#34 Wine

What a sad place the world would be without wine. As Victor Hugo so memorably put it: ‘God made only water, but man made wine.’ We can certainly manage without it. It’s completely unnecessary. It has no nutritional value. Even the cheapest bottle costs a fair amount and the most expensive costs a fortune. And drunk in any more than moderate amounts it causes people to misbehave at the time and suffer pain and remorse later.

Worse still, wine in any quantity can cause accidents when people drive after drinking, and can lead to violence as people who’ve drunk too much become belligerent. And continued heavy wine-drinking over long periods can create alcoholic dependency and all its associated ills from social problems to liver damage.

Wine is, in fact, one of the most useless inventions ever, and it seems likely that it is to blame for more days off work than even the common cold. But of course all this is to miss the point. Saying that wine is useless is like saying pleasure has no use. True, maybe, but who’d want to forgo it altogether?

And, of course, it isn’t all about pleasure. TV comedians Mitchell and Webb have a wonderful sketch in which they liken drinking a little wine to a Masonic rite. Their big secret is that drinking just under two glasses of wine solves all problems and gives you the confidence to do anything. The punchline of the sketch is that the hero, having come to rule the world in a spirit of wonderful bonhomie, feels so on top of it all that he finishes his second glass. Of course, he’s drunk just too much and the world descends into chaos.

This is the point about wine. In the right quantities, it is a balm that smoothes away anxiety. It takes away the sense of unease we have in so many social encounters. And it turns a simple meal into an occasion. There is probably a psycho-chemical reason for this. Scientists believe that alcohol works through affecting neurotransmitters such as serotonin and GABA – by its disinhibitory effect – but there is certainly more to it than this. Wine, of course, is not just alcohol but when at its best a richly flavoured, deliciously aromatic, vividly coloured creation – the end result of a long labour and maybe years’ preparation to bring the drinker maximum pleasure.

Wine inspires the kind of interest that no other drink does. Many vintners devote their lives to growing and creating the best possible vintages. Just as many drinkers are equally dedicated connoisseurs, relishing every nuance of taste and history. Many more simply enjoy knowing a little and tasting a lot. ‘Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things in the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection,’ wrote Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon, ‘and it offers a greater range of enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory things.’

Wine has been drunk (and probably people have been too) for over 8,000 years. Indeed, people started drinking wine not long after the invention of the pots that would have been needed to hold it. The oldest signs of wine-drinking have been found at Shulaveri in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, where infrared spectroscopy has been used to identify wine residue in the form of tartaric acid on jars dating back to 6000 BC. Wine jars almost as old have been found at Hajji Firuz in the Zagros Mountains in Iran.

There’s no way of telling what fruit this early wine was made from. Wine can, of course, be made from just about anything that is rich enough in sugar to ferment. Wild grapes (Vitis vinifera subsp. silvestris) certainly grow in the area but they seem too small and bitter to be used for wine. It’s not clear when grapes were domesticated – the earliest seeds found date from about 3000 BC – but they have two huge advantages over wild grapes. First, the fruits are much bigger and sweeter. Second, the vines are self-pollinating. The Chinese started with a slightly different wild grape, the mountain grape (Vitis thunbergii), until they too imported the domesticated grape, which has gradually been carried around the world and is now, of course, grown wherever the climate is suitable, including Australia, New Zealand, Chile, South Africa and California, far from its native home in the Caucasus.

In the Ancient World, the great masters of wine-making were the Greeks, and the amphorae (jars) that contained Greek wine have been found all over the Mediterranean and beyond. The seventh-century Greek poet Alkman sang the praise of Denthis wine from the slopes of Mount Taygetus with its flowery aroma, while Aristotle talks of Lemnian wine, from Lemnos, which is still produced today. Yet the Greek wine industry declined with its civilisation, and the realm of the master vintners shifted west to Italy, Spain and in particular France, where the chateau system reached a Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century when Bordeaux wine achieved a pinnacle of taste. The last 50 years, of course, have seen the emergence of New World wines, with Australian and Chilean wines sometimes taking the connoisseurs’ crown away from the traditional French vintages.

The French remain great drinkers of wine. It is often claimed that in spite of their very fatty diets, French people suffer less from heart disease because they down a lot of red wine in particular. What they neglect to point out is that other countries where they drink a lot of red wine, such as Bulgaria and Hungary, have quite high rates of heart disease.

Nevertheless, in recent years, some neuroscientists have been singing the praises of red wine, or rather a key ingredient of red wine called resveratrol. Italian scientist Alessandro Cellini found that fish given high doses of resveratrol lived 60 per cent longer, and when other fish died of old age at twelve weeks, these Methuselah fish still had the mental agility of young fish. Resveratrol seemed to protect the fish’s brain cells against age-related decline. Similar studies show that resveratrol is an antioxidant, protecting cells by mopping up free radicals, while others show that it actually encourages nerve cells to re-grow. One group of researchers even suggested that a glass or two of wine a day can increase neural connections sevenfold. It may even protect against Alzheimer’s.

However, before you hit the bottle, it’s worth remembering that alcohol is a major brain toxin. Even quite small amounts of alcohol can slow your thinking, ruin your sense of balance, wreck your judgement and completely obliterate your short-term memory. Long-term heavy drinking shrinks the brain and leads to memory loss and mental disorders. And the fish that benefitted from those high doses of resveratrol were on the equivalent of 72 bottles of wine day! A glass of red wine a day for women and two for men won’t do any harm, but it’s far from proven that it really will do you good.

Of course, some people have always attacked wine for the moral damage it does, not the physical. Some Muslims are firmly against drinking any kind of alcohol, and through the ages many Christians have preached abstinence. On the other hand, there are those like Cardinal Richelieu who retorted: ‘If God forbade drinking, would He have made wine so good?’ But perhaps we should all heed this warning from the Roman playwright and clown Plautus: ‘The great evil of wine is that it first seizes the feet; it is a crafty wrestler.’