It is appropriate to begin from the feature of wine that has been most abused: its ability to intoxicate. What exactly is intoxication? Is there a single phenomenon that is denoted by this word? Is the intoxication induced by wine an instance of the same general condition as the intoxication induced by whisky, say, or that induced by cannabis? And is ‘induced’ the right word in any or all of the familiar cases? Why all this fuss about wine? Is there something about wine that removes it altogether from the class of drugs, as Chesterton once suggested, when he wrote that ‘the dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They regard wine as a drug and not a drink’? It would be strange if Chesterton, who was right about most things, were wrong about wine.
There is a deft philosophical move which can put some order into those questions, which is to ask whether intoxication is a natural kind – in other words, a condition whose nature is to be determined by science, rather than philosophy. The question ‘what is water?’ is not a philosophical question, since philosophy cannot, by reflecting on the sense of the term ‘water’, tell us anything about the stuff to which that term refers, except that it is this kind of stuff, pointing to some example. Now we can point to a case of intoxication – a drunken man say – and explain intoxication as this kind of state, thereupon leaving the rest to science. Science would explore the temporary abnormalities of the case, and their normal or typical causes. And no doubt the science could be linked to a general theory, which would connect the behavioural and mental abnormalities of the drunk with those of the spaced-out cannabis user, and those of the high-flying junkie. That theory would be a general theory of intoxication as a natural kind. And it would leave the philosopher with nothing to say about its subject-matter.
However, we can quickly see that the question that concerns us cannot be so easily ducked. The drunk is intoxicated, in that his nervous system has been systematically disrupted by an intoxicant (in other words, by an agent with just this effect). This intoxication causes predictable effects on his visual, intellectual and sensory-motor pathways. When my heart and soul lit up with the first sip of Château Trotanoy 1945, however, the experience itself was intoxicating, and it is as though I tasted the intoxication as a quality of the wine. We may compare this quality with the intoxicating quality of a landscape or a line of poetry. It is fairly obvious from the comparison and from the grammar of the description that we are not referring to anything like drunkenness. There are natural kinds to which the experience of drinking wine and that of hearing a line of poetry both belong: for one thing they are both experiences. But the impulse to classify the experiences together is not to be understood as the first step in a scientific theory. It is the record of a perceived similarity – one that lies on the surface, and which may correspond to no underlying neuro-physiological resemblance. When we ask what we understand this intoxication to be, therefore, we are asking a philosophical rather than a scientific question. For that, to my way of thinking, is the central task of philosophy: to give a comprehensive theory of how things seem to us rational beings. (And to do so, I would add, while avoiding the inspissated jargon and futile theory-mongering of Husserlian phenomenology.)
Furthermore, there is a real question about the relation between the intoxication that we experience through wine, and the state of drunkenness. The first is a state of consciousness, whereas the second is a state of unconsciousness – or which tends towards unconsciousness. Although the one leads in time to the other, the connection between them is no more transparent than the connection between the first kiss and the final divorce. Just as the erotic kiss is neither a tame version nor a premonition of the bitter parting to which it finally leads, so is the intoxicating taste of the wine neither a tame version nor a premonition of drunkenness: they are simply not the ‘same kind of thing’, even if at some level of scientific theory they are discovered to have the same kind of cause.
It is also questionable to speak of the intoxication that we experience through wine as ‘induced by’ the wine. For this implies a separation between the object tasted and the intoxication felt, of the kind that exists between drowsiness and the sleeping pill that causes it. When we speak of an intoxicating line of poetry, we are not referring to an effect in the person who reads or remembers it, comparable to the effect of an energy pill. We are referring to a quality in the line itself. The intoxication of Mallarmé’s abolit bibelot d’inanité sonore lies there on the page, not here in my nervous system. Are the two cases of intoxicatingness – wine and poetry – sufficiently alike to enable us to use the one to cast light on the other? Yes and no.
