some draft from “take and eat”

Wine has always occupied a paradoxical place in the cultural imagination: part seduction, part sacrament, part poison. To drink is never merely to hydrate. Water is a necessity; wine is an event. It gathers, separates, inflames, commemorates. It toasts the dead and hallows the living. Its place at the table is never innocent. One can drink wine for pleasure, yes—but rarely without meaning. It is the sign of celebration and the cipher of grief, the prelude to a kiss or the dissolution of a kingdom. In wine, we mark thresholds—between sobriety and inebriation, between self-possession and abandonment, between language and its excess. What water purifies, wine stains. It sticks to the tongue, the breath, the lips. It lingers.

That wine should command such metaphysical gravity is not surprising. It is, after all, a product of time. Unlike most fruits of the earth, which spoil if untouched, the grape becomes something else in its delay. It matures, ferments, transfigures. And in this transfiguration, it mirrors what religion has long insisted is the deepest truth of matter: that the real is never static, that substance is susceptible to mystery. Wine, like the sacred, is a fermentation. It invites us to taste transformation.

To drink wine is not simply to consume a substance. It is to participate in a long process of transubstantiation—natural, cultural, symbolic. Crushing, pressing, fermentation, storage, uncorking, pouring, waiting, breathing. Wine asks for ritual. It demands sequence. It does not quench thirst; it courts the senses. And if taste, as we have argued, is an epistemology—if the mouth knows, if incorporation is cognition—then wine is its philosophical provocation par excellence: a substance that troubles the line between body and mind, clarity and intoxication, presence and loss. It is no accident that Brillat-Savarin placed it among the chief stimulants of gastrosophical reflection. Or that Barthes called it “a totem,” an object of national myth. Or that Scruton, ever fond of a good vintage and a bad pun, wrote that “in drinking wine, we are drinking meaning.”