In the on-going debates about contemporary wine styles, alcohol levels, and the like, one often hears it said that wine’s “traditional” place is at the dinner table. The implication of that claim is that today’s super-concentrated, highly-extracted wines don’t belong there. Brash neophytes, they violate cultured, time-honored conventions.
There’s some truth to that, but not nearly enough. The flamboyant style of high-alcohol, super-ripe wine (particularly red wine) that has taken the world by storm over the last couple of decades is certainly new. And for nearly two centuries, wine indeed has been at home when included as part of a meal. But wine is much older than that. For the vast majority of its 8,000 year history, it was something drunk all through the day, not just with food. It’s much more traditional place, then, is in the tavern or bar.
Wine only began to become associated with cuisine in the early nineteenth century, when a number of literary gourmands began writing and talking about dining in aesthetic terms. The most influential of these were two Frenchmen, Alexander Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reyniére (1758-1837) and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1829), both of whom promoted the appreciation of fine food and wine as comparable to the appreciation of painting, music, or verse. As Grimod argued, “the great art of dining” is quite different from the simple desire to sate hunger or thirst. Because the latter “can be appeased indiscriminately,” it is “fatal to art.” By contrast, dining involves taking the time to understand and care about what one eats and drinks. It is “a serious matter,” he wrote, and requires that one become “more refined in [one’s] taste.”
All through the 1800s, and for much of the next century as well, millions of people worked self-consciously to refine their tastes. Such refinement frequently involved acquiring new knowledge about and new experience with wine, especially the era’ s fine wines such as the classified growth Bordeaux châteaux, Champagnes, and late harvest Mosel and Rhine Rieslings. These were customarily drunk with meals, either in private homes or in that other early nineteenth century invention, restaurants. Wine’s cultural place thus became fairly narrowly prescribed. People drank other beverages in other places and at other times–beer or ale in a pub, for example, or coffee in a café, or whiskey before dinner; but wine belonged on the dinner table.
The great wine boom of the last thirty years has changed all that. People certainly still drink wine with meals, but they also increasingly drink it at other times and in other places–in bars, at cocktail parties, as a social lubricant rather than a food partner. And the kinds of wines they prefer are, not surprisingly, bolder, riper, and more forward than those Grimod or Brillat-Savarin enjoyed. That is the rarely discussed factor responsible for the rapid rise of interest in wine in America and beyond. It no longer is thought of exclusively or even primarily as a food beverage.
Whether or not wine’s changing cultural place is a good or bad thing is a subject for another time. But even a cursory glance at wine’s history makes it clear that this is nothing new. In fact, far from being untraditional, ripe, highly extracted wines that are best enjoyed on their own mark a return to a far older and more established tradition. Shakespeare’s Falstaff celebrates that tradition when, sitting in a tavern, he calls for Sack, a Renaissance Spanish wine made with dried grapes, so high in alcohol and richly concentrated. Sack produces “excellent wit” and “warms the blood,” he says, declaring it a “humane principle” to “forswear thin potations.”
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