Non-rational animals sniff for information, and are therefore interested in smells. They also discriminate between the edible and the inedible on grounds of taste. But they relish neither the smell nor the taste of the things that they consume. For relishing is a reflective state of mind, in which an experience is held up for critical inspection. Only rational beings can relish tastes and smells, since only they can take an interest in the experience itself, rather than in the information conveyed by it. The temptation is therefore to assimilate relishing to the interest we have in colour and pattern, in the sound of music and in works of literary and visual art. Like aesthetic interest relishing is tied to sensory experience, and like aesthetic experience it involves holding our normal practical and information-gathering interests in abeyance. Why not say, therefore, that wine appeals to us in something like the way that poetry, painting or music appeal to us, by presenting an object of experience that is meaningful in itself? Why not say that the intoxicating quality is in the wine, in just the way that the intoxicating quality lies in the line of poetry? Our question about wine will then reduce to a special case of the general question, concerning the nature of aesthetic qualities.15
Philosophers have tended to regard gustatory pleasures as purely sensory, without the intellectual intimations that are the hallmark of aesthetic interest. Sensory pleasure is available whatever the state of your education; aesthetic pleasure depends upon knowledge, comparison and culture. The senses of taste and smell, it is argued, are lower down the intellectual ladder, providing pleasures that are more sensory than those provided by sight and hearing. Unlike the senses of sight and hearing, they do not represent a world independent of themselves, and therefore provide nothing, other than themselves, to contemplate. This point was argued by Plato, and emphasized by Plotinus. It was important for Aquinas, who distinguished the more cognitive senses of sight and hearing from the less cognitive senses of taste and smell, arguing that only the first could provide the perception of beauty.16 Hegel too, in the Introduction to his Lectures on Aesthetics, emphasizes the distinction between the pleasures of the palate and aesthetic experience, which is ‘the sensuous embodiment of the Idea’.
Frank Sibley has argued that this philosophical tradition is founded on nothing more than prejudice, and that the relishing of tastes and smells is as much an aesthetic experience as the relishing of sights and sounds.17 All those features commonly thought to characterize aesthetic experience attach also to our experience of tastes and smells. A smell or taste can be enjoyed ‘for its own sake’; it can possess aesthetic qualities, such as finesse, beauty, harmony, delicacy; it can bear an emotional significance or tell a story, like the taste of the madeleine in Proust; it can be moving, exciting, depressing, intoxicating and so on. And there is good and bad taste in smells and tastes just as there is good and bad taste in music, art and poetry. All attempts to drive a wedge between merely sensory and truly aesthetic pleasures end up, Sibley thinks, by begging the question. We should not be surprised, therefore, if there are art forms based on smell and taste, just as there are art forms based on sight and sound: the Japanese incense game, for example, or the somewhat extravagant but by no means impossible keyboard of olfactory harmonies envisaged by Huysmans in À rebours. Perhaps haute cuisine is such an art form; and maybe wine too is an aesthetic artefact, comparable to those products like carpentry that bridge the old and no longer very helpful division between the ‘fine’ and the ‘useful’ arts.
Sibley’s argument is challenging, but not, it seems to me, successful. Consider smells: the object of the sense of smell is not the thing that smells but the smell emitted by it. We speak of smelling a cushion, but the smell is not a quality of the cushion. It is a thing emitted by the cushion, that could exist without the cushion, and indeed does exist in a space where the cushion is not – the space around the cushion. Hence smells linger in the places from which their causes have departed. The visual appearance of the cushion is not a thing emitted by the cushion, nor does it exist elsewhere than the cushion, or linger in a place after the cushion has left it. (After-images are not appearances, but mental images, which are only accidentally connected with the way things look.) Moreover, to identify the visual appearance we must refer to visual properties of the cushion. The object of my visual perception when I see the cushion is the cushion – not some other thing, a ‘sight’ or image, which the cushion ‘emits’. To put it another way: visual experience reaches through the ‘look’ of a thing to the thing that looks. I don’t ‘sniff through’ the smell to the thing that smells, for the thing is not represented in its smell in the way that it is represented in its visual appearance. Crucial features of visual appearances are therefore not replicated in the world of smells. For example, we can see an ambiguous figure now as a duck now as a rabbit; we can see one thing in another, as when we see a face in a picture. There seems to be no clear parallel case of ‘smelling as’ or ‘smelling in’, as opposed to the construction of rival hypotheses as to the cause of a smell. Hence there is a great difficulty – a near impossibility – of making, for smells, the kind of distinction that I made in the last chapter in relation to the picture of Guardi: the distinction between meaning and association, between what we experience in the object and what the object merely calls to mind.
