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The Psychology of Snobbery

A wine snob
The snob mistakes the appearance of discernment for discernment itself.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why you shouldn’t be a snob, and how to avoid being one.

The protagonist of the British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances is the social-climbing Hyacinth Bucket—or ‘Bouquet’, as she insists upon being called. To give the impression that she employs domestic staff, she answers her beloved pearl-white slimline telephone with, ‘The Bouquet residence; the lady of the house speaking.’ The originally working-class Hyacinth spends most of her time trying to impress others in the hope of passing off as upper-middle-class, while looking down on anyone who does not meet her approval. This is the simple but effective recipe for five seasons of timeless British comedy.

Hyacinth is funny because her snobbery is self-defeating. Every attempt to advertise her refinement instead advertises her insecurity.

It has been claimed that the word ‘snob’ originates in the Latin sine nobilitate (‘without nobility’), used in abbreviated form—s. nob—on lists of names by Cambridge colleges, passenger ships, etc. to distinguish between titled and non-titled persons. In fact, ‘snob’ was first recorded in the late eighteenth century as a term for a shoemaker or his apprentice, although it is true that Cambridge students came to apply it to local tradespeople, townspeople, and anyone unaffiliated with the university. By the early nineteenth century, ‘snob’ had come to mean ‘a person who lacks breeding’, and then, as social structures became more fluid, ‘a social climber’. Thackeray’s Book of Snobs (1848), a compilation of satirical articles, cemented the word in the public lexicon.

At the heart of snobbery is the tendency to mistake status for value. Applied to people, this means mistaking social status for human worth; applied to things, it means mistaking prestige for quality. The snob identifies with the relevant markers of status or prestige (wealth, education, accent, address, brands, cultural tastes…), uses them to bolster his own status, and denigrates those who lack or disregard them. ‘I’m not a snob,’ said Simon Le Bon, the lead singer and lyricist of Duran Duran, in jest: ‘Ask anybody. Well, anybody who matters.’

Case Study: The Wine Snob

As a wine writer, I may sometimes pass for a snob.

In my defence, snobbery is not simply a matter of discernment, or of having high standards. A so-called wine ‘snob’ who enjoys and even insists on good wine may or may not be an actual snob, depending on the degree of his or her prejudice (from the Latin praeiudicium, ‘prior judgement’). To exercise judgement and discriminate between things is not necessarily to discriminate between people.

If wine is a case in point, this is because it can be tasted blind. Hide the label, price, producer, appellation, and vintage, and there is no longer anything to lean upon but the wine itself. Blind tasting can be wonderfully humbling as great names fall short, newcomers triumph, and prejudices dissolve in the glass. This proves the point: the more we rely on prestige indicators, the less we taste, or experience.

I’m quite happy—in fact, happiest—drinking an inexpensive or little-known wine, so long as it has a story to sing. To my worst enemy, this might be a way of being a snob while escaping the label, a meta-snobbery known as the meta-snobbery of authenticity—but let’s not get too meta.

The Psychology of Snobbery

Some sommeliers, immersed as they are in the world of wine, can place undue value on wine knowledge, to the point of deprecating their own seemingly ignorant patrons—a phenomenon lightheartedly referred to as ‘sommelier syndrome’. In mitigation, the snobby sommelier, like many a snob, is defending not only status but self-conception.

Aside from its unpleasantness to others, snobbery tends to undermine the snob, their achievements, and the interests and institutions that they represent. The Member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg did himself, his party, and the UK House of Commons no favours when he compared people who had not attended a public school (fee-paying school) or Oxbridge (the universities of Oxford and Cambridge) to ‘potted plants’.

Snobbery betrays rigidity of thinking and, by extension, poor judgement, as with those British aristocrats (Unity and Diana Mitford, Lord Rothermere, the Duke of Windsor…) who, despite their elite educations, came to sympathise with Nazi ideology. The thinking, in so far as it can be called thinking, is not merely rigid but warped. Snobs pigeonhole people according to skin-deep criteria such as their birth, profession, or accent, and, on that basis, either embrace or denigrate them. Like wine snobs who ‘drink the label’, they often miss out on real value or originality. As company, they are utter bores, constantly detracting from the rich texture of life and unable to marvel at anything other than through themselves.

