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There’s a bit of a silent conspiracy in wine writing. We
talk about the varieties of flavour that wine can possess. We talk of
grape varieties, yields and oak usage. We talk about terroir, how wine
can convey a sense of place. We talk about concentration, sweetness
and tannic structure. But we fail, by and large, to discuss why most
people drink wine in the first place. It’s alcoholic and it gets you
drunk. I remember when I was a student. I used to browse the
bewildering array of wines on sale at my local supermarket (it was a
Gateway, in Egham, and by today’s standards – this was the late
1980s – it really wasn’t that bewildering an array). How did I
make my purchasing choice? It was by means of degrees of alcohol,
coupled with price. I wanted a cheap wine, but the more alcohol the
better. Remember, 15 years ago most wines were 11–12% alcohol. Now
the norm seems to be 13.5%, but this was rare then. I guess at one
level degrees of alcohol may have acted then as a proxy measure of
ripeness, so it might not have been as absurd a criterion as it
sounds. Don’t get the idea that I’m condoning drunkenness.
Drunkenness, in its extreme pavement-splattering and fight-starting
manifestations, is an ugly thing. Rather, I’m arguing that the
pharmacological, mind-altering effects of our favourite tipple are
something that we should at least acknowledge as an important part of
our wine hobby. We drink the stuff because it makes us feel good and
it enhances and facilitates social interaction, just as much as we
drink it for an intellectual appreciation of the merits of this most
complex of beverages. I’ve attended some serious wine dinners in the past where
I’ve left in a state of extreme inebriation. It would have been rude
not to with the array of wines on offer. You don’t get much pleasure
from spitting out rare fine wines in a social setting. In fact, I
prefer not to reach this state, but I’d be lying if I pretended that
I didn’t like the buzz you get from drinking five or six glasses of
decent wine. In the right context, the effect of the alcohol
complements the social interaction and the intellectual pleasure of
assessing the quality of a number of fine wines with like-minded
enthusiasts. I don’t drink wine to get drunk. Anymore. Conversely, I
don’t drink wine if I don’t want at least some of the
pharmacological effects of alcohol, a drug that wine delivers in such
a pleasing way. It’s a tragedy that some end up abusing this drug in
destructive and life-threatening ways, but the answer to this abuse is
not dis-use, but correct use. As a wine writer I don’t feel I can go
along with this unofficial code of denial about wine’s
pharmacological properties. Instead, I must inform my readers. Wine.
It gets you drunk. There, I’ve said it… |