One conclusion to draw from that is that smells are ontologically like sounds – not qualities of the objects that emit them but independent objects. I call them ‘secondary objects’, on the analogy with secondary qualities, in order to draw attention to their ontological dependence on the way the world is experienced.18 Smells exist for us, just as sounds do, and must be identified through the experiences of those who observe them. However, smells cannot be organized as sounds are organized: put them together and they mingle, losing their character. Nor can they be arranged along a dimension, as sounds are arranged by pitch, so as to exemplify the order of between-ness.19 They remain free-floating and unrelated, unable to generate expectation, tension, harmony, suspension or release. You could concede that smells might nevertheless be objects of aesthetic interest, but only by putting them on the margin of the aesthetic – the margin occupied by the sound of fountains, where beauty is a matter of association rather than expression, and of context rather than content. But it would be more illuminating to insist on the radical distinction that exists, between these objects of sensory enjoyment which acquire meaning only by the association of ideas, and the objects of sight and hearing, whose meaning can be directly seen and heard.
If asked to choose, therefore, I would say, for philosophical reasons, that the intoxication that we experience in wine is a sensory but not an aesthetic experience, whereas the intoxication of poetry is aesthetic through and through. To say as much is to imply that the aesthetic is not reducible to the sensory, and that aesthetic enjoyments have a cognitive and exploratory character that distinguishes them from purely physical pleasures. But it does not matter very much whether you agree or disagree with the distinction, or whether you are or are not disposed to describe the enjoyment of wine as ‘aesthetic’. What matters is the cognitive status of wine – its status as an object of thought and a vehicle of reflection.
My excitement at a football match is not a physiological condition that could have been produced by a drug. It is directed towards the game: it is excitement at the spectacle and not just excitement caused by the spectacle; it is an effect directed at its cause, which is also a way in which that cause is understood. Something like this is true of the wine. The intoxication that I feel is not just an effect caused by the wine: it feeds back into my experience of the wine, so as to become part of its taste. It is a way of relishing the wine. The intoxicating quality and the relishing are internally related, in that the second cannot be properly described without reference to the first. The wine lives in my intoxication, as the game lives in the excitement of the fan: I have not swallowed the wine as I would a tasteless drug; I have taken it into myself, so that its flavour and my mood are inextricably bound together.
To put the point in another way: there are two kinds of intoxication, that which is experienced as a quality of its cause – like the intoxicating character of wine – and that which occurs merely as a result of its cause, without changing the way the cause is experienced. The first clue to understanding wine is, then, this: that the intoxication induced by wine is also directed at the wine, in something like the way the excitement produced by a football game is directed at the game. The cases are not entirely alike, however. It is without strain that we say that we were excited at the game, as well as by it; only with a certain strain can we say that we were intoxicated at the wine, rather than by it. And this connects with the second question mentioned at the start of this chapter: the question of knowledge. Is there something that we learn from, and in, the taste of wine, as we learn things from, and in, our visual images?
In describing my visual experience I am describing a visual world, in terms of concepts that are in some sense applied in the experience and not deduced from it. Another way of putting this is to say that visual experience is a representation of reality. As already noted, taste and smell are not like that. I might say of the ice-cream in my hand that it tastes of chocolate or that it tastes like chocolate, but not that I taste it as chocolate, as though taste were in itself a form of judgement. The distinction here is reflected in the difference between the cogent accounts of paintings given by critics, and the far-fetched and whimsical descriptions of wines from the pens of wine writers. Winespeak is in some way ungrounded, for it is not describing the way the wine is, but merely the way it tastes. And tastes are not representations of the objects that possess them.20
In Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh describes Charles and Sebastian, alone together at Brideshead, sampling the Earl’s collection:
‘… It is a little, shy wine, like a gazelle.’
‘Like a leprechaun.’
‘Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.’
‘Like a flute by still water.’
‘… And this a wise old man.’
‘A prophet in a cave.’
‘… And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.’
‘Like the last unicorn.’
The dialogue expresses the callow love between two adolescents, as they explore each other’s imaginative powers. But does it describe the wines that they are drinking? Not in the way that I describe a painting, by detailing what I perceive in it. A prophet in a cave is not something that you can taste in a wine as you can see St Jerome in Titian’s painting. Nor does this description of a wine bear much resemblance to the descriptions that we give of music, when describing its expressive power – like the ‘anguished’ (beklemmt) that Beethoven wrote on the score of the Cavatina of the B flat late quartet. Wine is not a representational medium; but it is not an expressive medium either: we cannot read emotions into the savours that rise from the glass as we read them into music, for these savours, though intentionally produced, are not marked by intention as the notes in music are. Somehow the descriptions that we offer, however appropriate they might seem, never migrate from their origin in the mental life of the speaker, to their goal, in the wine that brings them to mind.
This does not mean that we cannot describe the taste of a wine, or break it down into its sensory components. If I say of a wine that it has a flowery nose, lingers on the palate, with ripe berry flavours and a hint of chocolate and roasted almonds, then what I say conveys real information, from which someone might be able to construct a sensory image of the wine’s taste.21 But I have described the taste in terms of other tastes, and not attempted to attach a meaning, a content, or any kind of reference to it. The description I gave does not imply that the wine evokes, means, symbolizes or presents the idea of chocolate; and somebody who didn’t hit on this word as a description of the wine’s flavour would not show that he had missed the meaning of what he drank or indeed missed anything important at all.
Our experience of wine is bound up with its nature as a drink – a liquid which slides smoothly into the body, lighting the flesh as it journeys down. As I suggested in the last chapter, this endows wine with a peculiar inwardness, an intimacy with the body of a kind that is seldom achieved by solid food, since food must be chewed and therefore denatured before it enters the gullet. Nor is it achieved by any smell, since smell makes no contact with the body at all, but merely enchants without touching, like the beautiful girl at the other end of the party.
The symbolic use of wine in religious cults is reflected in art and literature, in which magic drinks are conceived as mind-changing and even identity-changing potions. We find this symbolism easy to understand, since it draws on the way in which intoxicating drinks, and wine pre-eminently, are ‘taken into oneself’, in a way that tempts one almost to a literal interpretation of that phrase. It is as though the wine enters the very self of the person who drinks it. Of course there is a great difference in this connection between good wine and bad, and the self learns in time to welcome the one as it fights against the other. But it is precisely because the self is so actively engaged that this battle has to be fought and won, just as the battles between good and evil and virtue and vice must be fought and won. There is more at stake when it comes to taste in wine than mere taste, and the adage that de gustibus non est disputandum is as false here as it is in aesthetics. We are not disputing about a physical sensation, but about choices in which we are fully engaged as rational agents.
The symbolism of the drink, and its soul-transforming effect, reflects the underlying truth that it is only rational beings who can appreciate things like wine. Even if taste is a less cognitive sense, therefore, it has an aspect which is closed to non-rational creatures, and that aspect includes the one we are considering, which is the aspect of intoxication. Animals can be drunk; they can be high on drugs and fuggy with cannabis; but they cannot experience the kind of directed intoxication that we experience through wine, since this is a condition in which only rational beings can find themselves, depending as it does upon thoughts and acts of attention that lie outside the repertoire of a horse or a dog. Relishing is something that only a rational being can exhibit, and which therefore only a rational being can do. Hence when, in my duties as a wine critic, I try out a bottle on Sam the Horse, stirring a glass-full into his oats and studying his reaction, I can make no distinction between his relishing the wine and his merely enjoying it. The taste is a source of pleasure to him, but not an object of pleasure. He does not focus his thinking on the taste of the wine – indeed he has no such concept, and no ideas that could be captured by a phrase like ‘me tasting this’. Still less does he experience the intoxicating quality of the wine as a quality of it. It is, for him, no part of the flavour, even if it is part of what he feels in absorbing it.
In saying that, however, I imply that not all forms of intoxication, even for rational beings, are species of a single genus. It is therefore necessary to make some distinctions among the substances that we take in search of stimulation, intoxication or relief from the lacrymae rerum. In particular we should distinguish between four basic kinds of stimulant: those that please us, but do not alter the mind in any fundamental way, even if they have mental effects; those that alter the mind, but which impart no pleasure in their consumption; those that both alter the mind and also please us as we consume them; and finally those that alter the mind and do so, at least in part, by and in the act of pleasing us. There are intermediate cases, but those broad categories offer a map, I think, of this hitherto uncharted territory. So I shall deal with each in turn.
1 Those that please, and which have mental effects, but which do not alter the mind. Tobacco is probably the most familiar example of this. It has mental effects, leading to a reduction in nervous tension and a heightening in concentration and control, but it does not fundamentally alter the mind, so as to cause the world to appear different, so as to interfere with perceptual and motor pathways, or so as to hamper or redirect the emotional and intellectual life. The pleasure involved is intimately connected with the mental effect, and although the case is not exactly like that of wine, there is a definite sense in which the taste of a good cigar, say, is relaxing, in the way that the taste of a good wine is intoxicating – i.e. the mental effect forms part of the gustatory quality. This is an odd phenomenon, which has its parallel in aesthetics. It arises when there is a distinct experience of savouring whatever it is you consume: something that, as I said above, no non-rational animal can do, and which we can do only when the mental effect of a substance can be read back, so to speak, into the way it tastes. Some sense of what this involves can be gained from considering the second kind of stimulant, which is not savoured at all:
2 Stimulants that have mind-altering effects, but which do not bring any pleasure in the consumption of them. The most obvious examples of this are drugs that you swallow whole like Ecstasy, or drugs that you inject like heroin. Here there is no pleasure in the taking of the drug, but radical mental effects as a result of it – effects which are wanted for their own sake and regardless of how they were caused. There is no question of savouring a dose of heroin, and the mind which is disengaged in the ingestion of the stuff remains in a certain sense disengaged thereafter. The mental effects of the drug are not directed towards the drug or towards the experience of using it: they are directed towards objects of everyday perception and concern, towards ideas, people, images and so on. You take no pleasure in the drug itself, even if there are other pleasures that result from using it. It should be obvious that this is quite unlike either the first case, or the third case that I now consider:
3 Stimulants that have mind-altering effects but which give pleasure in the act of consuming them. The two most interesting cases are cannabis and alcohol. I refer to alcohol in general and not just to wine. The psychic transformation that occurs through the consumption of pot is, the experts tell us, quite far-reaching, and outlasts the moment of pleasure by hours or days. Nevertheless, the moment of pleasure definitely exists, and is not dissimilar to that provided by tobacco: though it involves a loss rather than a gain in mental concentration. Likewise alcohol also has a mind-altering effect, heightening emotions, muddling thoughts, and interfering with nervous pathways; and this mind-altering effect outlasts the moment of pleasure, and is in part unconnected with it. It is precisely because the mental transformation outlasts the pleasure, indeed, that we are driven to contrast the case of the alcoholic, who has become addicted to the effect of drink and more or less indifferent to its taste, from that of the wine-lover, for whom the mental transformation is the taste, so to speak, and outlasts it only in the way that the pleasure of seeing an old friend survives after his visit is over. Hence the need to distinguish a fourth kind of case, the one that really interests me:
4 Stimulants that have mind-altering effects which are in some way internally related to the experience of consuming them. The example, of course, is wine, and that is what I meant earlier in referring to the intoxicating quality of the taste. It is in the act of drinking that the mind is altered, and the alteration is in some way bound up with the taste: the taste is imbued with the altered consciousness, just as the altered consciousness is directed at the taste. This again is near to the aesthetic experience. We all know that you cannot listen to a Beethoven quartet with understanding unless your whole psyche is taken up and transformed by it: but the transformation of consciousness is read back into the sound that produces it, which is the sound of that transformation, so to speak. Hence the well-known problem of musical content: we want to say that such music has a meaning, but we also want to deny that the meaning is detachable from the way the music sounds.
While I have compared cannabis and alcohol, it is very important to be aware of the differences between them. Obviously there are significant medical and physiological differences. Alcohol is rapidly expelled from the system and is addictive only in large doses – at least to those like us whose genetic make-up has been influenced by the millennia of winemaking. The Inuit of the Arctic Circle, and others whose ancestors never cultivated the grape, are unable to process alcohol harmlessly and become quickly addicted to it; but for the purpose of what follows I refer only to you and me. And of you and me it can safely be said that cannabis is vividly to be contrasted with wine from the physiological viewpoint. The effects of cannabis remain for days, and it is both more addictive and more radical, leading not just to temporary alterations of the mind but to permanent or semi-permanent transformations of the personality, and in particular a widely observed loss of the moral sense. This loss of the moral sense can be observed too in alcoholics, but it is not to be explained merely by addiction. Addiction to tobacco, whether smoked or chewed, seems to lead to no demoralization of the victim, and while people commit crimes under the influence of drugs and cause accidents under the influence of alcohol they do neither under the influence of smoking.
