets around Adele, who laments about losing childhood innocence and becoming a person she never wanted to be to appease others. “How can one become so bounded by choices that somebody else makes? / How come we’ve both become a version of a person we don’t even like?” she questions in the first verse. “We’re in love with the world, but the world just wants to bring us down / By putting ideas in our heads that corrupt our hearts somehow.”
The music video reaches its end by zooming out and revealing the studio in which the touching video was filmed, including the man-made stream and forest scene. Adele dumps her wine into the water and seems unamused by it now that she sang her thoughts away. As more of the soundstage is revealed, a voiceover of Adele vulnerably talking about “the most turbulent period” of her life and not wanting to burden others by talking about it plays. However, she does admit that she found “memories in the big storm” of it all. The final scene shows Adele floating in the stream surrounded by pink flowers and gazing into the night sky, seemingly unimpressed.
The “I Drink Wine” music video is Adele’s first release since January’s music video for “Oh My God.” The British superstar announced on Tuesday that she would be dropping the video on Oct. 26 and revealed it was the first video she filmed for the 30 album. “I’m excited for you to see it and I can’t wait to see some of you tonight!” she exclaimed on Instagram. “I Drink Wine” peaked at No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 in Dec. 2021, which followed the No. 1 single “Easy On Me” and No. 5 “Oh My God”, both of which peaked in October of that year.
Adele has lived an exciting year since then. In September, she won a Creative Arts Emmy Award for her pre-taped TV concert special Adele: One Night Only. “Bloody hell I’m pleased as punch! Thank you @mrbenwinston for dropping this round to me this afternoon!! Trust me to officially have an EGO,” Adele captioned selfies she took after receiving her Emmy in the mail. As she noted, Adele is one trophy away from becoming an EGOT winner, as she has an Emmy, Grammy (a whopping 15!), and Oscar to her name. She just needs a Tony to achieve the exclusive EGOT-winner status, which includes artists such as John Legend, Jennifer Hudson, Whoopi Goldberg, and 14 others.
Additionally, Adele is in the final stages of preparing for her upcoming Weekends with Adele Las Vegas residency which is set to kick off in November and run through March 2023. It was originally postponed in January after COVID-19 struggles dragged the production schedule behind.