A Healer’s Geste

To Cheer the Heart of Man

With wine at hand, the good man concerns himself, not with getting drunk, but with drinking in all the natural delectibilities of wine: taste color, bouquet; its manifold graces; the way it complements food and enhances conversation; and its sovereign power to turn evenings into occasions, to lift eating beyond nourishment to conviviality, and to bring the race, for a few hours at least, to that happy state where men are wise and women beautiful, and even one’s children begin to look promising. If someone wants the bare effects of alcohol in his bloodstream, let him drink the nasty stuff neat.

…

And ordinariness is the right note on which to sum up the case for wine. It is precisely the foolishness of classifying wine as an alcoholic beverage that keeps so many of us from taking it with our lunches, suppers — and even breakfasts, if you like. Whiskey, gin, and rum are sometime things. A man who takes them too often courts disaster. But wine is simply water that has matured according to nature’s will. It is the ordinary accompaniment of a grown man’s food. … God gave us wine to make us gracious and keep us sane. The light aperitif en famille, and the half bottle or bottle split between husband and wife over cold meat loaf and brawling children, are not solemn alcoholic dosages. They are cheerful minor lubrications of the frequently sandy gears of life.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection