Ancient philosophy, Christian religion and western art all see wine as a unique adjunct to the human condition: a channel of communication between god and man, between the rational soul and the animal, between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Through wine, the distilled essence of the soil seems to flow into the veins, awakening the body to its life. And having swamped the body, wine invades the soul. Your thoughts race; you plan the triumphant career, the immortal work of art, the world takeover, or the new kitchen. And tomorrow morning all will be forgotten. Hence, wine symbolises those radical changes, those soarings and plummetings from one existential plane to another, that make life so dangerous, so meaningful and so sad.
No artist has seen this more clearly than Wagner. Isolde presents Tristan with what they both believe to be the drink of death, snatching the cup from his hands to be certain of her share. Then they fall into each other's arms. Even a glass of water would have done the trick, wrote Thomas Mann, since there is no reason now to pretend. But that is not the point. The love potion that Brangane has substituted for the drink of death symbolises what it also permits. It is a force working from within. This is how erotic love must be experienced if it is to be genuine - a conquest of the soul by the body, and of the body itself by that world of magic, of vegetable mystery and unconscious life, to which love joins us in an act of self-renewal.
Likewise, when Siegfried is presented with the drink of forgetting, and it slides down his oesophagus into his soul, you hear that vegetable invasion once again, obliterating memory, rubbing out the image of Brunnhilde, bringing down the once exalted Siegfried to the level of ordinary ambition, so that he will deserve his death.
We owe those intense moral visions to Bacchus. Indeed, without the experience of wine, we would not understand the great existential transformations that form the theme of western art. A few works have come from opium - "Kubla Khan", De Quincey's Confessions; a few more have been kick-started by cannabis. But far more owe their life, their subject matter and their symbolism to alcohol. For wine reminds the soul of its bodily origin, and the body of its spiritual meaning. It makes our incarnation seem both intelligible and right.
Incidentally, those thoughts began in a vineyard in St Aubin, lived for a while in steel vats and oak barrels, were shipped in bottles before slipping down the now 60-year-old oesophagus, whence they made their way through vein and brain to the page. Make no mistake about it, St Aubin is the most inspiring white Burgundy under £15.
