Sometimes it seems as if the entire wine industry is braced in a defensive crouch. We have been browbeaten with dire warnings about health risks; we are terrified of Gen Z’s (possibly antithetical) moves towards cocktails and abstinence; in the language of Sellar and Yeatman’s comic classic 1066 and All That, we appear to have accepted that wine is a Bad Thing.

One of the symptoms is the increasing promotion of zero- or low-alcohol wines (I am not talking here about Mosel Riesling). I have to say I am not convinced by this move. It may accord with the tasting note approach to wine whereby it can be reduced to a list of aromas and flavours. But I have yet to sample a low-alcohol wine which gave me the experience of drinking wine. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset was not the first to find divine traces in wine – Horace got there before him – but no trace of divinity is to be found in low-alcohol wines. Dionysus, Bacchus, Liber (whichever name you prefer) would have nothing to do with them.

What if we turned all this around and took a positive approach? Positive but not positivist, that is to say not wedded to a “philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof”. Our positive but non-positivist approach to wine would start from the premise that life is not about quantity but about quality and meaning.

The people, especially medical experts, who issue the dire warnings about wine are locked in a positivistic, quantitative mindset. They can tell us about quantity of life but not about quality of life.

Though I would argue that health is not just about extending our number of days on this planet, I am generally in favour of longer rather than shorter life and I am not advocating the kind of alcohol-fuelled self-destruction sadly pursued by many great creative artists, among others. (Some heroic boozers, unfairly, have also lived to a ripe old age.) It’s just that the main constituents of a well-lived life are qualitative, not quantitative, and I am convinced that drinking wine, not in excess, can enhance them.

I would start with sheer sensuous awareness, especially as regards the neglected senses of smell and taste. To make a rather obvious point, we only have five senses, so in crude arithmetical terms those two make up 40% of our sensory apparatus.

There are books to be written on why these two senses have been neglected, certainly by philosophers, and also by scientists, for hundreds if not thousands of years. In fact I’ve just been reading a rather good one, The Forgotten Sense by the Swedish cognitive scientist and smell researcher Jonas Olofsson. Olofsson argues that smell is far more central to our lives than we may often imagine (dogs understand this), and that is hardly surprising given smell’s role in evolution as the oldest and most fundamental sense.

Smell has been looked down on by philosophers since Aristotle no doubt in part because it’s so embarrassingly physical. There’s no getting away from bodily odours. But the intense physicality of smell gives it positive powers of evocation and association as well as negative powers of repulsion. Wine and long-aged spirits are surely the greatest, most complex, most subtle expression of those positive powers that we have. Their appreciation – as Olofsson also argues – is also the best way of developing those powers so that we not only enjoy but understand smells and scents better. Training our sense of smell could help us not just to savour Alsace Riesling more acutely but also to enjoy the scents of a damp English early summer wood.

Much of the same applies to taste, which is of course intimately linked to smell, and which is arguably even more physical, as it involves ingestion and swallowing. We all know what happened when the narrator of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu savoured the crumbs of madeleine biscuit steeped in his tisane and recalled a taste from his childhood. Nothing less than a whole world opened up. Wine with its infinite variety not only educates and extends our enjoyment of taste but enriches our lives with all the associations of those varied tastes.

Arguing for wine’s benefits, I would move on from sensuous awareness to connection, in many and varied forms. Wine is a great connector. At the most obvious level, wine connects us with its place of origin, and thus with the earth. But the first connection one needs, arguably, is with oneself. We can lose connection with ourselves more and more easily in these increasingly disembodied times. Too much time in the virtual world really isn’t good for us. Wine is the opposite of virtual, it is visceral and tangible; not only that, but it helps ground us, physically and mentally, by engaging not only the aforementioned senses but also our intellect (yes, wine appreciation has its intellectual side) and our emotions. I’ve written before how a half-bottle of Château Meyney restored me to equanimity on a lonely ferry journey to Spain.

But wine is meant for sharing, in company. Opening good bottles among friends not only fosters mirth and merriment but deepens friendships, breaks the ice (if that function is needed), rubs the rough edges off characters inclined to crustiness. Horace distilled all that in his greatest wine ode, addressed to his old friend and comrade in arms Messalla Corvinus on the occasion of opening a bottle (or jar) harvested in Horace’s own birth year, 65BCE, the year of Consul Manlius.

Even that is not the end of the story. Beyond sensory awareness and delight and connection with the earth, with ourselves and our fellows, wine offers, or can offer, something further. To say wine has, or can have, a spiritual dimension is to invite a scoff or a sneer. But I’ll say it all the same: certain wines can embody a loveliness, which while obviously physical and sensuous, a matter of molecules, is also somehow immaterial, a vision of grace.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash