What Wine Reveals About Being Human
Wine is in decline.
Across much of the world, especially among younger generations, people are drinking less wine than they once did. The reasons are several: changing attitudes to alcohol, concerns about health, economic pressures, changing patterns of socialising, and shifting cultural values.
Perhaps this is no great loss. If wine is merely alcohol, then one drink can be replaced by another.
But wine has never been merely alcohol. For thousands of years, wine has occupied a remarkable place in culture and civilisation. It has flowed through religion and ritual, philosophy and poetry, friendship and celebration.
The deeper question, then, is not why people drink wine, or are drinking less of it, but why wine has mattered so much to human beings.
Human beings have always sought ways to turn necessity into meaning. We do not merely eat; we dine. We do not merely speak; we tell stories. We do not merely gather; we celebrate. We do not merely see; we behold. We do not merely survive; we live.
Wine is one of the oldest ways in which we transform ordinary experience into something more elevated. It takes grapes, sunlight, soil, and time, and turns them into something capable of carrying memory, place, history, and human intention.
Wine is nature transformed into culture.
Wine lovers know that wine is so much more than a drink. But how are we to explain this to those who do not already know it?
When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil and exposure, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love, labour, and lives of people who may now be no more. If you know how to read it, the wine, like a book, will speak to you of all those things and more.
The wine is still alive, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incredibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God.
This moving mirror. This distillate of time and place. It will send shivers down your spine. It will make you burst into laughter and tears. It will knock you right out of yourself, release you from the abstract and self-absorbed prison of the mind, and redeliver you into the magic and mystery of the world as though you had just been reborn.
Every wine that can do this does it in its own way, so that there can be no end to your journey. At its best, wine returns us to the world: more alive, more embodied, and more at home in it.
To get the most out of wine, you will need to sharpen your senses, and you will need to deepen your knowledge. Through wine, we become more aware of our senses and begin to develop them, especially the neglected, almost vestigial, senses of smell and taste. By awakening our faculties, we begin to experience the world more intensely. We also begin to experience it in a different way, as though we were a different kind of animal. We become more instinctual—until, like Nietzsche, we can declare:
My genius is in my nostrils.
Modern life encourages us to live as detached minds moving through an abstract world. Wine returns us to our senses. We are embodied creatures, creatures of sensation and perception, rooted in place and time.
Through wine, I have learnt a great deal about geography, geology, meteorology, biology, agriculture, chemistry, gastronomy, art, history, languages, literature, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Through wine, I have communed with many parts of the world—and visited many of them too. Wine regions, with their gardened slopes and Goldilocks climates, are among the most agreeable destinations imaginable.
Blind tasting has sped up my development. It has also taught me about the methods of the mind and, in the process, made me less bigoted and less dogmatic.
On so many levels, wine offers both a motivation and a medium through which to apprehend the world. It is, ultimately, a kind of homecoming, a way of feeling at home in the world.
A dinner without wine may still be a perfectly serviceable dinner, but for me—and, I suspect, for many wine lovers—it feels somehow incomplete. To put a bottle onto the table is to offer more than a drink. It is to invite conversation, companionship, and the possibility of transforming the quotidian and utilitarian into something more.
Without it, something intangible is missing: the transition from eating to dining, from nourishment to pleasure, from company to companionship, from the practical to the contemplative, from the necessary to the meaningful.
Wine brings people together, not merely to drink, but to converse, create, and celebrate. The Greeks understood this well. In the symposium, wine was not consumed merely for intoxication. It formed part of a carefully cultivated social and intellectual ritual. Friends gathered to eat, drink, debate, sing, and explore ideas. The word symposium itself means ‘drinking together’.
The drinking may have been the pretext, but not the true purpose—and in the most immortal of all symposia, that of Plato, the guests make a point of moderating their intake. Wine created the conditions for conversation, friendship, poetry, and philosophy. It loosened the mind without clouding it. It allowed people to step outside their ordinary roles and encounter one another in a different way.
The Romans continued this tradition in their convivia, gatherings in which food, wine, and conversation became an art. For many centuries, wine occupied this place in human life: not as an escape from civilisation, but as one of its highest expressions.
Yet wine has always possessed another, more mysterious dimension. It has not only helped to shape civilisation, but also reminded us that civilisation cannot be everything. The Greeks expressed this through Dionysus, the god of wine, regeneration, theatre, religious ecstasy, and ritual madness. Dionysus embodied something that every civilisation must somehow accommodate: the human need to loosen the boundaries of the self, to escape from rigid identities, and to experience a larger reality.
Wine played a central role in the Dionysian Mysteries, which aimed above all at ecstatic union with the divine—an idea that has survived to this day in the sacramental blood of Christ. The Dionysian impulse stood in tension with the Apollonian order and restraint imposed by society.
Civilisation depends upon both: the impulse to create form and the impulse to dissolve it. Without form, there is chaos; without dissolution, there is stagnation. This is why wine has always stood between refinement and abandon, cultivation and dissolution. Blind tasting, with its emphasis on reason and deduction, is an attempt to marry these forces. It requires intuition and imagination, but also discipline and analysis.
In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognised the Dionysian impulse as a primal and universal force:
Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring … that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.
‘Ecstasy’ literally means ‘to stand outside oneself’. Modern life, with its relentless emphasis on the sovereign self, has made such moments increasingly rare. More than ever before, we are encouraged to construct, defend, and project our individual identities. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona, with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we may have lost the art of letting go, leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience. Yet there are times when the surest way of finding ourselves is, paradoxically, to lose ourselves.
Letting go can threaten the life that we have built and even the person that we have become. But it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver—or re-deliver—us into a bigger and brighter world.
Wine matters not because it is unique, but because it reveals something universal. It represents something deeply human: our desire to transform necessity into meaning, and to experience life more fully and authentically.
A grape becomes wine. A meal becomes a celebration. Company becomes companionship. A moment becomes a memory. Necessity becomes meaning.
Perhaps what we risk losing is not merely wine, but one of humanity’s oldest reminders that life is not only something to endure, preserve, or prolong.
It is something to experience, savour, and celebrate—something that returns us to the world with our senses awake, our minds open, and our place within it restored.
‘Man,’ said Balzac, ‘dies in despair, while the spirit dies in ecstasy.’
Discover the world of wine
In The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, Neel Burton offers an engaging introduction to the art, science, and meaning of wine. Going beyond grape varieties and tasting notes, the book explores how wine connects nature, culture, history, and human perception.
Whether you are a complete beginner or a seasoned enthusiast, you will learn how to taste wine with greater confidence, understand what makes different wines distinctive, and develop the skills of blind tasting. Along the way, you will discover why wine has occupied such a unique place in human civilisation—for wine is not merely something we drink, but something we experience, interpret, and share.
A guide to becoming not just a better wine taster, but a more attentive observer of the world.
You may also enjoy
You must be logged in to post a comment.