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.)
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