The temporary nature of the physiological effects of wine is of great importance in describing its emotional aura. The effect of wine is understood, by the observer as much as the consumer, as a temporary possession, a passing alteration, which is not, however, an alteration that changes the character of the one in whom it occurs. Hence you can go away and sleep it off; and the ancient characterizations of Silenus (the tutor and companion of Dionysus) are of a creature alternating drink and sleep, with a crescendo of drunkenness between them. Moreover, and more importantly, alcohol in general, and wine in particular, has a unique social function, increasing the garrulousness, the social confidence and the goodwill of those who drink together, provided they drink in moderation. Many of the ways that we have developed of drinking socially are designed to impose a strict regime of moderation. Buying drinks by round in the pub, for example, has an important role in permitting people to rehearse sentiments of reciprocal generosity and to cohere as a group, without relying on any specific intimacies.
Cannabis also has a social function, and is associated in the Middle East with a hookah-smoking ritual that produces a mutual befuddlement, briefly confused with peace, a commodity rarely to be found in the region. Each intoxicant both reflects and reinforces a particular form of social interaction, and it is important to understand, therefore, that the qualities that interest us in wine reflect the social order of which wine is a part.
Wine is not simply a shot of alcohol, or a mixed drink. It is a transformation of the grape. The transformation of the soul under its influence is merely the continuation of another transformation that began maybe fifty years earlier when the grape was first plucked from the vine. (That is one reason why the Greeks described fermentation as the work of a god. Dionysus enters the grape and transforms it; and this process of transformation is then transferred to us as we drink.) Although we know that human skill is involved in this transformation, it is skill of quite another kind from that of the cocktail mixer, being a skill of husbandry, and in a certain measure the result is a tribute not just to the skill of the grower and the winemaker, but to the whole ethological process that turned us from hunter-gatherers to farmers. (Maybe there is some echo of this in the story of the drunkenness of Noah.)
When we raise a glass of wine to our lips, therefore, we are savouring an ongoing process: the wine is a living thing, the last result of other living things, and the progenitor of life in us. It is almost as though it were another human presence in any social gathering, as much a focus of interest and in the same way as the other people there. This experience is enhanced by the aroma, taste and the simultaneous impact on nose and mouth, which – while not unique to wine – have, as I have argued, an intimate connection to the immediate intoxicating effect, so as to be themselves perceived as intoxicating. The whole being of the drinker rushes to the mouth and the olfactory organs to meet the tempting meniscus, just as the whole being of the lover rises to the lips in a kiss. It would be an exaggeration to make too much of the comparison, ancient though it is, between the erotic kiss and the sipping of wine. Nevertheless, it is not an exaggeration, but merely a metaphor, to describe the contact between the mouth and the glass as a face-to-face encounter between you and the wine. And it is a useful metaphor. Whisky may be in your face, but it is not exactly face-to-face as wine is. The shot of alcohol as it courses through the body is like something that has escaped from the flavour, that is working in an underhand way. The alcoholic content of the wine, by contrast, remains part of the flavour, in something like the way that the character of an honest person is revealed in his face. Spirits are comparable in this respect to cordials and medicinal drinks: the flavour detaches itself readily from the effect, just as the face and gestures of a shallow person detach themselves from his long-term intentions. The companionship of wine resides in the fact that its effect is not underhand or concealed but present and revealed in the very flavour. This feature is then transmitted to those who drink wine together, and who adapt themselves to its way of honest dealing.
The ancient proverb tells us that there is truth in wine. The truth lies not in what the drinker perceives but in what, with loosened tongue and easier manners, he reveals. It is ‘truth for others’, not ‘truth for self’. This accounts for both the social virtues of wine and its epistemological innocence. Wine does not deceive you, as cannabis deceives you, with the idea that you enter another and higher realm. Hence it is quite unlike even the mildest of the mind-altering drugs, all of which convey some vestige, however vulgarized, of the experience associated with mescalin and LSD, and recorded by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. These drugs – cannabis not exempted – are epistemologically culpable. They tell lies about another world, a transcendental reality beside which the world of ordinary phenomena pales into insignificance or at any rate into less significance than it has. Wine, by contrast, paints the world before us as the true one, and reminds us that if we have failed previously to know it then this is because we have failed in truth to belong to it, a defect that it is the singular virtue of wine to overcome.
It is true, as I have suggested, that wine shines a certain light into the inwardness, the atman, of contingent things, and it points towards – without providing – another way in which being might be known. But it does this without eclipsing the light that shines on our world, and without deceiving us into thinking that we have entered another and less illusory alternative. It respects our illusions, and even amplifies the more benign among them. But it does not provide an escape route from reality.
For this reason we should, I believe, elaborate our description of the characteristic effect of wine, which is not simply an effect of intoxication. The characteristic effect of wine, when drunk in company, includes an opening out of the self to the other, a conscious step towards asking and offering forgiveness: forgiveness not for acts or omissions, but for the impertinence of existing. Although the use of wine in the Christian Eucharist has authority in the Last Supper, as recorded in the New Testament, there is another reason for the centrality of wine in the Communion ceremony, which is that it both illustrates and in a small measure enacts the moral posture that distinguishes Christianity from its early rivals, and which is summarized in the prayer to ‘forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us’. That remarkable prayer, which tells Christians that they can obtain forgiveness only if they offer it, is one that we all understand in our cups, and this understanding of the critical role of forgiveness in forming durable human societies intrudes too into the world of Islam, in the poetry of Hafiz, Rumi and Omar Khayyam, winos to a man. In surah xvi verse 7 of the Koran wine is unreservedly praised as one of God’s gifts. As the prophet, burdened by the trials of his Medina exile, became more tetchy, so did his attitude to wine begin to sour, as in surah v verses 90–91. Muslims believe that the later revelations cancel the earlier, whenever there is a conflict between them.22 I suspect, however, that God moves in a more mysterious way.
The Communion wine returns me to a point that I emphasized earlier: that the pronounced mental effects of wine are, so to speak, read back into their cause, so that the wine itself recalls them in its taste. Just as you savour the intoxicating flavour of the wine, so do you savour its reconciling power: it presents you with the taste of forgiveness. That is one way of understanding the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation, itself a survival of the Greek belief that Dionysus is actually in the wine and not just the cause of it. Although most attempts to describe the experience of wine are either literal comparisons of taste with taste, or else whimsical rhapsodies of the kind I discussed earlier in connection with Charles and Sebastian at Brideshead, there are these intense cases in which the boundary between association and meaning becomes blurred: the mental effects of wine become so intense as to invade the taste, so that we have an experience which is not wholly unlike that of seeing emotion in a painting or hearing it in music. Exactly what conclusions we should draw from this I do not know. But it should not lead us to ignore the fundamental difference between tastes and other qualities, and it is worth summarizing what these are.
First, tastes are not qualities in the way that colours are. Every patch of blue is a blue something, if only a patch. But not every strawberry taste is a strawberry-tasting something. The taste can be there without the substance, as when I have a taste in the mouth, but have swallowed nothing. The taste is in the mouth in something like the way the smell is in the air or the sound is in the room. Tastes belong with smells and sounds in the ontological category of secondary objects. Hence the taste of a wine can linger long after the wine has been swallowed.23 Tastes can detach themselves from their causes, as sounds do in music, and lead an emotional life of their own. Since they are associated with, rather than inherent in, their objects, they have a facility to launch trains of association, linking object to object, and place to place, in a continuous narrative such as was elaborated by Proust.
Connected with that feature of tastes is the well-known difficulty we experience in describing them. Colours belong to a spectrum, and vary along recognized phenomenal dimensions, such as brightness and saturation. Our descriptions of colours also order them, so that we know where they stand in relation to one another, and how they pass over into each other. Tastes exhibit order in certain dimensions – for example the sweet–bitter, bland–spicy continua. But most of their peculiarities show no intrinsic ordering and no clear transitions. We describe them, as a rule, in terms of their characteristic causes: nutty, fruity, meaty, cheesy and so on. Hence the process of discriminating and comparing tastes begins with an effort of association, whereby we learn to identify the characteristic cause. We learn to place tastes in a gustatory field, so to speak, whose landmarks are the familiar things that we eat and drink, and the places and processes that produce them.
This last point returns me to the earlier one concerning the epistemological innocence of wine. The ‘this worldly’ nature of the heightened consciousness that comes to us through wine means that, in attempting to describe the knowledge that it imparts, we look for features of our actual world, features that might be, as it were, epitomized, commemorated and celebrated in its flavours. Hence the traditional perception of fine wine as the taste of a terroir – where that means not merely the soil, but the customs and ceremonies that sanctified it and put it, so to speak, in communion with the drinker. The use of theological language here is, I believe, no accident. Although wine tells no lies about a transcendental realm, it sanctifies the immanent reality, acquainting us with its hidden subjectivity, presenting it under the aspect of Brahman. That is why it is so effective a symbol of the incarnation. In savouring it we are knowing – by acquaintance, as it were – the history, geography and customs of a community.
