A Rebuke to Neo-Prohibitionists

In debates about the health effects of moderate wine drinking, the psychological and intellectual benefits of wine are seldom discussed.

In an essay entitled “You’ll Have to Take my Glass from my Cold, Wine-stained Hands” (behind a paywall) novelist and wine writer Boris Fishman corrects that deficiency—comprehensively and with style.

It’s not because I’m chasing tipsiness — as someone who writes about wine, I often taste 50 to 60 glasses in a day, though I always spit them out and, in six years of drinking wine seriously, I haven’t once been drunk on it. But in a life that too often feels stripped of magic — whether because of our political hostility, the radical inequality in our society or the instantaneity required of everything — wine is a passport to transcendence. If water is life-giving, wine is psychedelic.

On wines’ ability to evoke memory, he writes about  a glass of Kalecik Karasi while in Istanbul:

When I stuck my nose in the glass, however, I wasn’t in Burgundy. I wasn’t even in Istanbul. I was 6 years old, in my grandmother’s kitchen in Soviet Minsk, smelling the tart sweetness of her raspberry jam, made from berries we’d picked in the countryside, as it bubbled away on the stove, the sunlight streaming through the window.

When hearing about a bottle of Port from 1815:

That a bottle of wine can survive for more than 200 years fills me with faith about what else can endure as our lives change so relentlessly.

On wines’ ephemerality and the pathos of each unique  bottle:

The thrill of every discovery comes with a sacrifice: It will never happen exactly like this again.

On the veneration of family, community, and tradition embodied in wine makers such as Louis Barruol of Château de Saint Cosme in Gigondas whose family has made wine for 15 generations:

How many people in your life are talking about beauty and respect for tradition these days? Listening to someone like Mr. Barruol, words like “sacredness” lose any edge of irony.

In closing he writes:

As I move through life, this sense of the sublime is what I want to feel above all. It’s what I want my kids to feel — there’s no glass of wine in my house that doesn’t pass under their noses. And if I might be around for a few years less so that we can have access to this kind of transcendence, I can’t think of a more noble lesson to teach them about what, in the end, matters.

He gets it exactly right. The case supporting the dangers of moderate wine consumption is weak. But even if it were better supported, that is not the end of the story. For those of us captivated by the mystery and beauty of wine, the health consequences must be balanced against the considerable pleasure and sustenance that wine brings. The quality of one’s life matters far more than a minor increase in risk. Most of what we do in life carries some risk. Wine is among the many pursuits that make life worth living. The benefits far outweigh whatever minor risk the health authorities uncover.