Ah, yes. Always among the avant-garde, many grad students say Harvard's usual beginning-of-the-year cocktail parties are now abandoning the traditional for the trendy.

Once known for their wealth of fine sherry and smart suits, recent grad student-professor schmooze sessions seem to have taken a turn toward light wine and casual dress.

"We determined quite a number of years ago that it would be better to serve beer and wine and that it would be much more casual," says Stephan J. Baker, a Government Department administrator.

Still, Baker acknowledges, they don't serve just wine. They add that little bit extra, making a drink which future generations may someday regard as equally quaint as yesterday's sherry.

"French white dry wine and creme de cassis, it's started to be a trend thing because white wine is so cheap," Baker says.

But while the Gov Department's parties are much more casual, they are still far from wild.

"Graduate students are boring," says one of the more interesting ones, third-year Jay Greene. "People are older and so they don't belch loudly and beat their chests."

Despite the lack of sherry, Greene says there's still some element of formality to the gatherings. "People do dress up, more so than at other universities."

In the History Department, across campus at Robinson Hall, some students and scholars say sherry still predominates. But, they add, sherry isn't what it used to be.

"Sherry used to be sort of daring," says Trumball Professor of American History Donald H. Fleming. But he says the aspiring academicians of the 1990s, health conscious as they are, have moved onto a lighter fare.

"People under 40 are more likely to drink white wine," Fleming says. "The professional class have all given up smoking and drinking."

But despite Fleming's assurances, when History grad student Elka B. Klein went to the department's beginning-of-the-year cocktail party last September, she was really nervous.

For Klein, it wasn't so much the sherry, but the implicit dress code.

"I was the only woman in pants... well, there were other women in really nice pants, but I was in pants and a t-shirt," she says.

"I'd met my advisor, but just walking into a room with complete strangers and starting all over again was kind of scary," she says. Her attire "didn't help."