We love to forget to learn from the past. Learning from history has never been a strength of human beings. Even though we are continually reminded of our historical forgetfulness, generation after generation thinks it knows better. We repeat ourselves over time, asking the same questions and making the same mistakes; ignoring our artists and poets who have been obsessing over this phenomenon since the first falcon lost its hearing, and the gyre started getting fat.

As I thought about wine historically*, my mind turned immediately to the Greeks (the Ancient ones, not the fiscally irresponsible ones). We have taken so much from the ancient Greeks, but not their attitude toward wine. Their approach to wine was, from what I have read, the most sensible. And even though, according to the Pythons, “Socrates himself was permanently pissed,” he described wine as such: “[it] moistens and tempers the spirits, and lulls the cares of the mind to rest . . . it revives our joys and is oil to the dying flame of life.”

Importantly for me they had a god of wine, Dionysus. I wonder how he is doing now? I imagine he is far weaker than he was in ancient times. In the times when women would go on a pilgrimage to Thebes, and the holy shrine of the Oracle at Delphi – Apollo’s for nine months of the year – would become Dionysus’ from December to February; when Euripides wrote plays about him, and when men and women drank wine and knew they were drinking a god.

Today I imagine he criss-crosses the earth visiting half-hearted festivals still in his name. He slips unnoticed through harvest parties, and dinner parties alike, kept alive through people’s drunkenness rather than their praise; a mere memory of his former, more powerful self.  Today we do not give our thoughts to Bacchus when a cork is pulled and a glass is poured. No, today we instead turn to the new vinous gods; the gods of brands. Wine drinkers no longer praise Dionysus for the harvest, and his grapes, but rather worship Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and bow to Pétrus. Whether it is 2-buck Chuck, or Columella, today we care more about what wine we are drinking  than the wine itself.

As civilization goose-stepped its way through time, ‘progressing’ is the word for it I suspect, we lost our appreciation for things in and of themselves. Perhaps this is why some of my fondest vinous memories come from a time before I knew anything about the subject, when the wine I drank was filled into a 20l plastic container down in the village. I drank wine with no label, with no cultivar, no tasting notes or alcohol levels. It was not a wine to be studied, or explained at length, but a wine to thank Bacchus for.

I am as much a part of the problem as anything. Writing columns weekly about something that should rather just be drunk. I hold-forth on which wine is good, and which one is not, but all I am doing is paying lip-service to the new gods of wine who want you to care less about drinking wine, and far more about which wine is better, and the supposed ‘prestige’ and ‘privilege’ that comes with such knowledge. Drink, friends, be merry and remember wine should not be something that offers status or mere drunkenness, but something closer to Plato’s description of wine as, “the cure for crabbedness of old age, whereby we may renew our youth and enjoy forgetfulness of despair.”

Let us jump forward to modern times for a lesson from post-revolution France, and listen to Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior Jean-Antoine Chaptal. He was the writer of Traité de la Culture de la Vigne (A Treaty on the Culture of the Vine), considered the first modern wine treatise, as it looked to evidence from modern science to make its arguments rather than the classics. He took his job at a time when the French wine industry was not at its best. He wrote:

How is it then, that a great number of French wines, famous in former times, are fallen into discredit? Why is their quality so mediocre, while those from other districts acquire or maintain a well-deserved reputation? Only a little thought is needed to see that it is not the situation, the climate or the soil that is to blame : the fault lies with careless cultivation, with the repetition of unthinking routine, with ignorance or forgetfulness [and above all] with the preference for the grapes that give the maximum of vulgar juice over those that produce the best quality.

It is amusing, and so typically human, to think that Monsieur Chaptal’s rant in the early 19th Century still applies to us 200 years later. Why do we continue to plant varieties in areas that are unsuited to them? Why do we continue to churn out millions of litres of average wine? Why are so many local winemakers shackled to “the repetition on unthinking routine” of making wine in the same way that has been done for years with no real, excellent, results? Well, it seems we can turn again to the 19th Century –  a character from Balzac – who tells how the bourgeois . . .

claim that I make junk instead of wine. What use is education? You figure out what it means. Listen: these gentlemen harvest seven, sometimes eight barrels to the acre, and sell them for sixty francs apiece, which makes at most 400 francs an acre in a good year. Me, I harvest twenty barrels and sell them at thirty francs, total 600 francs. So who’s the ninny? Quality, quality! What use is quality to me. They can keep their quality, the marquises and all. For me, quality is cash.

The novelists and wine writers of the 19th century saw exactly what was going on in the French wine industry, but what have we learned from them? We continue to make enormous amounts of wine where quantity is more important, and cash – the only sacrifice the new gods accept – is all that matters. The new gods of wine, and their minions in suits, care more for turnover and profit than they do for wines of authenticity, and the simple pleasure of imbibing.

Of course it continues like this as it always has, and will. There seems little point to struggle against it, but there is comfort. Comfort in producers that do make authentic wines, and the comfort in drinking them not because they are famous or have status, but because of the pure and simple joy of drinking wine.

*The quotes have been taken from a book I am currently reading, and that got me thinking about our forgetfulness of the past, it is The Story of Wine by Hugh Johnson. I highly recommend it, and anything else written by Mr. Johnson, my favourite wine writer.