Inverse Snobbery

Closely related to snobbery, and presenting some of the same pitfalls, is ‘inverse snobbery’. Inverse snobbery is the disdain for those same traits that the snob might hold in high regard, combined with admiration, whether real or feigned, for the popular, the ordinary, and the commonplace—and, in this case, not just with the aim of winning an election. Inverse snobbery can be understood, in large part, as an ego defence against the status claims of others; and it is possible, indeed common, to be both a snob and an inverse snob, for instance, looking down on someone’s privileged education while boasting about one’s own working-class credentials.

Inverse snobs make the same fundamental mistake as snobs: they judge according to status rather than substance, merely reversing the signs. An expensive restaurant must be pretentious; a successful artist must have sold out; an educated person must be out of touch.

Why Snobbery May Be on the Rise

Both snobbery and inverse snobbery can be interpreted as a symptom of social insecurity. Social insecurity may be rooted in early experiences, especially feelings of shame at being different, or a sense of privilege or entitlement that, in later life, cannot be realised. Or it may result from rapid social change. For instance, after Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US, the ebbing of influence from established, educated elites seemed to lead, on all sides, to a surge in both snobbery and inverse snobbery.

In a similar vein, some snobbery may represent a reaction to an increasingly egalitarian society, born out of a deeply ingrained human instinct that some people are better than others, that these people are more fit to dominate or rule, and that their rule tends to produce better outcomes—although, of course, one need not be a snob to share in that belief or intuition. Whatever its source, snobbery can serve as a mechanism of class surveillance and control—as can, paradoxically, inverse snobbery—entrenching existing social hierarchies and the status quo, or status quo ante.

The Way Out

In some cases, snobbery may be a manifestation of narcissism or excessive self-regard—which points to its antidote, namely, humility. Instead of looking inward, or sideways, the person of genuine taste looks outward, toward the thing itself.

Humility on its own can be hard to achieve. Taken to an extreme, or to its perfection, it approaches the dissolution of the ego, which in certain Indian traditions amounts to liberation. This requires a highly philosophical mind, or drugs.

Alternatively, it may be possible to arrive at humility indirectly through the more achievable route of empathy—including empathy towards the snob. Snobbery (‘snobbishness’), said the writer Hugh Kingsmill (d. 1949), ‘is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.’ 

If humility corrects the relation to the self, empathy corrects the relation to others, and, indirectly, the relation to the self.

Reason, as Hume held, is but the slave of the passions: employing empathy to alleviate snobbery is, I think, an excellent example of better feeling opening out onto better thinking.

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What the Odyssey Can Teach Us About Wine—and Drinking

Odysseus pours wine for the Cyclops Polyphemus
Odysseus offers Polyphemus the wine of Maron. After a design by John Flaxman.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Wine flows through the Odyssey. Homer mentions it well over a hundred times, and even supplies the first recorded tasting note in history. He loves wine so much he sees it on the face of the sea: the famous ‘wine-dark sea’.

But wine in the Odyssey is far more than a drink, or even a poetic image. It is a measure of civilisation. How people drink, and whether they drink at all, tells us what kind of people they are.

What Odysseus Most Loves

Many people imagine that the Odyssey unfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians.

But before beginning his story, Odysseus tells King Alcinous and the Phaeacian court what, to him, constitutes the happiest scene imaginable:

For I say that there is no fulfilment more delightful than when joy possesses a whole people, and the banqueters in the halls sit in rows listening to a singer, while beside them the tables are laden with bread and meat, and the wine-bearer draws wine from the mixing bowl and carries it round and pours it into their cups. This seems to my mind the fairest thing there is.

This is the very scene before him. It is a revealing picture of the good life, three thousand years ago. Wine is not drunk alone, or merely for intoxication. It is shared, with food, music, conversation, and storytelling. And the adventures that Odysseus is about to relate will show what happens when those customs break down.

The Wine That Bested a Giant

Odysseus begins with the Cicones at Ismarus. After sacking their city, he orders his men to leave immediately. But they refuse. Instead, they remain on the shore slaughtering livestock and drinking wine. ‘There,’ Homer tells us, ‘much wine was drunk.’ While they are feasting, the surviving Cicones summon reinforcements. They counterattack, and Odysseus loses six men from every ship. Already, wine-drinking has become a test of self-command.