Since ancient times, therefore, wines have been associated with definite places, and been accepted not so much as the taste of those places, as the flavour imparted to them by the enterprise of settlement. Wine of Byblos was one of the principal exports of the Phoenicians, and old Falernian was made legendary by Horace. Those who conjure with the magical names of Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Rhine and Moselle are not just showing off: they are deploying the best and most reliable description of a cherished taste, which is inseparable from the idea and the history of the settlement that produced it. The Ancient Egyptians, incidentally, while they often labelled wines with the place of their production, and would trade with all the best suppliers around the Mediterranean, would classify wines by their social function. Archaeologists have recovered amphorae labelled as ‘wine for first-class celebrations’, ‘wine for tax collection day’, ‘wine for dancing’ and so on.24 It is doubtful, however, that these descriptions can function as a guide to taste. It is easy to imagine a tasting in which the punter holds the glass to his nose, takes a sip and then says ‘Burgundy’; rather more difficult to imagine him saying ‘tax collection’. Why is that?
Here we should again return to the religious meaning of wine. At the risk of drastically oversimplifying, I suggest that there are two quite distinct strands that compose the religious consciousness, and that our understanding of religion has suffered from too great an emphasis on one of them. The first strand, which we overemphasize, is that of belief. The second strand, which is often overlooked by modern thought (though not by those pioneering sociologists of religion like Émile Durkheim and Max Weber), is the strand that might be summarized in the term ‘membership’, by which I mean all the customs, ceremonies and practices whereby the sacred is renewed, so as to be a real presence among us, and a living endorsement of the human community. The pagan religions of Greece and Rome were strong on membership but weak on belief. Hence they centred on the cult, as the primary religious phenomenon. It was through the cult, not the creed, that the adept proved his religious orthodoxy and his oneness with his fellows. Western civilization has tended in recent centuries to emphasize belief – in particular the belief in a transcendental realm and an omnipotent king who presides over it. This theological emphasis, by representing religion as a matter of theological doctrine, exposes it to refutation. And that means that the real religious need of people – a need planted in us, according to some, by evolution and according to others by God (though why not by both?) – seeks other channels for its expression: usually forms of idolatry that do not achieve the refreshing humanity of the cult.
Far from supposing the cult to be a secondary phenomenon, derived from the theological beliefs that justify it, I take the opposite view, and believe that I have modern anthropology, and its true founder, Richard Wagner, on my side.25 Theological beliefs are rationalizations of the cult, and the function of the cult is membership. It is through establishing a cult that people learn to pool their resources. Hence every act of settling and of turning the earth to the common needs of a community, involves the building of a temple and the setting aside of days and hours for festivity and sacrificial offering. When people have, in this way, prepared a home for them, the gods come quietly in to inhabit it, maybe not noticed at first, and only subsequently clothed in the transcendental garments of theology.
Now it seems to me that the act of settling, which is the origin of civilization, involves both a radical transition in our relation to the earth – the transition known in other terms as that from hunter-gatherer to farmer – and also a new sense of belonging. Settled people do not belong only to each other: they belong to a place, and out of that sense of shared roots there grow the farm, the village and the city. Vegetation cults are the oldest and most deeply rooted in the unconscious, since they are the cults that drive out the totemism of the hunter-gatherer, and celebrate the earth itself, as the willing accomplice in our bid to stay put. The new farming economy, and the city that grows from it, generated a sense of the holiness of the planted crop, and in particular of the staple food – which is grass, usually in the form of corn or rice – and the vine that wraps the trees above it. Such, surely, is the prehistory of the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Moreover, the fruit of the vine can be fermented and so stored in a sterilized form. It provides a place and the things that grow there with a memory, so becoming a symbol of a settled community and its will to endure.
At some level, I venture to suggest, the experience of wine is a recuperation of that original cult whereby the land was settled and the city built. And what we taste in the wine is not just the fruit and its ferment, but also the peculiar flavour of a landscape to which the gods have been invited and where they have found a home. Nothing else that we eat or drink comes to us with such a halo of significance, and by refusing to drink it people send an important message – the message that they do not belong on this earth.