Is Wine A Luxury Product?

Collectors items - vintage ruby red wine and copies of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

"Dry January" strides virtuously and purposefully off the end of the calendar month into, we assume for some, wetter months ahead. Instead of partaking - oxymoronically - in abstinence, I used this arbitrary stretch of time - between Winter Solstice debauchery and the beginnings of late-winter cabin fever revelry (kicked off in the U.S. by the Superbowl, perhaps) - to be thoughtful about wine.

So while you were strenuously keeping your New Years Resolutions for the past month, I was vigorously wrestling with the question of, What is wine's place in human life and culture?

Of course that required the drinking of wine.

My conclusion is that it depends very much on the specific human culture about which we are talking. Wine tends not to be highly regarded in Muslim cultures, for example. While for Christian cultures it can be regarded as a sacrament - sometimes only a sacrament. Those would seem to be polar opposites, but may in fact be bound much more closely than either religion would like to believe.

What strange form of extremism is the idea of abstinence. It seems, to me, an unhealthy dualistic conception whose flip side is addiction. That which is fetishized as a tempting demon to be avoided, unavoidably becomes the scapegoat of human weakness. Those caught in the pull of the heads-or-tails paradigm they have internalized fail to see that the hub at the center of this duality is themselves.

So I don't think it is possible to talk about wine in general, as it regards culture. I can only talk about the personal culture that I humbly embrace, and love.

My name, Adam, is from the Hebrew language and is rooted in the color red, but also resonates and alludes to the earth, dirt, dust. It is sometimes translated as meaning "red earth." But in the context of its allusions it probably would be more accurately translated as "mortal." As in "from the red dirt and dust we come, to the red, bloodied earth we return." This becomes especially significant since "Adam" is the Biblically applied moniker for all humanity. We are, each and every one of us, Mortals.

Both the red earth and mortality have significance in my personal wine culture.

I was raised with the Christian Bible and without wine. So I found my first inspiration in the biblical treatment of wine. For all the Puritanical prohibitionism that sprang from biblical religious traditions, the Bible itself seems to uphold wine as a significant, and significantly positive symbol.

At the beginning of the Bible, early in the book of Genesis, we get the story of the Great Flood and Noah's Ark. The denouement of this story was left out of my childhood, but now holds a special place in my heart.

It isn't often put in these terms, but the world after the great Flood would have been literally post-apocalyptic. Noah and his family would have witnessed the deaths of everyone they had ever known except each other. The bodies of the dead would have been swirling in the flood waters for weeks. Now the waters would have receded, leaving the macabre flotsam rotting on the ground to be pecked by crows. The earth would have been wiped clean, and the scene, as Noah descended from the ark, would have been like the aftermath of a world war in which no one survived.

Noah's first act? He immediately planted a vineyard. (Which, btw, means he had brought vines on the ark. Good foresight.)

Of course I've come to see the need to read these stories symbolically. Was there really ever an actual historical global flood, an ark, and a man named Noah? Doesn't really matter. Think of this as a form of reverse sci-fi. Instead of telling us where we might be headed, it aims to tell us how we got to where we are. Humanity got a reboot in the form of global annihilation. Only one family got the early warning and survived, and as they emerged from their fallout shelter they looked around and said, "This calls for some wine. ASAP."

Noah planted a vineyard to make wine before he planted food crops. The story seems to say that wine, and specifically its ability to diminish life's darkness, to numb the pain so to speak, is a more important form of sustenance than food.

If I was answering the question of "Is Wine a Luxury Product?" using the book of Genesis, the answer would be "No." Wine is an urgent need in the face of the sometimes painfully unavoidable elements of life.

Isaiah, the prophet, once foretold of the Utopian future that Yahweh would bring about by saying:

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare

    a feast of rich food for all peoples,

a banquet of aged wine—

    the best of meats and the finest of wines.

"A banquet of aged wine" is the preeminent symbol of Utopia? Yes, Isaiah, I heartily agree.

In the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) - the Romeo & Juliet book of the Bible - wine gets many mentions and comparisons to love. Here is one of my favorite:

And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.

Then of course we get to the book of John in the New Testament, and we learn that Jesus' first miracle ever was to turn water into wine when the wedding that he was attending ran out. I won't break down all the symbolism and allusions packed into this story (though it will be the first sermon in my future Wine Church), but suffice it to say that it introduces the central character with the idea of transformation. The story of Jesus' first miracle is a micro-story of the meta-message that within the mundane lives the extraordinary.

The trappings of wine marketing and the wine industry - the bottles and labels and sommeliers and fancy glasses and beautiful wine tasting rooms and wine bars and Instagram feeds and podcasts - belie the fact that wine is this little miracle of transforming water (and earth and sun) into something that can change you.

As my personal culture matured beyond my Christian upbringing, I discovered another ancient source of wine inspiration: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A "ruba'i" is a poetic quatrain, and Khayyam wrote quite a number of them (LXXV to be exact), saturated with wine metaphors, and assembled into a meditation on mortality. He was born almost 1,000 years ago in ancient Persia - now Iran.

Omar Khayyam says in his Rubaiyat:

Ah! My Beloved, fill the cup that clears

Today of past Regrets and future Fears -

Wine's ability to change our moods is pretty special. It is, almost literally, bottled sunshine, and can bring a glimmer of light into a dark time.

Because of this I think of wine as more like a story than a product. Every bottle is a little condensed version of life. Its consumption is a cycle, like listening to a story, that makes us feel and helps us cope with the larger, inescapable cycle from which it, and we, grew. There's something important and ineffable - even magic - in that.

Omar Khayyam also says:

I often wonder what the Vintners buy

One half so precious as the Goods they sell.

Wine is too inextricable from the human culture from which I've grown to be considered a luxury. Yet I wouldn't call it a grocery item either. That seems to take it for granted, and I don't even think we should take water for granted.

Is wine a luxury product? No. Wine is not a luxury product. But it makes my life luxurious.

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