Uncork the demon
The demonisation of drink has overreached reason
This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
I slit the envelope with no sense of foreboding. It was my first day as a visiting professor in the United States, and I expected the slip to say, “Welcome to Brown University,” or something equally innocuous.
The effect of reading “Under no circumstances are you to offer an alcoholic beverage to a student who is under the age of 21” was alarming. No one in Oxford had been able to get through a tutorial with me without a sustaining or consolatory glass of sherry. Now I could poison undergraduates with lurid orangeade or chemical cola, yet I could not help them with a healthful glass of wine.
Consistent with what was then Spanish normality, I was raised on wine and taught to regard it as a civilising influence at mealtimes: a little when I was little, a just modicum by the time I was fully grown. In consequence, I would never think of sitting at table without a blushful goblet and would never succumb to drunkenness.
Since then, however, the demonisation of drink has overreached reason. Not even in Spain are children introduced to the beneficence of wine.
Part of the background is ideological: Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists have grown in numbers, wealth and power; though puritanical teetotalism has declined, its self-confidence and self-righteousness are undiminished.
Commercial skulduggery, I suspect, has also played a part: there’s a lot of hard cash in soft drinks. More surprising is the effect of health-and-safety nannyism. A huge output of supposedly scientific research encourages or vindicates busybody interference in harmless and healthy drinking.
As so often, laboratory and library are in conflict, whilst purported expertise inverts ordinary experience. The more historical and archaeological research tells us, the broader the evidence of esteem for wine amongst creatures and cultures that have had little else in common.
Alcohol is like honey — a naturally-occurring stimulant
Chimpanzees in the wild seek rotting fruits for the sake of the ethanol they exude. Alcohol is like honey — a naturally-occurring stimulant. At the close of the 15th century, Piero di Cosimo painted the simultaneous discovery of both by primeval, Pan-like creatures at an early moment of what we now think of as evolution, when humans — horned, hoofed and furry — still closely resembled other beasts.
The combination was transmutative, as honey can enhance the fermentation that turns ripe fruit into alcohol. In the world’s earliest traces of spiritous drink, in a Chinese vessel some 9,000 years old, it was a vital ingredient.
The first hooch was, no doubt, made from foraged ingredients. Presumably, it enhanced the raptures of palaeolithic shamans. Then agriculture facilitated the large-scale transformation of grape and grain into wine and beer.
The oldest known fragments of wine jars and presses are in finds of the 6th millennium BC in Georgia and Armenia. In Egypt, drinkers appreciated wines of various provenances for their peculiar qualities as early as the 4th millennium BC, when new technologies which enabled wine to mature in clay vessels elevated the vintner’s art.
In the mid-2nd millennium BC Tutankhamun’s sepulchre entombed wines with labels indicating vintages, some up to 35 years old, from named wineries: “the House of Atun” for instance, or “of Tutankhamun”. Connoisseurship has been active ever since.
Excess induces ecstasies and unveils visions. The ubiquity of love of wine, however, has more to do with the effects every drinker can observe: it stimulates appetite and (like almost all unnourishing beverages) aids digestion; humans have to eat a lot because, by the standards of other species, we are profligate consumers of energy.
Medical journals, however, are full of denunciations of alcohol as a cause of damage to digestive organs, an aperient for inhibitions and a source of an astonishing range of social and somatic ailments. Paradoxically, they admit the value of acids and enzymes, in which wines are rich, or of the herbs that enhance vermouths and digestifs.
Even more madly, opinion-formers increasingly extol or extenuate noxious weeds and powders that are at least as addictive and delusive as drunkenness.
The paradox is explicable in part because boffins focus on bingeing, whilst most ordinary, moderate experience is of benignity. In cold, sterile, visionless labs nothing is recorded unless measurable, whereas the wellbeing induced by wine at mealtimes is something you can only feel. We shall be better off tippling at the table than tinkering with the test-tube.
