Wine down! Kelly Ripa revealed that she’s sober on Live with Kelly and Ryan and joked that her lifestyle change might’ve had something to do with wine sales in the U.S. decreasing last year.
“They’re saying that Americans bought less wine last year,” Ripa, 49, said on the Monday, January 20 episode. “It’s the first drop in a quarter of a century. Now, I believe this is because I quit drinking that I caused this dip.”
“I have influenced the market,” the mother of three said. “I’m not saying I’ve driven people [from drinking alcohol]. I’m saying, I stopped buying wine and there’s [been] a dip.”
Ripa didn’t reveal why she stopped drinking during the episode or how long she’s been sober, but her cohost, Ryan Seacrest, may have been behind the change.
“I started the show and she quit drinking,” Seacrest, 45, said playfully on the morning program. “What does that tell you?”
The New Jersey native replied, “Exactly. It’s amazing!”
Seacrest joined the show in May 2017 after Ripa ran the talk show solo with rotating cohosts for one year. She took over following her former cohost Michael Strahan’s departure in May 2016.
Throughout their two years together onscreen, Ripa and Seacrest have poked fun at one another many times. Most recently, in January 2019, the American Idol host took a spill off his chair and crashed to the floor as Ripa was talking.
He was attempting to catch a gold balloon and instead fell right beside the All My Children alum. Ripa then leaped out of her seat to check on him, and both the audience and the internet had a good laugh at the radio host’s expense.
“First fumble of the new season,” Seacrest wrote alongside the clip of the incident via Instagram at the time. “Hope I make the playoffs.”
Quitting alcohol, however, wasn’t the only lifestyle change Ripa faced in 2019. The morning show host and husband Mark Consuelos’ middle child and only daughter, Lola, 18, graduated high school and started college in the fall.
Although they aren’t empty nesters yet (their 16-year-old son Joaquin still lives at home), the couple miss having all three of their children around. Michael, 22, graduated from NYU and lives in Brooklyn.
“As the kids are getting older … we know that these holidays are going to be almost coming up on the last we can all kind of dictate where they spend their holidays and [will] have to share that with their new families,” the Riverdale star told Us Weekly exclusively in December 2019.
The couple told Us that having a full house at Christmas is still “really special” even if their kids are grown.
“In the blink of an eye, your kids grow up and suddenly you are begging them to spend time with you,” the Hope & Faith alum joked.
The TV personality revealed that although her two oldest decided to stay close when it came to college, she told Lola to treat NYU like it wasn’t in the same city as where their parents lived.
“College is where you start establishing yourself as an independent person,” Ripa said during an interview with On Air With Ryan Seacrest in September 2019. “So when your kid goes off to college and your kid stays local … if she feels homesick, I have to say to her, ‘You can’t come home. You have to work it out.’”
She added: “I treat it [like long-distance]. I did the same thing for my son. ‘You’re going to have to figure it out.’”