One assumes they were drinking the local wine—from what is now PGI Ismaros, in Thrace. At the heart of this wine region is the ancient town of Maroneia, named for Maron, the legendary priest of Apollo—and in later tradition, grandson of Dionysus. During the raid, Odysseus had spared Maron, together with his wife and child. In gratitude, Maron gave him gold, a silver mixing bowl, and twelve jars of an extraordinary wine.

It is here that Homer gives us the first tasting note:

He gave me twelve jars of wine, sweet and unmixed, a divine drink. No servant or maid in the house knew of it, but only [Maron] himself, his dear wife, and one housekeeper. And whenever they drank this honey-sweet red wine, he would fill one cup and pour it into twenty measures of water, and from the mixing bowl there rose a marvellous sweet fragrance: then indeed it would have been no pleasure to hold back.

Admittedly, Homer is not using the WSET tasting template. But I think the examiners would be satisfied that this is no rustic plonk.

Odysseus takes a skin of the wine when he goes to investigate the Cyclopes. The Cyclops Polyphemus, though a shepherd, is not a social or civilised creature. He has generous grapes—later tradition would place him on the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna—and milk and cheese, but no wine. So when Odysseus pours him some of Maron’s wine, he drinks it neat and is overwhelmed by it. When he asks for more, Odysseus obliges him three times, until he slumbers. That’s when the red-hot olive stake is driven into his single eye. It was not merely by his cunning that Odysseus defeated the vastly stronger Cyclops, but by wine, and by turning the monster’s own savagery against him.

The Sorceress’s Wine

Several adventures later, Odysseus and his remaining men reach the island of Circe. The sorceress welcomes a group of them into her house and feeds them a mixture of cheese, barley meal, honey, and Pramnian wine, a strong, celebrated wine of uncertain origin—interlaced with amnesic drugs. As they gulp it down, she strikes them with her wand, and they are transformed into pigs. (Circe is the original sorceress, and why Western witches and sorcerers carry a wand.)

Men surrender to their appetites, forget their homes, and become animals. Yet Homer is not preaching abstinence, but self-control. After Odysseus overcomes Circe and she restores the men, wine and feasting help lift their spirits.

Two Kinds of Feast

Much later, when back in Ithaca, Odysseus offers one of the shrewdest descriptions of drunkenness in ancient literature. In Alexander Pope’s verse translation:

And wine can of their wits the wise beguile,
Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile,
The grave in merry measures frisk about,
And many a long-repented word bring out.

For Homer, then, the question is not whether to drink, but how. For a positive model, we need only return to the Phaeacians. They mix their wine with water, pour libations to the gods, exchange gifts, eat together, listen to music, and tell stories. They welcome the shipwrecked Odysseus and create the conditions in which a stranger might tell his story. Here, wine does not obliterate memory, but facilitates its recovery. And the scene is, of course, ‘the fairest thing there is.’ Grapes have been turned into wine, ingredients into cuisine, sounds into music, strangers into guests, and experiences into stories. Only once he has recovered his story is Odysseus fit to return to Ithaca.

Ithaca, where the suitors have been occupying Odysseus’ palace, slaughtering his livestock, draining his wine stores, and feasting at his expense while competing for Penelope. Outwardly, theirs is a civilised feast. There is meat and wine, music and conversation, servants and guests. But the suitors abuse that hospitality and gorge themselves day after day. Like Polyphemus, they know how to consume but not how to live.

Homer lived almost three thousand years ago, in a world in which wine was not treated simply as another form of ‘alcohol’. It was agriculture and craftsmanship transformed into hospitality, fellowship, ritual, pleasure, and even enlightenment. But Homer was not uncritical. Wine could indeed loosen the tongue, overwhelm judgement, invite forgetfulness, lose men, and return them to animals. The same drink could accompany Odysseus’ fairest vision, while also bringing down a giant, turning his men into swine, and foreboding the demise of the suitors. Civilisation requires not the abstinence of Cyclopes, but the moderation of men.

For Homer, the opposite of drunkenness was not sobriety, but civilisation.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Myth, on the psychology and philosophy of mythology, and The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, on the appreciation, psychology, and philosophy of wine.

