I Drink Therefore I Am
Throughout recorded history human beings have made life bearable by taking intoxicants. And, while societies differ over which intoxicants should be encouraged, which tolerated and which forbidden, there has been a convergence of opinion around one all-important rule: that the result must not threaten public order.
As we know, however, prohibition doesn’t work. For if society is sometimes threatened by intoxicants, it is equally threatened by the lack of them. Without their aid we see each other as we are, and no human society can be built on so frail a foundation.
(...) drink that causes you to smile at the world and the world to smile at you.
But public drunkenness, of the kind that led to prohibition, arose because people were drinking the wrong things in the wrong way.
It was not wine but its absence that caused the gin-sodden drunkenness of eighteenth-century London, and Jefferson was surely right to argue that, in the American context, ‘wine is the only antidote to whiskey’.
Thanks to cultural impoverishment, young people no longer have a repertoire of songs, poems, arguments or ideas with which to entertain one another in their cups. They drink to fill the moral vacuum generated by their culture, and while we are familiar with the adverse effect of drink on an empty stomach, we are now witnessing the far worse effect of drink on an empty mind.
The right way to live is by enjoying one’s faculties, striving to like and if possible to love one’s fellows, and also to accept that death is both necessary in itself and a blessed relief to those whom you would otherwise burden. The health fanatics who have poisoned all our natural enjoyments ought, in my view, to be rounded up and locked together in a place where they can bore each other rigid with their futile nostrums for eternal life. The rest of us should live out our days in a chain of linked symposia, in which the catalyst is wine, the means conversation, the goal a serene acceptance of our lot and a determination not to outstay our welcome.
Unlike the eco-whiners I don’t oppose travel because of the energy consumed by it. I oppose travel when it causes people to wander where they do not belong, unsettling those who are settled there, and dispersing the spiritual capital that is stored in every place where love has been invested.
I surrounded myself with the literature of the real France; I struggled to acquaint myself with the Catholic Church and its dying rituals; I cooked authentic French meals on the little stove beneath my window; and when I could afford it I went down to Nicolas for a bottle, with which to travel to the parts of France that my old scooter had never reached.
It is one reason why blind tastings are so misleading: it is not the taste, considered in itself, that we hold to our lips, and you can no more understand the virtues of a wine through a blind tasting than you could understand the virtues of a woman through a blindfold kiss.
To think you can judge a wine from its taste and aroma alone is like thinking you can judge a Chinese poem by its sound, without knowing the language. And just as words sound different to the one who knows their meaning, so do wines taste different to the one who can locate them in a place and a time.
Even when matured in old oak barrels, Chablis resembles glass, through which the bright minerals of Jurassic marl and limestone shine like polished pebbles in a stream. There is no better wine to accompany shellfish, or chicken in white sauce, or the trios of Haydn. But the best accompaniment to Chablis is more Chablis, sipped quietly at the desk as night draws in.
Madiran is a generous, flavoursome product of the local Tannat grape: purple, spicy, long lived and–after a few years’ bottle age–as soft and yielding as a mother’s cheek.
As always, however, the whiners prefer to forbid our pleasures, rather than to discover the virtuous forms of them.
It is a wine for celebrations, for those noctes cenaeque deum–nights and feasts divine–that Horace invokes in fragrant verses that share the charm of his native grape.
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.
H. L. Mencken defined puritanism as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.
The first is that you should drink what you like, in the quantities that you like. It may hasten your death, but this small cost will be offset by the benefits to everyone around you.
The second principle is that you should not, through your drinking, inflict pain on others: drink as much as you like, but put away the bottle before gaiety gives way to gloom. Drinks which have a depressive effect–water, for example–should be taken in small doses, for medicinal reasons only.
The third principle is that your drinking should inflict no lasting damage on the earth. By hastening your death, a drink does no real environmental damage–after all, you are biodegradable, and that may be the best thing to be said about you. But this is not, in general, true of the containers in which drinks are sold.
So here is my fourth principle: don’t drink anything that comes in plastic bottles.