Wine and Culture

 

"Wine symbolises those radical changes, those soarings and plummetings from one existential plane to another, that make life so dangerous, so meaningful and so sad." Roger Scruton

 

If the progression of civilization constitutes the enlargement of the faculties and of humankind's creative instincts, then wine is an essential part of it. Poetry primarily affects the intellect and emotions, art, the eyes and wine permeates the senses of taste and smell. And yet as the other forms are not limited to their primary sources of experience, so isn't wine, as its effect diffuses itself to the rest of the faculties, making subtle our sense of discrimination, heightening our sense of reality, strengthening the way we perceive the world around us, and gently leading us to open ourselves. Thus there is a kind of truth and honesty in wine, and whereas other mind-altering drugs lead people to another vague world, wine actually enriches our experience of this very world itself.

 

But why wine? Why not whisky? Or gin or vodka? Whisky does come in a variety of styles and we love single malts from Scotland, small-batch bourbons from Kentucky, and great whisky from anywhere. But it does not have the infinite variety of wine. Wine changes from vintage to vintage, from vineyard to vineyard, from hillside to plain, from one winemaker to his neighbour across the road. Whisky is varied but it cannot match wine for variety.   And as for gin, it is a delicious commodity, but still a commodity. Vodka and tequila, though their producers dress them up in fancy clothes, don't engage the imagination for very long.

 

We know for certain that people were cultivating grapevines by 5000 BC- way back in the late Stone Age. The first cultivated grape pips(seeds) were excavated by archeologists in georgia(on the Black Sea) The area around the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains is the source of so much of our civilization that it is not surprising that wine, too, first appeared here. The ancient Egyptians were enthusiastic wine makers who know how to distinguish good wine and bad and this is our record of the first vintages. Their tomb paintings   provide the most detailed pictures of viticulture and winemaking anywhere in the ancient world.

 

In ancient Greece, we find scenes of wine drinking decorating pottery and featuring everywhere in Greek literature. To them, a people that cultivated vines and olives were civilized; barbarous nations did neither. It was a vital part in the most Greek of occupations, the symposium, in which drinking and conversation, perhaps accompanied by music and dancing, went on long into the evening. Romans expanded on this foundation and in their mission to civilize the world, they introduced wine to barbarous regions along with it.

 

Subsequently, wine became the sacrament in the Christian Mass, symbolizing the blood of Christ, connecting man to God. Wine then, working within the body, inspired the soul to reach its maker, its creator, synthesizing two creative forces into one- God and man.

 

Interestingly, in Australia, wine was favoured over locally produced spirits because it was less apt to produce drunkenness and disorder. Thomas Jefferson once wrote: "No nation is drunk where wine is cheap".  Wine thus symbolizes order rather than chaos, order being a prerogative of civilization. And yet it provides the best state for self-expression, fostering mutual respect and dignity in a way that one person does not infringe upon the liberty of the other.