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The Long History of One of Wine’s Greatest Ideas

Vincent van Gogh's The Red Vineyard (1888).
Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard (1888). The finest wines have many stories to tell.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Most people think terroir means soil. Others think it means climate. Everyone agrees the concept is French. Everyone is only partly right.

Terroir is the entire relationship between a vine and its environment, including even the animals and people within it. Climate, geology, topography, soil microorganisms, plants and insects, centuries of accumulated know-how, and the choices of the grower and winemaker are only some of the things that contribute to the character of a wine. Terroir is not any one of these things but the interaction between them. The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

It took humanity thousands of years to arrive at this deceptively simple idea.

The first winemakers, in the South Caucasus some eight thousand years ago, left no written record. But they almost certainly understood that some vineyards produced better wines than others.

What we can be sure of is that, by the time of Homer (eighth century BCE), certain wines had already become famous. In the Odyssey, Odysseus carries the priest Maron’s Ismarian wine, so rich and fragrant that it has to be diluted with twenty parts water—and, even then, fills the room with perfume. Indeed, it is potent enough to bring down the Cyclops Polyphemus. Homer assumes his audience will recognise the wine’s reputation. Long before anyone understood why some places produced extraordinary wines, the Greeks already knew that they did.

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle’s friend and student Theophrastus asked a new question: why? In his two great botanical works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, he seeks not merely to describe plants but to explain them. ‘There are as many kinds of grapes as there are kinds of soil,’ he observes. It is a simple but revealing remark. For perhaps the first time, someone was looking beyond the reputation of a vineyard and, like Master Aristotle, asking about causes.

The Romans carried the idea further. Virgil famously wrote, Bacchus amat colles—’Bacchus loves the hills’—suggesting that vines do their best on well-drained slopes. Writing in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder argued that when a vine is transplanted, ‘it changes its character so completely owing to the difference of soil and climate that it is never recognised as the same.’ His conclusion is strikingly modern: ‘It is a fact that the soil matters more than the vine.’

Yet the Romans also contributed something even more enduring than practical viticulture. They spoke of the genius loci: the spirit of the place. A great vineyard possessed a character that everyone knew, but no one could fully explain. It was more than its soil, more than its climate, more than the skill of the grower. It had a spirit of its own.

Modern science has transformed our understanding of wine. We can analyse soils, study climates, sequence vine genomes, and measure almost every aspect of a vineyard. Yet in so doing we sometimes forget what the ancients grasped intuitively. A great vineyard, like any balanced ecosystem, is more than the sum of its measurable parts.

As a blind taster, I encounter this truth every time I lift a glass. A Chablis should not taste like a Napa Chardonnay, nor a Mosel Riesling like one from Clare Valley. The finest wines carry unmistakable traces of where they come from—even of the eucalyptus of Coonawarra and the garrigue of Provence. Their place speaks through them.

For this reason, I have never been fond of heavy-handed oak. Oak has its place, and in skilful hands it can add harmony and complexity. But when it overwhelms a wine, it drowns out many of the very signals that blind tasters rely upon and wine lovers cherish. Instead of hearing the voice of the vineyard—the genius loci—we hear only the barrel from another place.

Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of terroir. It is not merely a list of soils, climates, or slopes. It is the elusive way in which a place leaves its signature upon a wine. The highest calling of a winemaker is not to silence that voice, but to listen for it—and let it speak.

Sources: Homer, Odyssey 9.208–211; Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants 3.11 and On the Causes of Plants; Virgil, Georgics 2.113; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 14.4–5, 17.3–8.

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Why the Greeks Thought Wine Deserved a God

Sick Bacchus, by Caravaggio
Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (in fact, a self-portrait) — To the Greeks, wine was not merely a drink but an affirmation of life in the face of death.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Would you turn the other cheek? Not that cheek. Discover the last and most unusual of the Olympian gods.

Dionysus was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus. Owing to his hold on the imagination, there is much mythical material surrounding him.

Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, one of the four daughters of Cadmus. When Semele was pregnant with Dionysus, a jealous Hera persuaded her to ask Zeus to reveal himself to her ‘as he does to his wife’. Zeus reluctantly obliged, leading Semele to die from one of his thunderbolts. Zeus succeeded in saving his son from her womb, and stitched him into his thigh (probably a euphemism for his testicle)—whence the Dionysian epithet dimētōr, ‘of two mothers’, ‘twice-born’.

