Perceptions of wine are shifting.
From the glory days of the Mediterranean diet, touting the cardiovascular benefits of moderate wine (and especially red wine) consumption, we are now at a place where wine feels under attack. If a rapidly warming world and a host of new pests weren’t bad enough, some recent studies have concluded that any amount of any kind of alcohol consumption is always bad for you. Consumers are absolutely getting a strong prohibitionist message: Wine is BAD.
News flash: I never drink wine because I think I am doing something particularly healthful. I don’t pour a glass of wine in the same way I pop a multivitamin, or apply sunscreen. I drink wine because I love it.
I drink wine because of its cultural significance and links to history. I drink wine because it adds to a meal, teasing out additional flavors and nuances. I drink wine because good wine is so much more than just an alcohol delivery system; it’s a conversation about grapes and soil and weather and human hands. Wine tells a story. And I always want to hear that story.
Eric Asimov, wine critic for the New York Times, recently published a piece titled ‘In Defense of Wine’, delineating the ways in which wine can ‘transfix, captivate, and inspire’. He compares his decision to consume moderate amounts of wine to his decision to do other activities that ‘are not without risk, like drive, fly, eat meat, or train in the martial arts.’
But Americans have never been particularly skilled at moderation. We tend to prefer excess. Or total prohibition. Excess is the problem. But I don’t believe Prohibition is the answer.
This issue is hardly new. Nearly 700 years ago, Giovanni Bocaccio wrote in the afterword to The Decameron, ‘ Who will foreswear that wine ….is an excellent thing for those hale and hearty, but harmful to people suffering from a fever?’ He then asks if we are to conclude that all wine is harmful to everyone because it could be harmful to the sick? Is all fire harmful because uncontrolled fire could burn down your house?
Bocaccio’s mention of fever is no coincidence; The Decameron is set amidst the greatest of fevers, the Black Plague which decimated over half of Europe’s population. Are current prohibitionist trends a hangover from our own pandemic? Perhaps.
But if we are descending into another Prohibition, a Dark Age of wine , I remain optimistic that its beauty and cultural significance will survive and rise again. Every bottle tells a story; those stories will draw us back in.