Following this second birth, Hermes placed Dionysus into the care of his aunt Ino and her husband Athamas, asking them to bring him up as a girl. Even in this guise, Hera recognised him and inflicted madness upon Ino and Athamas, who killed their children before killing themselves. To protect him, Zeus turned Dionysus into a kid, which Hermes spirited to the satyr Silenus and the mænads of Mount Nysa. Silenus became his tutor, and the centaur Chiron completed his education.

After the young Dionysus discovered the magical vine, Hera drove him mad. He roamed the world to escape from her while teaching mortals the secrets of winemaking. He travelled to Egypt and Syria, and even led a campaign into India. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus (d. 30 BCE), Dionysus taught all the known world how to make wine—except for Britain and Æthiopia. In Phrygia, he met the mother goddess Cybele, who taught him the mysteries and, by channelling it, cured him of his madness. He then established his cult and rites, inspired by those of Cybele.

While in Phrygia, Silenus wandered off drunk and was carried to King Midas. When Dionysus came to collect him, he offered Midas any wish. Midas asked for the power to turn whatever he touched into gold. Before dinner, he had turned every bush in his famed rose garden to gold. But he was horrified when his food and wine also turned to gold. His daughter tried to comfort him, but she too suffered the same fate. When Midas begged to be rescued, Dionysus told him to bathe in the River Pactolus, the golden sands of which later became the source of Croesus’ fabulous wealth.

Dionysus returned to Greece in a triumphal procession of satyrs and mænads. However, his wild and alien cult met with resistance. In Thrace, King Lycurgus captured his followers and drove Dionysus into the sea. Dionysus visited madness on Lycurgus—leading him to kill his wife and son and chop off his own legs in the belief that they were vines.

In his own city of Thebes, Dionysus was opposed by his cousin Pentheus, the son of Agave. The seer Tiresias urged Pentheus to embrace Dionysus, warning him, ‘Your blood [will be] poured out and defile the woods and your mother and sisters…’ But Pentheus forbade his worship, after which the women of Thebes lost their minds and left their homes to cavort in a frenzy on Mount Cithæron. Pentheus hid in a tree to spy on them, but the daughters of Cadmus found him and tore him apart from limb to limb. Agave tore off his head, put it on a pike, and took it to Cadmus—before realising what she had done.

Some time later, Dionysus chartered a ship manned by Tyrrhenian mercenaries. Believing him to be the son of a rich man, they sailed towards Asia with the intention of ransoming him. When they bound him to the mast, the bonds simply fell away. The helmsman Acoetes warned that this was no ordinary man, but the captain failed to change course. Dionysus filled the vessel with ivy and flute song, leading the mercenaries to lose their minds and leap into the sea. He then turned them into dolphins, sparing only Acoetes, who bore witness to his divinity.

On Naxos, Dionysus found Ariadne, who had been abandoned there by Theseus. Dionysus had countless lovers, both male and female, but married only Ariadne, giving her a crown and fixing it into the heavens as the constellation Corona. He then travelled to Hades to bring back his mother Semele, and all three ascended to Olympus.

The Meaning of Dionysus

Dionysus’ origins are shrouded in the mists of time, and it may be that he is a composite of a number of similar gods from far-flung times and places. His name is first attested on tablets recovered from Mycenæan Pylos, although its etymology is uncertain. The Greeks had many other names or epithets for him, including Androgynos, Bromios [Thunderer], Eleuthereus [Liberator], and Tauros [Bull].

Whatever his origins, Dionysus came to symbolise the impulsive, the chaotic, and everything that escapes human reason and control—and, by extension, nature and its vitality. Like nature, he is both creation and destruction, representing on the one hand growth and fertility and on the other wine and dissolution. He dissolves the boundaries between reason and instinct, civilisation and nature, life and death, the human and the divine. As twice-born and returned from Hades, he crosses and re-crosses the boundary between life and death. He reminds us, as does the hero, that life is at its fullest in the jaws of death.

Much of his mythology is about establishing himself as a god, suggesting that he may in part be rooted in a historical figure. Although the Greeks, especially Greek men, resisted his alien and anarchic cult, he rose to become one of the principal Olympian gods.

Dionysus was the last of the twelve Olympian gods to arrive, and the only one with a mortal parent—embodying, like wine itself, the duality between the human and the divine.

He rode in a chariot drawn by big cats and accompanied by an ecstatic retinue, or thíasos, of erect satyrs and frenzied mænads. Under the influence of the god and his wine, satyrs and mænads tore apart sacrificial animals and ate them raw. The Greeks honoured Dionysus in several annual festivals, including the City Dionysia, which became the premier competition for playwrights in Athens. The thíasos, especially the triumphal procession on Dionysus’ return to Greece, served as a model for later Dionysian processions and, according to Pliny the Elder, even the Roman Triumph.

Dionysus appears in early Greek art as a bearded man, but later evolves into an alluring and androgynous youth. His attributes include the thyrsus, a fennel staff tipped with a pinecone; the kantharos, a drinking cup with high handles; the vine and ivy; the snake; and the bull.

For Sigmund Freud, Dionysus and his thíasos symbolised the id, the deep, primitive, and instinctual part of the mind. Freud requested that his ashes be preserved in an Ancient Greek krater painted with Dionysian scenes—where they remain to this day.

To Dionysus, the most important individual in his train was Silenus, the wisest and, not coincidentally, the most drunken of his followers. The Midas myth has become famous the world over and is a powerful way of making the point that the true wealth of life resides in life itself. Assuming we have a modest amount, it is not generally a lack of funds but a lack of soul, or lack of love, that keeps us from living.

Silenus is also associated with the bleak teaching that the best thing for human beings is never to have been born, and the next best to die as soon as possible. Plato alludes to this ‘Wisdom of Silenus’ but thinks it dangerous and refrains from spelling it out too clearly. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus for being ugly outside but beautiful inside.

In his earliest work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche popularised a dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian stands for light, reason, order, and individuation, whereas the Dionysian is all about darkness, irrationality, chaos, and dissociation. The Dionysian impulse, similar to Freud’s concept of the id or Jung’s concept of the shadow, is a primal force that demands to be acknowledged and integrated.

Dionysus himself lost his mind until he mastered the mysteries, after which he became a model of sanity or even hypersanity and established his cult. If too much of the Dionysian is destructive, too much of the Apollonian is stultifying, whereas a balance of the two unleashes the best of both.

Nietzsche argued that the Ancient Greeks achieved that rare balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian, notably in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which, by providing a paradigm of existential suffering, enabled people to experience a profound sense of release and escape. But owing to the influence of rationalists such as Socrates and Plato, the Apollonian took over, and European culture came to lack passion and vitality.

The dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus is, however, a modern one. The Greeks, if anything, tended to assimilate them: Like Apollo, Dionysus was said to have the gift of prophecy, and even to inhabit the Temple of Apollo at Delphi during Apollo’s winter absence.

The Dionysian Mysteries were related to the Orphic and Osirian Mysteries. Orphics held the ‘first Dionysus’, or Zagreus, to have been torn apart and eaten by the Titans before being reborn through Semele. They worshipped Dionysus as a chthonic aspect of Zeus and connected him with the reincarnation and immortality which they sought for themselves.

Dionysus also has much in common with Jesus Christ: a divine father, a mortal mother, and a rebirth or resurrection. Both carried a revolutionary message of salvation, sought to establish a following on earth before ascending to heaven, and roamed about performing miracles. Still today, followers of Jesus ritually eat his flesh and drink his blood in the bread and wine of the eucharist.

Of course, Dionysus was never likely to turn the other cheek—or, at least, not that cheek—but he was, unusually among the Olympian gods, a good friend to humankind.

If Prometheus gave us fire, Dionysus gave us wine, the inner fire which frees the mind and dissolves the ego along with all of its problems. Wine brings us together, helps us be together, and be inventive together, as in the Greek symposia and Roman convivia, in which measured drinking could lead to expansive elation and creative association and the voicing of disruptive ideas and perspectives.

It can be no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.

Life without wine would be a pale shadow of itself. I raise my glass to Dionysus.

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What Wine Reveals About Being Human

Plato's Symposium
The Symposium by Anselm Feuerbach (1869). In ancient Greece, wine was not merely consumed; it created a space for conversation, friendship, poetry, and philosophy.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

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.

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If you this article spoke to you, you might look into The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting.

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